Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 46: Five-over-ones

Episode Date: November 23, 2020

Today we talk about wooden buildings made of oil. kate's article: https://commonedge.org/architecture-aesthetic-moralism-and-the-crisis-of-urban-housing/ patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod slides: https://youtu.be/xVodkE47aLw

Disconnect that. Can everyone still hear me? Yes. Okay. Once I threatened to uninstall Discord, it popped right up. You're going to like... You're going to terrorize it a little bit, so it does what you want. All right. All right. We're ready to podcast.

Yep. Hello. Welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, and it has slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay. I am Alice Koldwell Kelly. I am the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her, and shout out to the person in the comments who is like, I just realized that's actually correct, and she hasn't been doing an extended bit for

the last however many dozen episodes. Oh my God. We call them problematics for a reason. Listen, I wish I were that committed, right? Just to be doing like a slow burn thing, just to annoy people. I say that my pronouns are something other than what they are. So half the people out there think we're just edgy gamers. Yes.

People genuinely think this. Granted, it's my fault for never bothering to do any of the voice work, but still. Yeah. Overrated. That's true. It's a lot of work and. Let's see here. I am Liam Anderson.

My pronouns are he and him. Are you sure you don't want to? He's got a very grim there. I'm listening. We're going to talk about Saudi Aramco. I'm trying to get in the holiday spirit. All three of us are driving one of those like early, early generation Dodge trucks that like all of the, the like Gulfie oil companies used the like red and black ones.

Oh yeah. Yeah. We just, we just did one of those. We're just thriving. Mobile podcasting unit. That's right. You know, depending. I was, I've also spent the last five days in my buddy's RV and I slept on what could

be charitably described as an extra thick boy yoga mat. So while my spine is in perfect alignment, everything else has just gone to hell. What kind of RV though? Like it's a, it's like, it's like a 2004, 25 footer. It's absolutely like keeps the, the gaudy wood paneling. The bathroom is not tall enough for me to take a shower in. So I was just, you know, taking the hobbits to Isengard. Just about to burst out of this RV, like the Hulk's shirts.

That's really how I felt. And it's got this really curious design choice where the passenger foot well is extremely narrow and I am a chunky lad. So I'm just like shifting uncomfortably for seven and a half hours. The airbag light was on the whole time. Our brakes locked up three times. No, I, so I'm a little. Subscribe to the Patreon for our next bonus episode.

Liam's friends RV. He, God bless, God bless a friend of the pod. You know, vomit as I say those words. Josh Munson, he, he bought this thing. It's amazing. I do love the fact that like RV designers make the most interesting choices in the world. Like the fact that there's no room for a full size trash can is just one of those little dinky like bathroom trash cans. And just there's two dudes at the whole van.

The whole thing smelled like warp tour. You've got to do the Mad Men thing where you like you have the picnic and then they throw all of the trash down the pristine beautiful hillside. You know, that's, that's the dream. I mean, it's funny that I can poop in my car like that. You can't do that in any car. If you don't have a coward. Also, you can, you get to say the line, the car is coming from inside the house. Yeah, my friend Ann Marie was just like, oh, you should open a window.

And I'm just like, do you not understand what's seeping into the fabric beans? So let's learn about another petrochemical disaster. Yes. What you see in front of you is one picture of an apartment building being built and another picture of a finished apartment building. This building appears to be made out of wood, right? And a lot of people think they're made out of wood, but today they're mostly made out of oil. Today we're going to talk about the five over one. That's a low viscosity oil.

Yeah, but we don't know the exposure time on this photo. Yeah, exactly. These are sort of like the, you know, the standard sort of developer boxes. Every building looks like this. Yes. And today we're going to, we're going to talk about, you know, how these came to be, why they all look the same. You know, and some of the problems with these buildings beyond just aesthetics, right? Because it's really easy to do an aesthetic critique on these.

This is always the point at, or the residences at. People may be saying, but wait a second, the residences at isn't a disaster. Oh, you are incorrect. And we will explain how over the next hour or something. Hour or something. Yeah, okay. Over the next four years, we will be explaining to you and also awarding a degree in. Yeah, yeah.

Over this eight part course. I look forward to the Penn Central episode. And for no other reason that it's just like, we're going to find a way to make this. If revolutions can make the, whatever the French Revolution, 900 parts, we can make Penn Central. Easily a thousand part. I'll figure out how to make this podcast into something you can watch and get continuing education credits. Yeah, I was going to say we should find a way to become a degree mill. Oh, yeah.

Oh, I've never heard of. Well, there's your problem. Technical college. No, I think technical college is too cool. We should go for like the retro thing and become a normal school. Oh, yeah. We're finishing school. We'll go way back.

Well, there's your problem. Charm school for young ladies. Right. Now I'm going to have to make ID cards for that. So, but before we talk about this, we have to talk about the goddamn news. Springfield Tirefire now smelled in 46 states. Yes. And apparently Bradford.

That's right. United Kingdom. Oh, look at that sad double decker. Yeah. What we have here is just a regular, an actual tire fire, not just a metaphor. And this is, if I can like be allowed to use my Dave Courtney voice and highly illegal storage of tires that somebody like, I guess a couple of guys were just like operating a kind of unregulated tire storage business.

Well, they were like, yeah, just throw them on the pile. And then this happened. We don't know how it started yet, but it's been going for five days and counting. They've closed all of the schools, like all of the buses. You can see the sad bus here. The reason why it's sad is because it's not running because nothing's running. Bradford is shut off. It is a Chernobyl style closed city due to a gas and bath is illegal tire refinery.

I was interested that there was, if you Google this, the first result came from a website for a tire and rubber recycling magazine. Yeah. Very like good SEO, surprisingly. Yeah. And I was, yeah, exactly. And they have a tire recycling podcast apparently, which you should listen to and donate to their Patreon.

Obviously, we should do a collab sometime. Yeah, that's right. What I was thinking is maybe they could, you know, harness the energy from these burning tires, right? Maybe you could run a turbine. You could produce some electricity, right? You could use that to power electric cars, right? And then those electric cars, you know, could then provide tires which could fuel the fire,

right? Folks, he's figured the whole thing out. I am good at environmentalism. Oh, perpetual motion. We did it. That's right. I mean, like the fact that this has been burning for five days, it might well be the safest thing, but like, you know, the firefighters are hating that because it makes them look

like cucks, right? Like West Midlands Fire Service or whoever it is, just like gently standing near this and like lightly misting it down. My God. These tire fires are gnarly. I mean, they go forever. Yeah. And we'll apparently continue to do so.

So Bradford's now twinned with Centralia, Pennsylvania. Apparently, yeah. They leveled Centralia now. Yeah. Yeah. They got mad at us trespassing. We were the last people to ever trespass there. Well, they're just going to level the rest of Bradford.

They closed the graffiti highway is what I meant by that because why would you give people nothing to do in Central Pennsylvania, even less things to do? It's genius. Because then then we'll be able to get on heroin, which is what this is the real thing we should be encouraging them to do. Yeah. That's that is the natural task time. Speaking of post industrial decline, the area that this is happening on this unlicensed

illegal tire disposal thing is a former go-kart track. Oh, the phrase former go-kart track is so evocative. Really? Like everything is in a decline. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, they've closed everything because the smoke, which is of course incredibly

accurate is just sitting all over the city. It's a rat. Yeah. Not good in other not good news. Oh shit. Where's my where's my news drop? God damn it, Alice. You're a fucking news man, Don.

I ever tell you otherwise you put me in the face. Thank you. The other news. That's right. This is public service announcement. Thanksgiving is coming. Don't get yourself killed. Yeah, please don't get yourself killed.

Do not shake hands with danger. Maintain a 1.6 meter distance from danger. 1.6. Yeah. Imagine not just having feet. Yeah. I mean, just some tips on how to avoid taking part in the oncoming turkey day holocaust. I saw that note.

Finally. Yeah. Finally as deadly for humans as it is for turkeys. Yes. I mean, if not more so, because like, yeah, you have one Thanksgiving meal that might kill one turkey, but it's going to kill 25 30 people. Yeah. I just want to say like CDC says don't travel.

You know, which is a smart thing to do. Don't be stupid. Don't let your parents make you be stupid. Don't travel with other people. Listen, this should be an easy sell to you. The listeners of well, there's your problem. Continue as normal with the gamer Thanksgiving. Come down.

There's once wearing the full master chief armor to get a place. Eat that plate in your room and listen to more podcasts. Yeah. Yes. And also please continue to subscribe to our Patreon. That's right. We can't take your money if you're dead. We can probably work something out with your estate.

Does a master chief helmet count as a mosque? I would have to think so. I think so. Yeah. You should think about all the all the ways you can get killed traveling, right? Cause it could be fine. Or you could wind up, you know, in a line for the one working bathroom stall at Vince Lombardi service station for an hour.

Very specific. Also, if you're traveling, do you want to get COVID at home or do you want to get COVID at like on a beach? Yeah, exactly. Like a hospital that's already overwhelmed, like where your parents live. You don't want to do that. Well, I noticed, I guess, friend of the pod, Katty, Katie, sorry for saying your name wrong, was saying that 94% of ICU beds in Arkansas are already full.

Yeah. So if your parents live in Arkansas, for instance, do not go home. Don't go there. I know. I know. I know. If you're a data person, Canadian Thanksgiving is earlier. You can see the graph.

It's just a line. It's a vertical line. It's a big spike. If you live in a place with a lot of COVID, don't go to a place that doesn't have much COVID. Could you bring it there? If you live in a place with not much COVID, don't go to a place that has a lot of COVID because then you'll bring it back.

Why would you leave? Don't go anywhere. Don't go anywhere. Yeah, stay in your room. I stopped a truck stop in North Carolina. I was the only person wearing a mask because of course I was. Or it was actually in Tennessee. My apologies to the five people in North Carolina.

And the woman working the register laughed at me and I sort of thought to myself, listen, I'm going to go full hillbilly elegy here in a second. Listen, lady, look where we are. They had a Trump flag still flying and I just wanted to be like, yeah, I was going to go full JD Vans and be like, do you want to know why your life sucks? If you had come from Philadelphia, not wearing a mask, it would have been the deadliest interaction someone coming into a gas station would have had since Anton Sugar. I always just want to lower my mask and just cough on these people.

And be like, clearly you don't have a problem with it. It's like, listen, I'm doing this as a courtesy to you. I don't care if you live or die. You're a volunteers fan. What you've got to do is you've got to get the sociopath mask, the one with the exhale valve, that it's just like, fuck you got mine, valve. Well, one that like actually amplifies every breath from the sneeze. That's part of it.

It's just like people don't really understand that like wearing a mask, like the literal bare minimum you can do to protect people around you is like, it's just not, I wouldn't say at this point anymore. It's just this profoundly American disease of the idea of, I simply cannot be bothered to do anything for other people, despite the fact that I live amongst 330 other million Americans. It just pisses me off so much. President Biden is going to restore civility and he's going to fix it.

