A richly detailed bungalow with broad sheltering eaves repelling the Vancouver rains |
“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.” Dr. Seuss
Rain was falling steadily
when I began this post, marking Victoria’s autumn shift from drought to damp
and serving as a reminder to ensure drainage systems are working properly
so that comfort is ensured. Keeping moisture out of houses has been a running challenge since
man first bent branches together to roof out a patch of the sky – especially in
damper climates like ours. Recently it’s
been resurgent, as newly engineered flaws in roof and wall designs let
moisture invade cavities that can’t dry out due to plastic vapour barriers. Rot
consumes its wooden host with startling speed when walls can't dry out, especially
when second-growth timber is involved!
All building eras have their failings when it comes to
managing water, as do some very famous modernist architects. All house types require
ongoing attention to water management, adding to the bane of home ownership and affecting how
much we have to be involved in order to dwell comfortably. I’m fortunate in that
my house, the Hubert Savage bungalow, does a reasonable job of keeping rainfall and
moisture out of walls and foundations. For a century-old home, the general
conception is fairly sound, meaning that water is successfully managed from
roof to ground and then dispersed.
The challenge for architecture begins with a roof that’s
impervious, shedding water and sending it away from the building's foundations. One advantage
of early bungalows is the way their roofs are pushed well out over their walls, protecting
them from being directly rained upon. These sometimes exaggeratedly broad eaves create
a distinctly sheltering look too, a hallmark of the early California style and a
feature that’s central to its lasting appeal. A relatively flat, projecting roof defines
the one-story building’s style.
For bungalow designers, exaggerating the roof’s form reinforced
the impression of the house as a haven or refuge from inclement weather. Generous
treatment of the roof imparts a sense of security and coziness, a form-play that
Frank Lloyd Wright used to great effect on many of his massive Prairie-style
houses. But a house can only provide a cosy haven if it actually delivers a dry
interior!
A sheltering roof over a bungalow with massive buttresses |
The umbrella effect of broad roof overhangs shields the walls
beneath them from direct rainfall. Any rainfall that does reach the walls is then
sealed out by siding that directs it downwards to a device known as a water
table – a slab of angled wood that casts any moisture out beyond the foundation. This is a very useful feature, as many California-style
bungalows sit close to or even directly upon the land.
Gutters, downspouts, water table: water removed |
Of course, water collected by the roof still has to be removed
or it cascades over the edge, splattering on the ground and splashing wet organic
matter right back onto the building. This might be alright in drier parts of the
country, but here in the Pacific Northwest it would guarantee mossy, damp walls
and develop ideal conditions for rot. Here on our wet coast, gutters and
downspouts are needed to complete the job of moving rainfall safely away.
The Savage bungalow is somewhat optimistic in the configuration
of valleys and gutters used to carry water away from its substantial roof
forms. Being cross-gabled, valleys happen where the roof planes intersect, causing
heavier flows of water. These valleys discharge into small,
narrow gutter runs that are accessed at very sharp angles, which then send water to ground via metal
downspouts.
Because this bungalow was built in an oak meadow, there’s a
lot of tree litter moving across the roof that tends to collect where valleys and gutters
intersect. In a downpour, this debris moves suddenly into the gutter, where it tends
to plug the downspouts and cause overflows that run back over the soffits or splash
wet soil back against the building.
There are simply no exceptions to the implacable laws of physics: water
is either managed systematically downwards to ground and safely dispersed, or it invades crevices and dampens materials. So this system
has to be thought out carefully and methodically as part of design in order to protect the integrity of the house and the dryness of the interior, a process
many designers continue to struggle with.
A fashion of the pre-WW1 era was to mate narrow-chanelled wooden gutters
with small diameter downspouts, which looks just fine but tended to make plugging at the intake
frequent. Periodically then, one finds oneself up on a ladder freeing the downspouts (which is awkward, given the lie of the land, especially
if it's at two o'clock in the morning).
Another flaw I would be facing at home but for this building’s fortunate
placement high on a rise, is the lack of infrastructure to conduct water away from
the end of the downspouts. (Just as well, as perimeter tiles do tend to plug fairly quickly!) At our home on the ridge, much of the water collected at the front of the
house is simply shed and left to drain down the slope, which it does quite handily.