I'm going to cough on these fucking people, Alice. I'm going to cough on them and then I'm going to take the Trump flag and then I'm going to wipe my fucking ass with it. And then I'm going to go to Pat Toomey's house and I'm going to give him my shit covered Trump flag because he won't fucking pass COVID relief because he's too busy pouting about Governor Wolf. I just, I swear to God, every time Pat Toomey tweets or opens his mouth,

I just want to drive up to Scranton and just... I didn't have to edit that out. I didn't say gun so we should be fine. No, it probably would be legal if you said something about a gun, but since you mentioned any other kind of weapon, it's highly illegal. I was just going to stand at the base of his driveway and do one of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier rotations. Complete with like spinning the M14 and shit.

Yeah, exactly. And then when he interrupts me, I'll do the thing they do at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and they just scream at you until you're quiet. Yeah. They do do that. I prefer not to be screamed at by a DI if I can avoid it again. Thank you.

Good Lord. Yeah, don't don't get yourself killed. You know, unless you're a bad person, in which case, whatever. Lie Delta. Okay, that was the news. The news. Oh, we're back here again. I know we're back here again.

At Drake's Well, which notably is a wooden building, right? Well, so he did this and had a successful rap career. Yes. That's how he funded his rap career. This is so we're back at Drake's Well question mark. Yeah. Oh, right. Because we're going to talk about low viscosity oil.

Yeah, exactly. So like, why would you, you know, we're doing a show which is about wooden buildings, but what wooden apartment buildings, you know, you're five over ones, right? Why would you start here to talk about wooden buildings? And, you know, it's sort of because we're going to talk about engineered lumber and in order to talk about engineered lumber, we had to talk about oil, right?

This is the building that is ending the world. I would say of the buildings out there with like the most historical threads that pass through them, it's like Drake's Well and Old St. Peter's. So, all right, we talked about this in which one, the Piper Alpha episode commercial oil production began here in 1859. Lots of interesting applications for the black stuff, you know, came shortly afterwards, right?

It wasn't really until mass adoption of the internal combustion engine that the potential for oil and oil byproducts was really realized though, right? So, which brings us to Saudi Arabia, best country in the world, only country in the world, it put a giant flag up to annoy the Jordanians, just a land of cool people, all of whom are wearing 50 white Dior belts all the time and abusing their domestic laborers and driving cars sideways.

Well, that is cool. That one's cool. Yeah, that one's good. Whatever the Nissan Patrols, which we have as the Armada in the United States that they supermod to make like 1,400 horsepower, those are pretty sick. Yeah, let's try and think of the positive things about Saudi Arabia.

No. It contains the cool cube, although they do their best to ruin the cool cube by like building luxury hotels around it. As the world's tallest clock tower. Yeah. More like cock tower, am I right? Yeah. So, in the early 1940s.

Everything got worse. Yeah. Three men, Max Steineke, Thomas Barger, and Ernie Berg went to the recently unified country of Saudi Arabia and they had a religious experience. Max, Tom, and Ernie destroy the world. Yeah. This religious experience was not at the Holy City of Mecca,

nor was it at Medina, nor at the 10th City of Mina. It was not well circling the Kaba, nor while stoning the pillars. It was while mapping the Wadi al-Saba riverbed, right? Yeah, exactly. They noticed an unusual geologic uplift which indicated the presence of oil, an unusual amount of oil like a huge amount more than would have been postulated to exist before.

Cut to the three of us in the time travel capsule from Looper getting out and I have a Glock. So, when the exploration wells were sunk, it was found that yeah, there was a whole bunch of oil, right? And these men realized God had given them a great gift and went on to found the Arabian American Oil Company, you know, to preach and evangelize the good word of oil and to ensure that oil was part of every fuel, every medicine, every

consumer product, every durable good, every industrial process, every single thing that you or I lay eyes on every day, right? They all come from that well in a place we now call Gawar, right? And the Arabian American Oil Company, which is later nationalized and called Saudi Aramco, you know, the story is expansive and encompassing and shapes a huge amount of global political economy today.

This is just sort of a small piece of that showing how even, you know, buildings we think are made of wood or mostly made of oil. Yeah. We are connecting a pin and some red string between Saudi Aramco and why all the apartments look like that as opposed to the usual connection of Saudi Aramco and 9-11. Yes.

We're just gazing into this faceted jewel, one facet of which is doing 9-11 and another is all of the apartment buildings look like that. Which is worse, who can say? Okay, so we should also look at, you know, sort of the history of apartment buildings, right? You know, we've had apartment buildings for a very, very, very long time, right?

The apartment buildings have always needed to be built kind of cheap, right? Because they're usually mass produced, right? You know, they're, well, not mass produced in the way we would know of today, but people have to build a lot of them, right? Right. So we got some examples here, you know, your classic New York

City tenement building, right? We've got Shebham, which is in Yemen. This is an ancient city of six and seven story, sort of clay brick and rammed earth buildings. Cool. Right? We got old Native American Pueblos in the Southwest. You know, these, these sometimes went a little higher than

the ones you see here. You know, you got house, parents and really like the, like the Pueblo ones that are built into the cliff faces. Those rock. I can tell you, though, getting home after a night of drinking would suck some ass. You got a Assassin's Creed park or your way up your neighbor's house.

How are you going to bed? And then you're just scaling like a 25 foot wall. Just like, I told him, I told him, I didn't want to do shots on a Monday. You got to get up and go to work the next day and you're just like, all right, time to break out the emergency fun slide. The Pueblos in this image have been modified to have doors

originally. The Pueblos would only be accessible from sort of a hatch in the roof. Yeah. The Indus River Valley like houses are like that too. You build them all together so the town's like a walled city. They all adjoin each other and then you just get in from the roof.

Well, awesome. That would not be conducive to me as a fat guy. Well, yeah, that's why like you just wouldn't. My calves would be terrific. Yeah, you'd be an extremely ripped and prim chat. Maintain a different equilibrium. Yeah. You just have to watch out for orange shapes.

That's right. Which is kind of a problem when your house is also an orange shape. Yeah, this is true. And then, you know, we got Roman insula over here. You know, all these apartment buildings throughout history, you know, this sort of remarkably similar construction really.

You got, you know, masonry walls and that's, you know, masonry here, I guess ranges from, you know, sort of adobe bricks to, you know, stone to bricks to, you know, what have you. Right. You got wood joists holding up the floors, right? You know, historically, your best apartments were usually on the second floor and they got cheaper as you went up until I invented the elevator and then the best departments were on

the top floor and they got cheaper as you went down. Yeah, you can see, for instance, if you look at the Paris ones, under the leaded roofs, you have what's called a garret. That's the cheapest one or used to be because you have like no space because the actual roof is intruding in on you. It's fine because that's where you like, that's where your servants and your starving artists live.

It was out of sight and out of mind. Right. Exactly. And I mean, we have a whole episode about the like politics of cramming people into highrises in order to not see them about Grenfell. And don't forget, poor doors got those in New York. Yeah.

There was a building that went up, I think a few years ago where they, there was a huge, it was the Time Warner Center where basically the tenants got to come into the nice neat little lobby and all the help, of course, had to filter in through whatever assassin's creed scale into an air vent. I mean, it's happening even with lockdown, right? Like now that we have all of these student residences, which are all absolutely buildings.

I heard of buildings that looked like that. I like that. Now that we've locked those down, we've just literally had universities surrounding them with fences here and like security and police patrols to be like, no, you want, you want to study sociology? Guess what? The university really does resemble a prison now, mother fucker.

I think Nate and Francis were talking about that on. Yeah. Oh God. Televoy. There we go. Eventually. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm in the Napathai extended universe, but I do not pay respect to my God. You were like an absent minded NPC where Nate is the protagonist. Edit this one, dickhead. Parallel universe. Yeah. Go ahead and make your jokes. He's going to edit me selectively on the next trash

YouTube because of it. Sorry, Nate. We love you, Nate. So. All right. So these, these apartments are very common, you know, basically everywhere, we're going to be kind of United States centric today because that's where five over ones are built.

You know, until sort of the immediate post war period, right? After World War Two, you know, the GIs are coming home, everyone needs houses and stuff. After World War Two, multifamily housing was sort of essentially banned in most of the United States, right? Through zoning, through financing requirements from the federal housing, administration and stuff like that, right?

Yeah. But we did get that song little boxes out of it. So it's, you know, worthwhile. Yeah. Who can say whether it's good or bad? So, you know, cities and towns across the country implement zoning codes that explicitly allow only single family homes on the vast majority of land, not just like, you know, towns

in the suburbs, but huge swaths of cities we're usually associate with multifamily housing, right? New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, places like that. You know, a huge amount of those cities are just, you can only build single family houses. And your multifamily apartment construction becomes limited to like public housing and large luxury towers, not so much stuff in the more affordable three to seven

story range. A good thing that we didn't also coincide this with massive redlining. Oh, yeah. So that we produce a lot of like, Yeah. So that we produce a lot of suburbs that have like single family occupation.

And then you just have a lot of inner cities that have like very tall buildings, for instance. No, who would do that? Couldn't be me. Look, it's called the Fair Housing Administration. It's not called the Unfair Housing Administration. And if they had been doing unfair housing administration, they would have had to have changed the name.

Surely the guide rails of the system will protect that's right. People from from. Yes. I don't know why all these guide rails are drawn in red, but it's fine. Well, yeah, you know, I can I can get a lot of financing for single family houses very easily.

But if I want to build one, you know, three story building, they just slam the door in my face. So, you know, construction sort of shifts to steel frames and reinforced concrete rather than load bearing masonry for your, you know, sort of taller apartment buildings, which are still able to be financed, right? But, you know, otherwise most construction single family homes, you know, this sort of it's a method to, you know,

sort of encourage everyone to own a home. Everyone owns a home. They own a car. They have all this sort of stuff, you know, every white person, every white person. Yes, of course. You know, and it brings sort of the institution of home ownership to America where, you know, home ownership is a store of wealth.

You know, it's a way to invest in your retirement. And, you know, it turns everyone into just rabid anti-communists. Yeah, the same thing happened in Britain with with that, just selling off council housing, public housing, very, very cheaply to create this this store of home ownership that turned an entire generation into psychos. It is one of the most effective ways of turning people into just psychotic.

Yeah, I only asshole. Yeah. Kool-Ax. Oh, okay. Hey, Dad. The price for you sending your kid to go and get killed in Vietnam is one of these houses. And for that cost, not only will you send your kid to die in Vietnam,

but you will be glad about it the whole time. Yeah, because you can come home to your four bedroom house, which you don't need anymore because you're three cents of all died in Vietnam. But yeah, no, it's actually really interesting because that's a bonus room now. Yeah, you know, maybe a weight room, you know, get back in shape after the baby. But I think part of it is that like this,

sort of in every facet of like home ownership and sort of the specificity around like why people sometimes I think do vote Republican is this idea that like, well, you know, maybe I'm not making 40 million a year, but like one day I will be. And at least in part that's represented by home ownership. So you just get absolutely not so about taxes and that sort of informs your entire worldview, despite the fact that like you're never going to see the tax break that fucking Mark Zuckerberg got.

But you think, you know, aspirationally, well, I might get there someday. And I don't want to, you know, hurt my chances and take it from me, a now incorporated small business owner. I get it. Yeah. It shifts the collective struggle from like, you know, wanting higher wages and better working conditions to wanting higher property values. Exactly.

I know that's exactly right. And it sort of decentralizes and takes away, you know, your ability. There's also, you know, as as dumb as it sounds to you, there's a better ability to organize when you live 10 feet from your neighbor. Yeah. This is an asset. Or something like that. If you want to like organize, if you want to organize a subdivision,

it's only ever going to be in service of raising property values, which means it's only ever going to be in service of terrorizing black people out of living there. Yeah. You're going to form a homeowners association, not a union. Yeah, exactly. And you're going to, you're going to really start screaming at like two or three people you don't like about where they put their garbage bins.

Find them $100 a day because it's one foot left of where it should be. Yeah. The neighbors I grew up across the street from would get very annoyed when our, when our trash cans were not lined up smallest to largest. So I started before I left for school on the day when the trash would come, I would just rearrange their trash cans. See how you like it. All right.

So with this suburbanization comes like new ways to do wooden construction, right? You know, it makes stuff cheaper. So it's sort of a brief history of wooden construction here. All right. I'll bite. What is wood? Stave church.

Stave church. It comes from a tree. What's a tree? I've never seen one of those. Yeah, you really do. I haven't seen one of those in years. A tree grows in Brooklyn, but not in Glasgow. Yeah.

All right. So on the one hand, we have like traditional wooden construction. Right. So you got like, you know, big, heavy timbers, right? Hewn from the mightiest oak in the forest, arranged by the most skilled tradesmen in the land into a stout and hearty structure that would last for the ages. Why are you yelling?

Yeah. I'm trying to evoke a sort of romantic image of skilled carpenters assembling stout and hearty structures. Yes, of course. Sorry. Maybe boats too. I don't know. This stuff was already almost nonexistent by the mid 19th century, right?

We love the enclosure, don't we folks? We love the industrial revolution. Depending on the location, a lot of times it's more economical to build with brick or masonry than large, heavy timber framing, right? But towards the 1830s, we get this thing called balloon frames, right? So rather than having big, solid, heavy wooden numbers, you have lots of light, standardized lumber, you know, two by fours and stuff that are arranged to make, you know, stronger assemblies, right?

So this is sort of similar to modern platform framing, but you know, these wooden studs are usually continuous through all the floors of the house, right? And you add diagonal members that resist shear forces. And this is the sort of stuff you get with like a sears house or something of that era. And then later on, after the widespread availability of plywood and stuff like that, we get platform framing, right? So your shear wall is now accomplished, not with a diagonal member.

You just nail some plywood on the wooden studs. The studs end at each floor and another set of studs starts on top of that. Wait a second. Is that platform framing photograph Grover House? Yes. I was wondering that for the whole slide and I was thinking, did this motherfucker? Yeah. Yes.

Of course he did. Yeah. Why would I not? Yeah. Your platform framing is very, very cheap, very simple, very flexible. It's so simple that a lot of contractors can and do design houses without the involvement of engineers or architects, right? Oh, good.

This way your reveal would have been that this was Grover House. Yeah. Well, it is a good example of where an engineer or an architect was not involved. No. I haven't really thought of, I don't think, except in I can do it better than that. Yeah. How hard can it be? I said asking my erectile dysfunction support group.

All right. So along with this sort of in the same vein comes this concept of engineered lumber, right? So you have wood, right? And most of this wood is sort of spruce pine for fast growing trees like that, right? You know, they're largely interchangeable, right? The basic idea behind engineered lumber is we take the wood and we make it stronger. And or otherwise, if you alter its characteristics to achieve desirable properties, right? Or we can reuse some waste products even, right?

The way you do this is through this material called glue. Okay. Yeah. So the one we're most familiar with, I think, is plywood, right? Very simple concept. You put a log on a lathe. You sort of unroll the log into a big sheet. You cut those sheets into four by eight foot pieces.

You glue them together. Bada bing, bada boom. You got plywood, right? This is the glue that you use is called urea formaldehyde, right? That sounds fine. Is that pee? Ah, well, what we've done is we figured out how to make pee out of oil. Awesome.

Okay. Yeah. Urea is the same thing used in the whatever the Blue Tech diesels. Yes. And I remember just being like, but could I hypothetically simply pee in it? Yeah. Like the radiator of a car, just in extremis. Yeah.

I don't know if you could. I don't know if there's enough urea. I don't believe you can pee in it. Yeah. I think I posted online and somebody was like, no, unfortunately. I don't think you could pee on wood and make it stronger either. No, we figured out how to make the out of oil. You really don't believe in yourself, Elroz.

No. Really defeatist attitude here. This is a petroleum derived resin, right? And sometimes you use a more expensive phenol from the propyldehyde, phenol from aldehyde when you need water resistance in the plywood. But the basic formula is here, you take wood, you add petroleum products, you get stronger wood, right? And then we have other stuff like particle board.

That's what your Ikea furniture is made of. That's basically waste lumber products like wood chips and sawdust, stuff like that. You compress that into a uniform board. You spray that down with resin, you add a wood veneer, you got particle board. One of our favorites of course is oriented strand board. We see here. I remember this. Yeah.

Sort of engineered wood chips, right? These are actually cut specially. It's not just like waste product. You press them and glue them together, you get a sort of oriented, you get a board which is stronger and uglier than plywood, right? And then there's a couple others. There's like glue lamb, which is this guy here. That's just a bunch of dimensional lumber that's been glued together and then sort

of pressed together. It's actually not a bad looking material. I've seen this used for as like exposed structure before. It's like okay, but then if you have, from there we have other materials like laminated veneer lumber, which is what I believe this guy is here. That's just a whole bunch of plywood or sometimes oriented strand board that's glued together to form a large structural beam, right? And then we got like some iJoyce here, which are like combinations of structural lumber

or dimensional lumber and oriented strand board, right? So you know, these structural materials are, you know, they're fine, they work, they're strong and useful, except for particle board, provided you build stuff right. So let's get to them not building it, right? Let's get to that bit. Yeah. All right. So sort of towards the mid 90s, there's a movement towards more permissive zoning,

you know, urban living, you know, this thing called new urbanism, right? Yeah. Gentrification. Thanks for nothing, Jane Jacobs. All that sort of stuff starts to take off. Some places start to maybe begin to sort of allow multi-family buildings again. Yeah, because you're like, huh, why people can live here? Yes.

Yeah. My God. So they could go to our coffee shops and our dog eateries and our fancy dessert coffee shops. Stop bringing your dogs in every fucking place, OK? But my Pappuccino. Shut up. So the first large sort of lumber apartment structures start going up in I think around

1996, like architects start to experiment with this sort of stuff, right? They require a whole bunch of variances from the building code, right? Because wood construction was not in international building code at that point. International building code was still very new at that point as well. Of course, international building code is not actually international. It's only for the United States. Road series. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Toronto has a team. Well, I think similarly, IBC is used in Canada. Thanks, guys. So fast forward to 2009. The new international building code explicitly allows lumber construction for multi-family buildings for the first time, including five stories of wood construction over one story of concrete.

That's where we get the term five over one four, right? From not four. That's where for we're getting the term. Yeah, exactly. Where for, et cetera. Where for out down five on one. Exactly. Jay, Shakespearean structures.

Yeah. So it's. Give me one second here. I'll be right back. This is fine. I'm eating a burrito while we're recording this. So like. I've not.

Yeah, I gotta eat lunch. I'm so. I like. I wasn't expecting us to record when we did. So I just like ordered food. We told you we were doing. Yeah. And I forgot and I ordered a fucking giant burrito, which got here.

How is it? It's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's like mild though, but it's got some like. What's on it? Well, let's see. Rice, pico de gallo, guacamole, cheese, and it's like some kind of pepper, but I don't know what.

Oh, I'm jealous. Yeah. It's pretty good. Also, it arrived like radioactively hot is the thing. Well, that's how you know they made it fresh. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're trying to murder you.

Yeah. I like I picked up the foil and I was like. I was seared. I was a ribbon. I lost five layers of skin. I'm just bones now and I'm like, holy shit. This is going to be a good asparisa and it is. So yeah, join me in vicariously enjoying this barisa.

I I'm I'm very jealous. So now we're going to have to fight. I'm back. It's a water. My throat was getting dry. You got covid. Yeah. Because you got the run.

Covid. You have covid. That's probably it. Oh, well. RIP to me. Carousel virus. That doesn't work. You can sort of see here's sort of general structure of a five over one, right?

So I think this is actually a five over two, which is allowed in some jurisdictions. Just for the ones who are feeling a little bit extra. I know. Right. So you got a concrete podium here, right? We got some concrete masonry unit walls here on top of that. You can see we got a whole bunch of dimensional lumber, you know, just sort of attached together like that.

We got an LVL laminated veneer lumber supporting this area above where a window is going to go. Right. Sort of repeat up the building. You see there's a little bit less wood as you go up to keep it lighter. Oh, good. It gets oriented, strandboard nailed over it at some point. That had some sheer strength so you can't just like push the building over with a light

wind. I prefer the Sears house option of just fuck it, put diagonals in everywhere. I mean, a flying buttress on the side of one of these. Oh, I want a flying buttress. I wonder how you would find a two by four that was, you know, 50, 60 feet long. It's a two by 50. Not going to fit in the pickup, unfortunately. Just tie a flag on the end of it.

It's fine. It's fine. Wide load, wide load coming through. It's a long load, not a wide load. It's wide if you think about it the other way. Having a wide load sticker on the side of the truck, what I'm what I'm hearing is Liam's going to transport these sort of horizontally. Yes.

So it's taking up. Yes. Yeah, we're getting we're getting into the construction business and this is how like we will ship you the structural members crosswise. Yeah. No one's ever thought to do this before as I'm taking up the entire BQE to move one single piece of wood. Yeah, you drive into you drive into the Queens Midtown Tunnel and like the the lumber sort

of, you know, just as the momentum carries you, such that the lumber catches the sides of the retaining walls as you go into the tunnel and you wind up dangling 25 feet in the air. Yeah, but I wouldn't be dead, maybe or lift off like the Mercedes at Le Mans. So, OK, we're going to look at a couple things as far as five over ones go. We look at some building systems like the structural system. Obviously, we just sort of looked at that. We're going to look at fire protection.