Water removed by the slope and a path mimicking its movement |
At the rear of the house the conception for dispersal is
somewhat more sketchy. Here the building sits close to the ground above a minimal crawlspace,
placed over a slight hollow that deepens towards its southeast corner. Here is where water
wants to pool in a downpour during the rainy season. An effort has been
made to drain the area with a pipe aimed down the slope, but unfortunately due to
the configuration of bedrock it's set too high to really be effective. Roof water at the back of the
house was originally sent into a set of narrow clay perimeter tiles, which of course
then clogged quickly with roof debris (don’t they all!). Eventually these were
decoupled and water was simply left to spread onto the ground a foot or so from the wall,
ensuring some of it would drain back under the building. One of my early interventions
was to have a wide-diameter drain (with a clean-out) installed to collect the roof runoff and carry it towards
a rock drain where the land slopes away. This helped reduce the tendency of water to pool under the building substantially.
Another intervention saw replacement of the three worn-out
roof layers (two asphalt on top of the original 1913 stained cedar shingles) with a
new cedar-shingle roof. Despite their thinness, seasoned cedar shingles are
superb rain shedders. And if they’re made of high-grade material and properly installed, they can last a fairly long time. Overall, this system of gabled cedar roofs with cedar gutters
and metal downspouts has proven to be a fairly effective and durable method of
keeping the house dry (with the help of the bevelled wooden siding, of course),
and therefore comfortable to inhabit. On the anniversary of its first century of use, the
Savage house shows no signs of any moisture ever having penetrated its ceilings
or walls (touch wood!).
Houses have always afforded us shelter, but as historian Alan Gowans (The Comfortable House) points
out, before 1890 they were rarely designed with creature comforts built-in. Delivering a
truly comfortable dwelling became an explicit aim of development with the advent of early C-20 bungalow home. Invading dampness is comfort’s persistent enemy, and certain novel features incorporated into bungalow design did a good job of keeping it out.
Friends of mine who live in a
much newer dwelling have not, however, been quite so fortunate. They inhabit
a flat-roofed modernist house whose rather drab exterior belies interesting,
well-lit interior spaces. But that flat roof has caused no end of trouble,
regularly needing emergency attention for unclogging, draining, patching or
wholesale membrane-replacement.
This is not a new problem of flat roofs – it has in fact
plagued modernist houses from the outset. It turns out that the public's instinctive preference for gable roofs isn't after all – as the more militant modernists would have us believe - mere sentiment. Gabled (inverted v-shaped) roofs actually make really good engineering sense because their angles cause water to be shed effectively. However, on flat roofs, water is much more prone to hang around, ultimately degrading surfaces and damaging seams.
"Like a river down the gutter roars the rain..." Longfellow
FLW at the Guggenheim |
It should be said that there are no inherent reasons for
buildings to leak, only designs that don’t sufficiently respect the
implacable laws of physics. Water invades, through multiple avenues, and its
accesses have to be closed off definitively by design, and by careful sealing.
Wright’s famous masterpiece, Fallingwater, though still revered architecturally, nonetheless had continuing moisture problems. This derived in
part from the building’s eccentric placement directly over a waterfall, a
choice Wright made in order to fuse physical feature and dwelling into an
organic whole. Aesthetically this arrangement continues to inspire an interest
that borders on obsession, attracting over 150,000 visitors annually (4.5-million-plus
in total since being opened to the public).
Wright’s stepped structure is cantilevered out over the stream,
capturing the sounds of the falls for its occupants in every room. Bringing the
falls inside audibly is one thing. Less desirably, this placement invites them
to enter the building as moisture, in the form of humidity and damp rising constantly
from their action. This moisture invades the entire building, with unintended
negative consequences.
Built for the wealthy Kaufman family of Pittsburgh as a
recreational villa, Fallingwater suffered so much from dampness that Kaufman-senior
nicknamed it (affectionately) “rising mildew”. The problem of damp invading structure was compounded
by engineering flaws within the dramatic cantilevers of reinforced concrete and
steel, which allowed Wright to step the building down the landform. The
cantilevers break up the massing while gaining space for outdoor living, simultaneously
functioning as roofs for the internal spaces beneath them. Unfortunately, there were problems with the load carried by
the reinforced concrete, which meant some early sagging and worrisome cracks. These fissures
expanded and contracted as humidity levels fluctuated, stressing flashings and opening
avenues for moisture to work its way back inside. Kaufman’s son reports opening
up areas only to discover sopping wet wood and soaked insulation, fuelling mould and
rot.
And when it rained, things got way worse. Fallingwater actively
leaked, even in Kaufman’s treasured study, a fact he informed Wright of with
some impatience - who in turn suggested unhelpfully that he should move his chair and
replace it with a bucket. Thereafter, Kaufman took to calling Fallingwater a
“seven-bucket house”, in reference to the seven buckets needed to catch all the
drips any time it rained. It’s said, in fact, that so much moisture collected
in one of the hallways that a drain had to be installed just to get rid of it! Despite
its flaws the Kaufmans remained deeply attached to their iconic home, able to
enjoy the views and vistas through ample windows from its cozy interior while
attempting to disregard its moisture challenges as best they could.