We're going to look at HVAC. We're going to look at the building envelope that's sort of like the facade systems and how you keep water out. It sort of relate that to, you know, design and sort of sustainability, which is one of the big arguments for these buildings and why that maybe not is such a great argument. So, but I thought, you know, the thing we obviously would start with for a wood frame department building is fire. Wow, I remember this slide, but yeah.

Yeah, well, you know, it's bad when you like when you're making a five day tire fire play second fiddle to you in the same presentation. Oh, look at it. This was during the George Floyd protests. Big five over one in Minneapolis got burned down fairly early on. This was under construction, of course. You know, and this is like the big obvious danger that people like to bring up a whole lot of times, you know, a wooden building can catch fire, right?

And if it's a big apartment block, that's a problem. And these buildings have caught fire a whole lot, but almost exclusively while they're under construction, you know, which is before the fire protection systems are installed, right? And when they've burned down, these fires burn very, very hot for a very long time. They often cause a lot of damage to nearby structures from radiant heat and, you know, the flames and, you know, bits of flaming wood falling from the sky, stuff like that. But there's usually not very many injuries.

And yeah, when these buildings are under construction, they're just sitting there naked in front of God and everyone. It's really easy to set fire to them, you know, especially since, you know, that's all impregnated with petroleum products. But once you install fire protection, it's a lot harder. As we mentioned in the 9 11 episode, you know, never forget the. Yeah, primary fire protection system is regular old gypsum drywall, right? Yeah, that or you like spray some bullshit onto the shit.

Yeah, and you kind of half ass it and you work for the Port Authority. You have a union job spraying the fire insulation on. And you kind of do like a fifth of it and go home. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, drywall, it's made of gypsum. Gypsum has water in it and the water boils off, keeps temperatures low, prevents the fire from damaging the wooden structure. Fireproofing is, you know, augmented with active fire protection systems.

You know, it's just a sprinkler system, right? And that's now required in wood frame department buildings. It wasn't always the case that it was required everywhere. So we should look at like an older, older five over one, where we see like the consequences of this. Um, oh, no, the consequences of my actions. Yeah. As far as I can tell, the only major fires which have involved completed and occupied five over ones have occurred in the borough

of Edgewater, New Jersey, which has had some bad luck with this. Yeah, or one guy who has a very, very forgiving insurance policy. I will get to that. Oh, boy. OK. This is the Avalon at Edgewater. Oh, of course. I know, right? This building was put up in the year 2000. It burned down while it was under construction, so they put it up again.

The Avalon too, at Edgewater. Yeah, I know, right? When it burned down, it also destroyed nine homes across the street from it. Jesus. But they built it again. And that's just the hubris at Edgewater. Yeah, 2015, it burned down again. This time after stuff like fire protection had been installed,

including a sprinkler system, right? So what happened here? In an ideal world, if you need to do repairs on a multifamily building, you go to the pros, right? And the pros have experienced they have the right tools for the job. And most importantly, they carry insurance and they have licenses, right? I'm going to guess that is not what happened here. I'm guessing this is a classic landlord bit of I get my cousin to do it.

I mean, technically, I guess most people are some guy's cousin, but like there is a specific landlord thing of like, yeah, I'll get my cousin to look at it. And, you know, the cousin shows up five weeks later, looks at it and goes, that's fucked, man. Yeah, alternatively, he gets it. He comes in like the day of and is extremely enthusiastic about fixing it, you know, in like a strange way. Both of those seem to be just about as common as each other.

But the property management company that ran the Avalon at Edgewater instead decided to hire, you know, some guys they picked up in front of the Home Depot to some do some plumbing work, right? And these guys decided to be a good idea to use a blowtorch on the plumbing problem. What? Good. All right. Sure. Yes. They have a very good idea in a wooden building.

I don't know what all the details are here. I would imagine they presumably had to, you know, work on a pipe that was behind some drywall, so they had to cut a hole in there to access it. They managed to set the structure of the building on fire and that fire spread to the attic of the building. That's crazy. I can't believe that happened. At the time, addicts did not need to have sprinkler systems installed. Because the people don't live up there.

Yeah, exactly. That's true. That is true. Famously, a feature of Aztecs is that it's not bad when they're on fire. Yes. Heat rises. It's not going to set stuff below it on fire. You look at Notre Dame, it was fine. Just takes the top right off. It's fine. Yeah, just just take a little off the top. Yeah, it's like it's like a haircut.

Convertible cathedral. So set the roof of your building on fire every few months. It's like a dome stadium, you know, if they're worshiping in bad weather, you know. I think it'd be funny if they installed a retractable roof on Notre Dame. I would like that. You may say it's sacrilegious, but I can't hear you over the air flow. Yeah, I was about to say, you get a the church, the church demands a retractable roof or they're going to move.

All right, so once the fire reached the attic, you know, it cut fire very quickly. And of course, once a fire is of a certain size and strength, you know, all of these fire-proving materials with one, two and three hour fire ratings, you know, these these these hours start to mean less when you're just you have so much fire, right? Crap, what did I do there? I went forward. So, you know, the building burned to the ground.

Everyone made it out, thank God. But the building was ruined. They had to demolish what was left and they had to rebuild it. Was it a fourth one? Four. Yeah. Mike Myers returns. They rebuilt it with the same construction on the same site, but they had sprinklers in the attic.

Wow. Yeah. And then two years later, this same company had another large building burned down in Maplewood, New Jersey. Which was under construction and it took an adjacent building, which was almost finished construction with it. That's just, again, really bad luck that it keeps happening to this one company. I'm sure there's nothing to investigate there. Nothing nefarious here.

Absolutely nothing weird going on. And in fact, you're weird if you think this is weird. Why do you think it's weird? You fucking weirder. If it's just that, you know, these these buildings, you know, these buildings do burn down, right? But usually when they're under construction and they cause a lot of property damage when they do that. But they usually don't burn down

once they're open and occupied. Usually, usually. So, you know, all right. You know, they can catch fire. I guess that's the I can't say they're not going to catch fire. They don't catch fire too often, though, except when they're under construction. So I don't know that that's the fire. That's the fire situation.

Let's move on to HVAC. Before we do, there is one exception. If you want to make one of these things catch fire after it's been built, what you've got to do is you've got to cover it in a highly flammable cladding, which again, we've talked about before on grand film. We'll get to it a little bit once we get to like external fit and finish stuff. But like, yeah, that's a good way of setting something on fire

is just cover it in flammable petroleum products. I know, right? So I thought it'd be fun to talk about, you know, some of the sustainability aspects of these buildings, you know, what the HVAC system really, you know, it's important to remember before we get started that, you know, living in an apartment is almost always more sustainable, environmentally friendly than living in a single family home, right? You're heating and cooling less space per person, you know,

hopefully transporting people less distance for work or shopping. And the largest energy cost of any building is the energy put into, you know, constructing the building, right? So I said, you know, the greenest building is the one that's already built, right? But I mean, on the one hand, that's all true. On the other hand, I want to live in an archaeology from SimCity 2000. True. Yes, this is also true.

So. But anyway, I'm so I'm not an HVAC guy. A lot of the stuff is kind of confusing and difficult for me, right? But if you're if you're in the USA, you're probably familiar with air conditioning because if you're in the UK, you are not. Yeah, so it's you in the USA, our cities are built on, you know, disgusting swamps that reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit with 200 percent humidity in the summer, right? Whereas everywhere else, that's just the future

that's coming down the pipe with with climate change. But we're not there yet. So no HVAC. Exactly. So if you live in like a single family home with central air, you're probably familiar with this guy on the screen right here. This is one half of what's called a split system, right? Your condenser coils in the fan are on the outside and the air handler and the heat exchanger on the inside of the house.

If you're familiar with a window AC, this is essentially the back part of the window air conditioner and the front part is separated by hoses, right, connected to a unit on the inside. One of the things about HVAC systems for large buildings is they tend to get more efficient as they get larger, right? If I have to heat and cool a large space like a multi-storey building, I can, you know, scale up a system like this into something with a big chiller and a cooling tower.

You know, some places like University of Pennsylvania actually take this further. They run like this central chilling plant to distribute chilled water to many buildings, right? It does look cool as hell. Yeah, they just leave the door open. You see it in some some tower blocks, too. Like you have the parallel tower

that has all of the heating and cooling infrastructure. It's cool. And there's lots of different methods of distributing cold air from an air handling unit to different, you know, HVAC zones, which in this case, you know, one zone would be one apartment. There's something called variable air flow where you have air at a constant temperature and you sort of vary the amount of flow into rooms. There's constant air flow with a preheater where the air is,

you know, at a constant temperature and a constant flow. But there's a little heater at the end, which we'd all studied. If we'd all studied this instead of, I guess, actual like civil engineering and, in my case, law, we would all be making so much more money than if we were doing a podcast. We have a podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Well, HVAC is HVAC is more of an art than a science. That's right.

Sort of like podcasting. Unfortunately, you two are like too busy getting STEM degrees to study HVAC. This is a new thing called variable refrigerant flow, which I don't understand. But, you know, rather than having one single unit, a lot of five over ones go with a different method, right? Oh, no. They chose something different. They chose what the fuck? Yeah. You have one split system for every apartment.

What? You know. And there's a window unit, like a roof one. Yeah, a roof one. Yeah. Yeah, you could you could you could do a slalom if you want. Rooftop slalom, baby. I love this little mushroom crop that's grown up on the roof of my building. I've seen some installations where there's like a whole bunch of them just in like one section, like they're all in one corner.

But what's that like fear of small holes? Oh, trypophobia. Trypophobia. Yeah. Yeah. It's very much gives you that sort of. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just like the lotus seeds picture. I really don't like that one. So, you know, and this is this is actually some of the older

multifamily buildings, which, you know, when air conditioning was sort of. I would say like 70s, 80s, they would use the under window units like you'd have in a hotel. I guess this is more creates a more aesthetically pleasing facade because there's not like, you know, there's not like a big vent under every window. Yeah, it's not like you need to use that like flat, expensive roof space for anything like, say, solar panels. Yeah, exactly.

Now, you got to use that for I'm going to use that for ventilate. Put the roof deck, put the roof deck between them and that way. Yeah, I'm trying to relax by the rooftop pool, but there's just 70 of these these giant chiller fans going, yeah. They're just constantly cycling on and off. So, you know, OK, fuck economies of scale. We're going to put one system in per apartment, right? And there's a few reasons why you might do this, right?

This is it's very easy way to get zone control. The whole building doesn't get mad if one system breaks. But crucially, you can meter people's individual air conditioning usage more easily this way and build them for it or, you know, hook it up to their electricity. And it's another way to like continue the atomization. Even when you're living in an apartment building, you're still living apart. Right. This is a way you just don't have to interact with your neighbors.

You don't have to share anything, anything. Yeah. And you don't need to install a lot of ducting and you need less highly trained people to do maintenance on these systems. And this is not specifically a problem with five over ones. There's lots of loft conversions and stuff like this. They run similar systems. But, you know, it looks really silly.

Yeah. Also, I'm still mad at loft conversions in general than five over ones because they they take away an existing piece of heritage, like a nice warehouse or the kink.com armory. And they just turn it into like just lofts, just more lofts, lofts. Yeah. Yeah. That's my cultural heritage that you're taking me from me. Yeah. And you turn it into the at something. The armory, the armory at the armory.

Apartment of redundancy department. But, you know, I feel like it sort of reflects some of the larger problems with energy use in these buildings. You know, another sort of example of this is. You know, how the windows work, right? The dolls. This is a five over two. This is allowed in some places in this case.

This is in beautiful sunny San Diego, California, right? It's very greebled. You know what I mean by that? No. What? So so greebling is a thing that you do to props. I think it was invented with Star Wars, where if you want something to look like futuristic and interesting, instead of having a flat surface, you don't just have like a box or something.

You put a lot of weird texture on it by having like these square bumps and shit and wires and stuff. So like it looks exactly like if you take the shape of that building, take all of the detail off that belongs on like Darth Vader's chest piece, right? Yeah, yeah. It's a way of making something that would otherwise be flat, look like bigger. It's the same reason like the Star Destroyers and have all the shit on the surfaces of them, is it makes it bigger?

You'll do it. Yeah. Greebling. It's a it's a thing. It's a thing. So. So. As we've stated a couple of times on this podcast, right? Living on the West Coast is for cowards and children who are afraid of weather. Yes, that's right. Yeah. San Diego is no exception here.

It's a balmy 70 degrees for most of the year and it barely ever rains. So you think, you know, this is the ideal climate for having some big windows. You know, you can open up and let the fresh sea breeze in, you know, really enjoy the climate that you're paying out the as you know, you're paying out the ass to live in, right? You know, what's installed on these buildings are these tiny casement windows? Here's the zoomed in view of over here. These tiny casement windows that barely open if they open.

Yeah. Yeah. Decorative use only. Basically, yeah. I think you're required to have some windows that open by the code and like developers are very reluctant to make them open in a useful fashion. It's also very useful if you are if you are big age back, a thing that I've just coined, but I'm now increasingly convinced myself over the last few seconds killed JFK. If you're big age back, right?

Not only do you get to install a hundred something units, but everybody has to keep their windows closed, which means everybody has to use the fucking age back. Yeah. And, you know, I think these these casement windows that barely open are almost ubiquitous in new construction. I have no idea why a lot of these buildings at least have balconies, but there's not really a possibility of, you know,

turning the air conditioner off once in a while, because otherwise, you know, you're stuck with stagnant indoor air. These buildings are a lot more hermetically sealed than they ought to be. They're certainly not as bad as, you know, high rises are because a lot of those no windows open, but, you know, still not good. I don't know if this is just an architectural trend or big age back killing JFK driven by building codes or insurance. But, you know, this is like the standard everywhere.

You're putting in these barely open encasement windows. Yeah. I mean, I think insurance might be a big part of it because like I would guess. You see the same thing with like on high rises, outdoor catwalks and stuff. They used to have this idea of like streets in the sky and stuff. We've talked about this, but like nobody nobody wants to do that when a kid like jumps off the thing, right? And like falls 50, 50 stories, right?

So now you just have enclosed bullshit. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, sometimes maybe you just need to accept that sometimes a kid is going to fall off something, you know, stuff happens. Stuff happens. Yeah. So we'll get to another another big part, another big part of these buildings. This is actually this is a prefab five over one,

except it's actually a four over one. It's spiritually a five over one. Spiritually a five over one. Yes, I used to live very close to this building. So it's no secret that the walls on these buildings are kind of thin, right? Thick walls don't mean good insulation per se, right? I live in an old Victorian brick house, right? And it's, you know, when I was writing this, it was cold as hell in here.

Right now, it's OK. It's cold and hell is here right now. I'm dying. But these might also be I have covid. Who knows? Who knows? I have to help the podcast on my own. It's like that one slide where it was just me. Help. Help.

But these oriented strandboard walls can't be exposed. And so they need some additional insulation, right? So we considered extremely flammable cladding. Oh, boy. So the first thing you do is you throw on some house wrap. That's a vapor barrier, right? Then you pick your façade system, right? Sometimes folks go for brick or stone, but more frequently they go for

cheaper stuff, right? Metal sandwich panels, you know, sort of like on Granville. Sometimes they do regular old vinyl siding. And more and more commonly, they use a stucco like system called EIFS, which stands for Exterior Insulation Finishing System. Oh, God. Yes. I love it. EIFS was developed as part of a solution to one of the biggest problems in the construction industry, one of the most pressing ones,

which was how can we build a structure entirely out of oil? You know, this problem was partially solved with products like vinyl siding in the 1950s and of course, banning stuff like asbestos based materials really helped us along. But frustratingly, some builders were still choosing materials like stucco, brick and other non petroleum derived products. So EIFS was developed to compete with and replace them, right? And your EIFS systems are proprietary, so different manufacturers have different systems.

With the basic format is you have foam insulation board, which is made of plastic and it's covered with some kind of some kind of acrylic based stucco like material, right? It's not real stucco because real stucco is made out of stuff like plaster and stuff like that. This is 100 percent. Yes. That was the drop. Yeah, I was looking for it and I realized I had missed my moment and I was going to have to circle back around, bring the plastic back into. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Every time you say anything, I'm just going to drown it out. Try it, try it. Hi, Alice, I think you're so. Hi, Alice. Beautiful. So you can you can get this material. It's applied in like sheets, right? You can get it in a bunch of colors and textures, but the texture is mostly there, right?

And the color is mostly also there, right? So you see a building and the facade doesn't quite look like it's made of stucco and it doesn't look like metal. It looks like a uniform shade and texture of that, such as on this building. Yeah, it looks like a texturing error in a video game. It looks like the maps have not loaded properly. Yeah, that's that's EIFS. It's what I what I think of like a five of one with this

EIFS is what I think of when I say a building that is like that, capital L, capital T, like buildings that are just like that, that because it's just a newly built building and they just look like that. Yeah. And it's because of oil, which is cool. Yeah. So nowadays, you can have this EIFS texture to appear like brick even, even though it's actually made of oil, right? And your metal sandwich panel works similarly, like you have two pieces of very thin metal and then you have,

you know, plastic insulation and foam insulation in between, right? And one of the big problems with EIFS is that it doesn't breathe like other materials like brick or stone or something like that. If water gets in, it can't evaporate to the exterior in the same way, you know, brick or wood will allow. That's fine. We just don't let the water in. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, waterproofing is, as we know, a perfect science.

It's like you always say, not everything leaks. Yeah. So this was not initially well understood, right? A lot of early wood frame departments in the Vancouver area, especially in the 1990s, sort of they got water trapped behind the EIFS systems. And because engineered lumber is also not good with water, these buildings sort of turned to paper mache. And I thought the thing about engineering was that famously stuff doesn't leak. That's right. No, everything leaks.

I know. So folks, yeah, the water got in and compromised the glue holding the building together. And, you know, sort of, you know, everything started to sag and get moldy and nasty. You know, so, you know, all these, a lot of these buildings had to be substantially rebuilt and affected about 900 buildings. And the rebuilding is actually still ongoing to this day. This is known as the leaky condo crisis. So they mitigated this problem by adding drainage to EIFS systems.

Right. But yeah, we've mentioned on this podcast before, everything leaks. So a good idea when designing these facade systems is to minimize potential locations for leaks to start in the first place, right? Which is why I think we have to talk about the actual architecture of these buildings. Awesome. Yeah. You see what I mean? It's greeboard, right? Like, but it just has blocky shapes protruding from it.

It's sort of semi random that seem intentional, but sort of aren't really. Yeah. Hold on. I'll be right back. So he's dying. Oh, he's a hundred percent. Got the rona. He's he's dying. Mm hmm. Well, no, not long for this world. This is this veil of tears. Oh, boy. I'm just I'm just glad I get to say greebled. You know, it's a it's a fun thing to say.

You cut out there. Can you say that again? I said, I'm just glad that I got to say the word greebled. Yeah, before we had to end this podcast, because Roz has before, yeah, before before that. I haven't spoken for longer than like three minutes at a time, probably in about eight days. Fair enough. Yeah. So, OK,

friend of the show, Kate Wagner did an article for Common Edge a while back about architectural moralism, right? Makes the point that, you know, aesthetics are secondary to economic and social concerns, right? You know, if these buildings looked good, they would still be bad, right? And I'll link that in the description, right? So, you know, and conversely, a building that looks bad, but does good is still good.

Oh, yeah, like this is this is something everyone likes to own each other online with criticism of this particular building, which is low income, senior housing, Seattle. So, you know, but if every five over one were dressed up to be a sort of solid, handsome brick building with a cornice and some flat arches over the windows, nice keystone and, you know, some nice materials and ornamented sidewalk level, you know, they'd still be these expensive luxury condos people complain about, right?

And there'd be still a crisis of housing affordability and massive financialization of the housing supply, gentrification, displacement, so on and so forth, right? Hmm. That doesn't mean you need to tolerate ugly buildings just that the critique shouldn't start an ended aesthetics, right? No, but. Or if it does, right, you don't pretend that you're doing anything

more serious than that, at least, you can just be like, hey, yo, that's an ugly ass building, but you don't have to, like, dress that criticism up as I think this says a lot about our society that this is an ugly ass building. Yes. But there's some practical consequences to some aesthetic choices in architecture. Alternatively, I think this says a lot about our society

that this is an ugly ass building. Yes. So you're sort of architectural vocabulary that the five of our ones draw from. I think greebling is a good word for it, actually. You know, yeah. In the context of EIFS and sandwich panel facades and structural systems, which are especially vulnerable

to water intrusion, you know, some of these some of these designs range from problematic to just outright stupid. So all right, let's start, I guess, by looking at. You know, the solid handsome brick building with a cornice and some flat arches over the windows with a nice keystone. And it's not on the sidewalk level, right? So this is this is New York City tenement, probably from, I don't know, 1880 to 1910 or so.

This is a load bearing masonry. It's probably has wood joists holding up the floors. It's got two materials for the wall, which is brick and some kind of stone. Right. These are breathable materials, right? If there's a torrential rainstorm, right? And the building is soaked down to the third wide of brick, the wide is like, you know, the each layer of brick horizontally, you know, it's going to dry out.

You're not going to have a lot of moisture trapped in there. But the other part of this is the architecture itself does work to keep moisture off the building, right? You go from top to bottom, right? So at the top, we got a flat roof. You can't see it here, because obviously we're at street level. Flat roof, bad. And I think flat roofs are a bad idea.