"And now the thickened sky like a dark ceiling stood; down rushed the rain impetuous" Milton
"And now the thickened sky like a dark ceiling stood; down rushed the rain impetuous" Milton
Le Corbusier, euro-modernist |
With regard to Le Corbusier’s iconic modernist house, which
predated Fallingwater by just a few years, things didn’t go nearly so well. Le
Corbusier, who veered modernism towards extremism out of sheer contempt for
prior building knowledge, systematically neglected water management at his infamous
Villa Savoye, the first rendering of his belief that a house should be
conceived as “a machine for living in.” Neither a gifted space planner nor
concerned in any obvious way with human comfort, Le Corbusier achieved novelty in
design by turning his back on the entire history of domestic architecture.
Despite a machine-like appearance and cold, sanitized décor
that make it feel sealed off from the entire organic world, the flat-roofed Villa
Savoye was an utter sieve from the day it was built. Set on stilts to remove it
from the earth's dampness, this elevated structure failed to respect the laws
of physics obliging one to design and seal all exposed joints properly in
order to keep water from infiltrating a structure. In this regard, Villa Savoye was grossly
deficient, indeed a total flop that would ultimately be abandoned
by the couple it was originally built for! Like Fallingwater, Villa Savoye provided large outdoor spaces
that simultaneously served as roofs for rooms beneath, with similar yet even more
dire consequences.
Indeed, so bad was Villa Savoye that its wealthy occupants
complained bitterly to the architect about its failings from the outset: “It is raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp and
the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked [….] it’s still raining in my
bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the
skylight.”
Le Corbusier felt houses should be isolated as much as
possible from the organic ground plane (rather the opposite of arts and crafts
thinking) so he set his villa on pipe-stilts that he called ‘pilotis’. Architecturally,
this contributed markedly to the building’s ungainly looks, making it appear
like some sort of weird armature or a modular appliance of unknown purpose.
Shunning contact with the earth does not obviate the need to
deal with weather effects – a truth le Corbusier simply chose to ignore
(ignoring inconvenient realities seems a hallmark of both his urban planning
and his architectural ventures). He introduced vast areas of plate glass, which
certainly afforded loads of light inside, but which also (because they were unventilated) caused
the house to overheat badly in summer and (because they were uninsulated) caused it to be
impossible to heat in winter. Comfort was simply not on his radar.
Le Corbusier’s greatest failing however was his abject
disregard of rain effects. It quickly became so uncomfortable living in the
house that the owners sent him the following curt note: “After innumerable demands you have finally accepted that
this house which you built in 1929 is uninhabitable…. Please render it
inhabitable immediately.”
He
ignored all of these requests (of course), and shortly thereafter the owners abandoned the
building on the grounds that it was defective beyond repair (they were then
fleeing the blitz-kreiging Nazis). During the war, it was commandeered for military use and
emerged abused and in semi-ruin. Le Corbusier himself would eventually go to
bat for his 'prize' dwelling, however, and did succeed in having it designated and restored as a monument
to his personal greatness (or folly, depending on your point of view). Would-be modernists
and sundry gawkers visit it now in droves every year.
This indifference
towards the invasive force of water continues in the minimalist camp of
modernism to this very day. When contractors fabricate structures with poorly
sealed stucco walls, metal framed windows lacking trim boards, roof
membranes exposed to all weathers, and eaves that don’t project over walls in buildings whose walls
contain vapour barriers that prevent them from drying out – the net result is buildings
that develop moulds and begin to rot within a few years. We’ve seen a spate of
this in condominiums and apartments over the past two decades here on our wet west coast
(the phenomenon is euphemistically described as ‘premature building envelope
failure’ or PBEF). We don’t know how many families endure living in mouldy environments
as a result of PBEF, but it’s absolutely not a small number.
The
goal in all design and building is weather-tightness, though I would argue not
air tightness, which bumps one right up against the ideology – oops, theory –
of the modern vapour barrier. But that’s another matter for another occasion,
perhaps. Fact is, at one hundred years of age, my bungalow remains dry and
sound, sans flat roof, untrimmed windows, stucco walls or vapour barriers – and
therefore it continues to serve us as a truly 'comfortable' house.
Lovely story, thank you!
ReplyDeleteHey, thank you for the comment. I'm in a process of editing these blog posts, to correct errors and the like. I appreciate your willingness to comment, it's what it's all about.
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