Where else are you going to keep the like 100 H vac units? In the front windows, as it turns out. So, you know, but since this is a narrow building with a simple shape, you only need to slope it in one direction. So we're not having opportunities for water to pool in weird places. We'll look at that in a second. You know, you have a cornice, right? Cornice looks nice.

It also serves a practical function. This overhang stops water from, you know, getting on the facade in the first place, you have a little bit of a dry area underneath. As you go down, you see this stone layer here. This is called a water table. This again drives water away from the facade. You know, we have some stuff like these these pediments here. They again shed water away from the windows,

which is where leaks are more likely to happen. Same with the flat arches. You get another water table down here, you know, down on the bottom. There's these some modern storefronts down here. I don't know whatever. You know, so these these some of these aesthetic choices, you know, they have a certain amount of practical applications, right? As far as, you know, we're going to keep these buildings.

It's a very sustainable building, even though it doesn't like have the fucking like weird curves and grass being grown on it and shit. Yeah, exactly. Like it was built once a hundred and forty years ago. Four times. Yeah, exactly, right? And, you know, it's a very simple shape overall. This basically, you know, there's this this end and this end protrude slightly. You got some brick coining in there.

You know, it's overall it's a relatively simple, you know, attractive handsome building, right? And that's not to say that, you know, this is a perfect building, right? Load bearing masonry has all kinds of problems that can get over time, especially with stuff like freeze thaw, you know, since water does get in there and then it freezes and then it likes to expand and it causes cracks and stuff. Sometimes things settle in a weird way. You know, stuff stuff gets old and it breaks.

You got to do maintenance and, you know, masonry again, masonry not perfect, but it does handle water fairly well. And when you're adding architectural details that draw to drive water away from the facade, you're, you know, you're only helping, right? You know, they also look pretty nice, right? But yeah, it's also not good in an earthquake. If we had like the East Coast, big one, which is a thing which can happen. This would not be a good place to be.

But let's compare this sort of to a. Capital capital capital T like that. Yeah. Well, this is this is a building in King of Prussia. This is a five over one. I don't know what you I don't know what you called. Alice called this greebling. I call it, you know, sort of random monkey cheese facade style.

Which is so common here. I truly hate these. I was. They started to go up, but they just they are idiots to look at. They're expensive to live in, which I think is probably the worst part. And imagine like living in one of like these greebles, one of these individual protrusions. Well, it's one of those weird, like ex-urban sort of.

Town centers that developed the pressures a lot like that. Where, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, oh, you can, you know, but you still have to drive to the bar. So to drive to work is just the drive happens to be five minutes. So you're not actually like making anything better. Yeah. So it's all very frustrating way to approach the problem, I think. So what do we got here?

We got we got some metal sandwich panel. This is dark gray. We got metal sandwich panel. This is light gray. We've got blue vinyl siding here, right? We got blue metal sandwich panel. Different blue, yeah. Gray vinyl siding, right?

Different gray, yeah. We have this brick, which I suspect is real brick, not EIFS, just because of the soldier courses above the windows. What else do we have? The red and other blue vinyl siding in the middle, like a third shade of blue. That is actually a different shade of blue. Yeah, that's a good, good one. Good eye there.

I didn't see that. Yeah, I got three shades, three shades of gray, three shades of blue and a white. Yeah. Honestly, it looks like they just they went over to the architectural panel supplier and they're like, I don't know, just throw whatever you got on the truck. So, OK. Five Grover one. This is this is this is a relatively modern building.

So it presumably has, you know, drainage there behind the facade. But we got to sort of look at how many opportunities do we see on this building for water intrusion? Many. Lot of corners. Yes. Yes. A lot of gaps between panels, I assume. Lot of corners around windows. Yes. A lot of my favorite detail here is how the top two stories here are like sort of a bay window.

And then one isn't. But then they continue that down. You've got to you've got to break up those lines. You've got to add the architectural texture. Yeah, I don't know why, but you do. Because, like, if you're a young architect, right, and you're putting your name on something and the way that if you're a young architect, you're putting your name on stuff, it is like these kind of uninspiring,

like, oh, we're doing like Riverside, City Hub or whatever, is like building these. You don't want to sign your name on a box, right? You want to do something that says, hey, I can do stuff for the sake of doing stuff. But what you're doing is $150,000 to do this. An inexplicable set of two bay windows, one not bay window and two bay windows across four different kinds of paneling. To be clear, young architect here means someone who's 50 or 60 years old.

Yes, yes. That millennials don't get to design buildings. My goodness, no. So, OK, everywhere, everywhere on this building, you turn a quarter, you're adding complexity, potential for leaks. You're making the construction documents more complex, right? More potential points of confusion for contractors. So, you know, here, here in this weird bay window, all these weird bay windows,

every corner is somewhere it might leak. Everywhere you change facade materials is where it might leak, right? You know, we have lots of facade penetrations here. These are all dryer vents because everyone has to have in-unit laundry here. You know, no one wants to go down the hall to do laundry. You want to be in your apartment. Can you annotate in a grill against the bottom brick concourse here and just melt some of the siding off with it?

I'm actually going to put the grill right here near the metal panel. Yeah. Is. Oh, that's beautiful. Yeah. So, all right. So everywhere, there's a facade penetration for like dryer vents. You know, that's that's another place where it can leak.

We have this wonderful thing up here, which is a reverse roof slope. Yeah, to provide to provide enflade for the defenders of that building in the course of the revolution. Yeah, exactly. So what happens is when it rains, all the water goes right here, right? And then it just stays there. I mean, presumably if the if the if the roof slope is good, you know, it drains properly.

But one of the things about flat roofs is that the slope is not good. A lot of the specs are like for, I don't know, a quarter inch over, I don't know, three or four feet. You know, that's your that's your roof slope for drainage. And when the building settles slightly, suddenly all of that's irrelevant. So and then, of course, over here, we don't have like a cornice or overhang that might keep water off the facade. No, that mess was just just aesthetically that metal paneling is going to streak.

You see it in Glasgow at the time, because it rains all the time here. You just end up with the like dark streaks around all of the windows. Looks horrible. Also not great for the building. You know, the panels don't line up at the corners. Yeah, I there's there's there's a there's a lot of problems here with this building was designed as an act of war to over stimulate any person with OCD who walks near it. I'm a big fan of this window right here, where the material changes

in the middle of the window. Oh, fuck. Blue siding in the book. Fuck everything. Every like more granular detail I noticed about it is so more and more like frustrating. Look at how the window on the top left, right? You'd like to look how that doesn't match with all of the other ones on the left.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That is interesting, because there are lots of different types of windows here for reasons which I am not sure of. I just I did. Oh, God. I was like, looking at the brick line, it's just like, who, who? It does just change the number of stars. There's just randomly windows.

It's like the border between Iraq and what is it? Iraq and Jordan that they call Churchill's sneeze because it just like jumps a couple of hundred miles and what's otherwise a straight line. Oh, what an upsetting building. Yeah, it's it's definitely from from from a perspective of like where is this building going to have problems in the future? It's everywhere. So let's look at another one.

This is in Malvern, Pennsylvania. Oh, God. This is sort of one that's been designed to sort of look like a foe, like town square. I just want to listen to this. Yeah, this is the criticism I was making. I know someone who actually lives in this building. Nice. Really? No.

Main Street, USAS building. This is like a style center. Yeah, we talk about what we have here is we have building one, building two, building three, building four, building five, building six, building seven. Right. So it's designed. This one just collapses on its own a couple of hours after the planes fly into one and two. Oh, yeah.

Damn, Alice. Yeah, I said. What probably happened here is they came up with one design and someone at a community meeting complained the building was too big. So they decided, well, what if we make it look like, you know, seven smaller buildings? Well, it's actually all one big building. I was going to put a whole section here on the approvals process for these buildings, which also makes them look like shit.

But that was figured it would run too long. If we talk about what you simply have to do is absolute Stalinism. Just build the fucking project design tenements. Do that. Give me a Kristjofka. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'd go full style on this architecture. Make everything like this sort of exuberant, you know, classical neoclassicism. Yeah. But all right.

So, you know, someone probably said, I need to break up the box. They made it, you know, seven buildings instead of one building. So let's sort of look at like, what are the problems we see here? Number one is this is a gigantic flat roof, right? And look how big that is. You know, it's probably like, I don't know, an acre up here of roof that has water falling on it every time it rains, right? You know, this is not inherently a problem.

Except that, you know, because of the shape of the building, you need very complex roof slopes, right? Because one of the things these buildings do a lot is rather than be like a rectangle or something like that. You know, they have various corners and protrusions. They go in and out and everywhere, you know, all like this, right? And the parapet height is different. You know, all kinds of stuff is going on here.

There's all kinds of these extra protrusions through the roof membrane. Yeah, prebles. Everyone's got to have their own. This isn't even like aesthetic. This is just practical, functional. It's the roof, right? It's not like it's not like something which is designed to be pretty. It's supposed to be designed to be functional, but like because of the way

these buildings are organized, you wind up with something which is, you know, just full of all these, you know, just much more complex than it needs to be, right? And every time you add complexity, you make waterproofing more difficult, right? You know, this is why when these things have complex shapes, like, let's say, you know, we've got this sort of peaked roof here, which is shedding water down here. We have like the different parapet heights. We have, you know, we have bits that, especially around the back here, where stuff goes in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out.

That's for the facade, right? And also, we have to talk about the most oppressed community here. City Skylines modelers. This is fucking impossible to me. All right, I would not want to do this building in City Skylines. There's too many. There's too many elements here. Yeah, yeah, like multiple different kinds of brick here.

We have multiple different kinds of it's it's it's bizarre. This is one of those assets that you like install and then you're like, wait a second, why does this take four hours to start now? Why is why is this a why is this a five hundred megabyte asset? Model of brakes, baby. Model of brakes, baby. Which in the City Skylines case is one mod. Yes.

But yeah, especially the thing is a lot of this complexity is the sort of the back of the house area back here that faces the railroad tracks. A lot of technical complexity in this building that I don't think adds much aesthetically, you know, sort of like McMansions and the roof line, right? You know, where, you know, they make the most complex roof line possible. And all it really does is add more opportunities for the damn thing to leak. The other common trope in these buildings is what I call protruding big box, right?

Yes, like this, but it's not a balcony. It's just there. Like, you recess a whole sway of the building. And sometimes sometimes this goes out farther than this, you know. And again, this is just another place where you're going to have water pooling against the side of the facade and it's going to sit there and it's going to find a way underneath the facade materials given enough time. Right.

And of course, you have another another favorite, which is these sunshades that don't do anything. So, you know, those are these are more opportunities for leaks. And leaks are bad in these buildings. Oh, oh, fuck me, that's terrible. This is a older sort of woodframed building, right? A lot of the sort of 90s ones looked like this. This was the promise of the Clinton administration.

This in the previous one are in West Falls Church, sort of Merrifield, Virginia. When you have balconies, right? People like to, you know, personalize them, right? Sure. They put some plants out there. They put some put some tile down, maybe, you know, they'd like, you know, they make it make it kind of their space. And, you know, the thing is, not all these people are professional builders, right?

Should have stuck to what I did when I had a balcony last, which was just smoke, so many cigarettes that like the entire wood flooring changed color ambiently. So, OK, here's a here's a here's an anecdote, right? I worked on a building in South Philly. It was about eight years old. It had been built on the site of a demolished Art Deco hospital. It was a wood frame department building, right?

And someone had installed tile on their balcony, right? And this tile was indoor tile, right? So, you know, it wasn't like outdoor tile that like breathes, you know, it was indoor tile that traps water underneath, right? So the water seeped through the tile got trapped underneath against the waterproofing membrane and just stayed there, right? Until eventually it found a way through the waterproofing membrane seeped into the engineered lumber in the balcony.

And then it sort of traveled back into the building into the laminated veneer lumber and all the stuff holding the building up, right? So, you know, when these a bunch of folks, balconies like below them started to feel like paper mache, you know, they called the property manager and property manager came out and said, oh, that's probably not good. Let's get an engineer to look at it. So we came in and we looked at it and we're like, hmm. Yeah, you're you the whole front of this building has to come off and be rebuilt.

It's an eight year old building. Stick to the cigarette thing, Jesus. Yeah. So, you know, with these these buildings, if they leak, they go to shit real fast if you let them. And so, hmm. So if there's one lesson to draw from this, it's that a quick and easy way to obtain revenge on your landlord is before you move out of one of these buildings, just lay a bunch of indoor tile on your balcony.

Yeah. So. The other thing is, like with these materials, I mean, you don't necessarily, you know, it's best to keep it simple, but, you know, you don't necessarily get a good looking building if you keep it simple. Well, yeah, that's a parking garage. Yeah, it is. This is this is I used to live in this apartment here.

It was good. Like the top two floors of this house. And they put there. There were two more of these sets of Victorian twins that they demolished to put these guys up. These developers are very nasty to us. Very nasty. Offer what? They threatened us for a fucking university realty forever.

I always hope your van goes off the road, Bubby. I said, Bubby there. I went to say, buddy, you're Bob. Boobla, I hope your van goes off the road. That sounds like an interesting a Bubby, because I've not. One of the I will tell the story, probably in a bonus episode, one of these days, the story of university realty and the the. That's how they try to tear down my house.

Yeah, try to tear down our house. Yeah. So, you know, but for the moment, like the book stuff, Linda asked, man. The these materials don't lend themselves to, you know, achieving architectural distinction through, you know, simple design. You have to do this complex stuff, which is ultimately self-destructive to make a building that looks not like, I don't know, a board cube right here. Yeah, to create a building that looks like one of those posts that's like socialist architecture versus traditionalist architecture.

Rejected onto the great tradition. That's right. Yeah. Oh, God, you could get so many fucking likes if you just like grayscale this and said it was the Soviet Union. Yeah, honestly, yes. So, OK, I suppose one of the things we haven't really gone through here is what are the arguments for these buildings? Right. What's the argument for the five over one?

Yeah, well, putting on my yimby hat, build everything all the time. Yeah, that's right. I don't care what it is. I don't care about the like the the the quality or the characteristics of it. I simply want more housing, whatever the cost, the affordability or the like occupancy rate of that housing does not bother me. I want there to be more housing.

I want to see more houses. Right. Yeah. I mean, if you're if you're a yimby, you're an urbanist, you like cities. You think more people should be able to live in them, right? You think, you know, cities should be made for people in that car. You like public transportation, pedestrianized streets, bikes, so on and so forth. You don't like inefficient land uses, which don't further those goals, right? You know, so like parking lots, car infrastructure, single family, detached houses,

stuff like that. You know, you recognize there's some crisis of affordability and housing and that constructing more housing will alleviate that. You know, some people believe that some people don't, right? What's the fastest way of constructing more housing? It's building these five over once, right? They go up very, very quickly. You know, and stuff like climate change and living in cities means you

have a lower carbon footprint because, theoretically, you're not driving a giant SUV 60 miles each day to go to work. You know, and I think a lot of that I agree with. Yeah, except for like Liam's King of Pressure criticism, which is that, OK, you're not driving the SUV 60 miles, but you're still driving at five. These are the same people who didn't want the the high speed line extension of King of Pressure. You know, in the case where it would actually make it make sense

where if you had one of these buildings near the proposed high speed line stations, you could commute in and out of the city easily without using your car. But that's not that that's not the goal here. The goal is just more auto oriented infrastructure, which is bullshit. And, you know, they didn't exactly tear down. They didn't tear down a gas station to put up that hideous five over one where we live. There was a perfectly good apartment building, which they then tore down and replaced it with 15 apartments.

So maybe adding some, but then also adding an entire parking garage, which it knows has made more car friendly, which it absolutely did. That's like the fact that you're two blocks away from an Elstop. Yeah, exactly. You know, you had a free shuttle van service to University of Pennsylvania, which was literally on the next block. So, you know, if it's something if all these buildings were being built, you know, in sort of to replace like auto oriented infrastructure,

like if the big parking lot and the two gas stations in my neighborhood got replaced by apartments, I wouldn't I wouldn't be mad about. I would, you know, I know you would be. Yeah, you know, listen, so. But what's actually happening? I showed a bunch of five over one today and most of them were in places like West Falls Church, King of Pressure, places like that, way out in the burbs. You know, and they're all, as Liam said, very auto oriented, right?

Urban ones, I showed, you know, there was one in West Philly. Again, that one has the parking garage. And, you know, these five over ones, you know, they have to conform to local codes. And a lot of times they're combined with my other least favorite type of structure, the precast parking garage, which you can see here in the middle of this building. This is a special kind of five over one called the Texas Donut. Delicious. Yes. Called the Texas Donut because it's a building wrapped around a precast parking garage.

Precast parking garages are all going to fall down in the next two decades ago. Yeah. Why? Why so? So there's all right. So parking garages are subject to different conditions than most other buildings because they have no HVAC, right? So they they experience more extreme freeze law. If you're on the East Coast where there's snow, they get road salt in them too. That corrodes the it sort of makes the concrete decay more quickly, right?

And a lot of times the contractors cheaped out when constructing them. They like to avoid stuff like doing grouting where they're supposed to. So there's water in places where there shouldn't be water and stuff like that. They are especially the first generation of precast garages are maintenance nightmares. They were some of our along with the five over ones. They were bread and butter back when I worked at the structural restoration place. Just trying to imagine the worst possible building.

And I'm just coming up with putting down an indoor tile in a freecast parking garage. Yeah. No. So. You know, what you're seeing here is a Texas donut in a place called Uptown, Houston. I don't know why they call it Uptown, because, you know, I figure that'd be north of Houston, but this is west of Houston, right? Fuck, Texas.

Bunch of skyscrapers and stuff like that. So it's very urbanized, but there was essentially no public transportation out here until very recently. You can see them building bus rapid transit here in a corner. But yeah, a lot of these buildings are being built sort of in the service of creating very car-oriented neighborhoods, you know, dense car-oriented neighborhoods, but still very car-oriented neighborhoods, right? You don't you don't get you don't get urbanism just by building dense housing.

You know, you're not going to you're not going to suddenly, you know, build by putting a bunch of apartments in like Tyson's corner. You're not going to Tyson's corner. You're not going to suddenly turn it into a beautiful Tuscan village. Urban, yeah, just the urban utopia, yeah. Yeah. It's just still going to be Goddamn Fairfax County, the worst place in the world. Aesthetics of urban life, but you don't have the substance.

That's exactly right. And yeah, I talked and I've talked to you about this, about apartments that have gone up in Philly, where, you know, they have a private street. They have this private courtyard and sort of my perspective is why would you live there when you clearly just want to live in the suburbs? Yeah, that's not a five over one, but it's it's sort of the same thing. Is that like, you know, you want to have the trappings of city life, but then you want to just be able to go back to your, you know,

centrally cool department in your weird car suburb and be able to drive the whatever, not even a half a mile to the grocery store. I think it's really cool. Decentrally cool. Decentrally cool. I was thinking about the apartment. Yeah. Well, all right. And then continue to live your pathetic, miserable life and cosplay as an eagle span when you feel brave enough to go to the link once every three months.

I think you can go to the link once every three months. Not anymore. Susan isn't that long. Now you could. Yeah. Well, there you go. It's exactly three games a year. Well, when they if and when this god damn thing is ever open, opened up, we should go to an Eagles game and then we get, I don't know,

live stream from there. We'll bring Alice. Yes. Alice, get your passport. And, you know, the other thing is like, it's not just a code that requires parking. Like a lot of times, you know, an auto oriented design, like a lot of times the banks who finance these buildings really like to see some parking in there, you know, not not everything is like driven by zoning codes.

I mean, finance plays a huge part in how these buildings look. But I think the big one really here is, you know, what really regulates the appearance of these buildings and how they're constructed, the economics, right? You know, they say a good architecture responds to its context, right? Bad architecture also responds to its context. Absolutely. Here is economic, right? You know, these buildings are only possible

because of the widespread availability of very cheap fossil fuels and oil, right? And because of the widespread availability of very cheap oil, these are almost the only buildings possible. We're back to Drake's Milligan. It leads naturally from a like a wood building to a wood building made of oil. From a wood building that produces oil to a wood building that stores oil. You know, a wood building that's mostly been pumped out of the ground in Saudi Arabia and shipped over here on oil tankers,

then reconstituted in chemical plants to do a wide variety of materials than assembled into a building, right? And one of the reasons why these buildings look the same everywhere is because they all come from the same place. So, you know, and I guess that's very, you know, these these fiber ones that are made of oil, they're I think a lot of them are going to go bad very quickly. They have inefficient, you know, mechanical systems. Most of them are very auto oriented.

They're not particularly fireproof, right? They they accomplish very little of the positive effects they're purported to have. And, you know, I guess the question here is, how do we get rid of them? And what's going to replace the catch fire very easily when they're under construction? You know, a huge amount of our built environment is created from cheap oil and fossil fuels. It's everything from structural cladding and like stuff like the flat pack furniture you get from IKEA upholstery and plastics in the private automobile.

The asphalt that makes up your street, you know, if we have some future economy where cheap fossil fuels are not the norm, you got to build different buildings, right? Which means we don't have so much engineered lumber or EIFS or sandwich panel or vinyl siding or plastic roof membranes and probably a lot less concrete and steel, too. You know, and I'm not I'm not the I'm not the the traditional architecture guy here, right? I'm not like I'm not Nathan J. Robinson. You know, we're mid-Atlantic accent guys, not trans-Atlantic accent guys. Yeah. And we're not we're not going to tell you that you have to build like a flagstone church.

But yeah, if you if you do, you do have to like if we're going to make the planet not like boil at some point within the next 10 years, maybe less, we're going to have to drastically change the way that we're living and building. Yeah. And you're going to need to use more local materials, more stuff like brick, wood, stone, rammed earth, whatever you're going to build, you know, wind up building buildings the way they did before they had cheap oil. And you know, I think as a result, a lot of those buildings will look and feel like older buildings do. You know, so this is an example sort of this is from a design firm in Charleston called Bevan and Liberados, right? And they sort of show how

you know what the what the codes and what the economics currently allow, which is this large Texas doughnut style, five over one building, and sort of it, which is very legal to build in Charleston right now. And what a similar density of apartments and housing units would look like if it were built with more traditional methods and, you know, more traditional amounts of parking, right, which is just like more of Charleston, South Carolina, right. And of course, this is highly illegal. Yes. I was joking, but it literally, yeah, okay, cool. Now, this subdivision is highly illegal. I do not have a permit to build this, this has in which matches the fabric of the neighborhood.

Yeah, you need to you need to create sort of an economy where it makes sense to build that or more illegalist architects who are just going to throw this shit at you. Exactly. Korea architecture. Yeah, and it's also not like these these buildings are going to be necessarily historicist in style. I mean, you know, let's let's look at the darling of the left, the neo-Andean architecture of El Alto.

Looks cool as hell. Does look like it gets a lot of notes, gets a lot of likes and retweets. Yes. These are from an architect named Freddie Mamani. They're in El Alto in Bolivia. These are mostly, so they're sort of McMansions. Oh boy. Sort of. Yeah, you can sort of, okay. So these were, this is a style he developed after the architect Freddie Mamani was dissatisfied with what he architecture school could teach him because it was all Western styles or sort of European styles.

This ultimately brought him a lot of success developing these mini mansions for this sort of class of Amara, Imara, indigenous Nouveau-Riche people. This sort of developed under Evo Morales, a social democracy strikes again. So a lot of these, most of these buildings are sort of like the first floor is commercial. The second two floors are sort of like a ballroom for social functions for the owner of the building. Usually the next floor or two floors are apartments, which are either rented out or for family. And then the top couple floors, that's sort of like a mini mansion for the owner. Did we just cancel Evo Morales?

Yeah, we did. Shit. Shit. No, I only respect socialists from the global North actually. So they're sort of big mansion-y, right? But the thing is, despite the fact, these are things with highly interesting and innovative design, which reflects like indigenous traditions, they are ultimately built the same as every other structure in El Alto, right? Which is, you can see right here from the party wall, this is built out of terracotta block and a concrete frame. So, you know, even I don't know what the term is for this is, it's very common in

the developing world, the sort of terracotta block concrete frame building. You notice that there's no plastics being used here. That we know of? That we know of. Yeah, I have no idea what the facade's made out of. I was thinking it might be plaster or stucco or something, but I have no idea. But you know, you're building with more traditional, more local materials, it doesn't have to look like traditional art. Yeah, you can actually get creative with this. The store of your architectural creativity is not to be pumped out of the ground in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to rely on Saudi Arabia for all your building materials.

I think that's what hopefully our future looks like. I mean, more likely it looks like, I don't know, sort of radioactive climate change hellscape, but we can hope. But it's nice to hope. Yeah, exactly. Hold on, give me one second. I'm starting to leave in so much today. I'll be right back. It's fine. We'll just go fuck ourselves. I mean, how's it going? I still have not eaten. Soon I will be forced to resort to cannibalism. I'm going to make a little Rosberino. Well, I mean, you're going to have to commute now, now that you don't you don't share a house. That's a shame. I love the people who are like, wait, Liam moved out because I just kind of didn't tell anyone that I was doing that. I was

moving with my girlfriend and Megan. I don't know. I think it was kind of like the podcast brand for a while that it was like these two guys who like share a house and also Alice, you know? Yes. Although I always I always thought it was Ros and Alice and then also me, apparently the dumb frat boy who keeps interrupting, which like, hey, the people want what they want. I would put that on a shirt. What the people want is Liam. It's just a picture of my face. And then for April Fool's Day, we can have gag ones and say what the people want is Alice. That's still a picture of my face. And what the people want is Liam. It's a picture of your face. Like that gag. Yeah, I like the love. I'll be Ross. Yeah. Oh, man. When are we going to get

shirts figured out? That's my question. Oh, oh, oh, Alice. Do I have news for you? You do. But you have to wait till the end for the announcement. Oh, fuck. Okay. You got it. God damn it, Alice. What happened? She doesn't respect the timing of the announcements. That's right. I don't respect that. That's all. Which announcements? God damn it, dude. You have announcements at the end. You would know that if you did, if you weren't dying of the road. I don't know. I feel pretty good right now. Oh, let's fix that. The other thing I wanted to say about these buildings before we end is I did say it's part of these are sort of Nuvo Reesh mini mansions. The other thing is these buildings are very cheap to

put up. Anyway, I mean, it's El Alto, Nuvo Reesh, right? So I've heard that, like, for a building this size, it's about $500,000 US dollars for some equivalent. I know. All right. That's cheaper than some row houses in South Philly. So anyway, we have a section on this podcast called Safety Third. Thank you. I was waiting. Thank you for waiting. I was scrolling. I was going through alphabetically. I was like, well, I can't play the Seinfeld theme just because it's closer to where I'm in the position. I don't want to be like we have a segment on this podcast that we call Safety Third. Oh, some of these get pretty fucking surreal. I will say that. Yeah. All right. So this, today we have a Safety Third from Alaska. Yes. Yes. All right. So

I work in a small fishing village in Southwest Bristol Bay way up in Alaska during the summer. It's a commercial set net fishing job. And as such, it carries with it an expected amount of danger, right? Sleep deprivation for multiple weeks on end, combined with motor vehicles and skiffs, as well as larger vessels, means anything can happen. However, problems can be exasperated when you have a shitty boss. You say exasperated? I said exasperated, but they spelled it exasperated. I guess this is one of the problems that could be exasperated. Yes. What you've done now, Alice, is you've made our other circles and contributed the

story embarrassed because I had to point out your typo. I'm sorry. If this is your story, I apologize for embarrassing you. So anyway, now that we're never going to get a Safety Third because I'm just going to make fun of your writing. I don't know. I think some people might actually submit more. Submit more of them with worse typos to make Alice mad. Good, good, good. So we have these two fuel tanks that will serve us the whole season. Couldn't find the pictures. One is a 500-gallon Greer, and the other was a 150-gallon tank, right? Greer is a manufacturer who remakes tanks. So they sit on these wooden cradles, which in turn sit on a mound of earth, which means they can use gravity to fill up gas cans,

wheelers, so on and so forth. There's no road or rail out here, so everything is either flown in or shipped in, right? The fuel barge comes a couple times a year, and if you miss it, you're fucked. The way we get these refueled is by using a Volvo front loader to hook in the eye on the top of these tanks and place them either on the bed of a Ford F350 or a trailer to be towed by a tractor, right? They're taken a few miles down to the beach where the fuel barge goes in, they get filled up, and they get put back in the cradles afterwards, right? Now, the 500-gallon tank is for gasoline, but that's not what this story is about. Previously, a 150-gallon tank had been used to store the diesel for the summer. However,

the boss decided he needed a 500-gallon tank for this, despite only two vehicles on the site using diesel. Man just loves diesel. Yeah, I know, right? The problem lies, you know, these refined fossil fuels like diesel and gasoline are notable for never going bad or turning into varnish or anything like that, right? The problem lies where he got this new tank, right? He found an abandoned tank topside down, it's the side, it's the side with the eye loop on it, that's important, right? And he had us dig it out. Jesus! This tank had been sitting for who knows how long outside on the Alaskan coast with no protection from the salty air or winter storms. Fast forward to a bit when we were putting her in the cradle, right? There was a piece of two-inch rope

from the eye up onto a fork of the loader. This was the only thing holding the tank. The tank was not entirely full, but still around 400 gallons of diesel, you know, equivalent to about 2,000 pounds or a ton of diesel, right? Crewmen are standing on either side of the tank as it's being lowered, pushing and twisting, it's a little seat properly onto the cradle. I should also mention that this was being done at 1 a.m. and there was a rainstorm on the way. Cool. Yeah. So there had been several creaking noises from the top of the tank earlier, but no one gave a shit because it was cold and we were tired. Okay.

As we were lowering it into position, there was a loud snap and the tank fell from about a foot up and landed in the cradle. If it had not been built properly or it fell outside a little, me and at least three other people would have been immediately flattened. Holy shit. What happened was that the eye on top had broken at one end, releasing the tank in not the way we wanted to at all. Not ideal. Yeah. Why was decided that an old rusted piece of shit was the best option or why an upgrade was ever needed astounds me, but it wouldn't be the first time my boss has almost killed multiple people at once. You know, I've seen him shoot at, almost run over, almost ram with a boat and give

bleached water to dozens at this point. Oh, hell yeah. Why is your boss shooting at people? Yeah, it's Alaska, man. Things happen. I know. Is your boss like some dark triad shit going on here? Can we stage some kind of intervention Blair Mountain style? We could try. We just got to get to the last step. Well, we're planning a live show in Juneau. Yeah, exactly. We're going to go to like, what's it? Shit. You're like Dead Horse or something. Go way up there. If you want to see the live show, you got to work for it. You go up the gnome.

Tickets are free, but you have to prove you traveled over land to get there. That was good. That was a good one. I want more safety thirds from like extreme. Yes, please be a hot one. If you've worked in like, I don't know, we got some go foil stories. El Salvador, although that's just depressing. I was out picking crops and it was so hot and so humid that sweat made me hotter. That's depressing. Next episode is on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster. That's right. Oh, thank goodness.

Yes. And you don't have any commercials before we go. Shirts next week. Shirts. We are recording this on Black Friday. I have emailed Union Pete. We have been in contact. He's got to put the pieces together. We should be good next week. Hell. So we have the one design. Yes. Finally. We don't know about pricing yet. I don't know if it'll be live by the time the story goes up or what, but we will do our best to communicate that information to you when we have it. Be aware of the existence of shirts imminently. Yes. Yes. Be aware. And once again, Pennsylvania Secret Service ID cards. I am printing them.

I will print them for you. I will mail them to you. It is pay what you want. The way that you order one is you DM me on Twitter. I'm DMing the goddamn podcast account. And you DM me, Alice Aversandum on Twitter with the name and image you want on the card doesn't have to be yours. And the shipping address. And I will print it when I get to it. What you do not do is DM me with yes. Give me the details so I don't have to ask you. It fucks with my workflow. You hogs. Other things which do not work are email, Patreon message, YouTube comment, carry your pigeon. Yeah. God almighty please people. Just DM me with what you want on the card. I will print the card if I have not gotten back to you in a few weeks. DM me again and be like,

yo, fix it and I will fix it probably. Oh, if you can get a carrier pigeon to go to Alice's house, I mean, you know, that would be pretty impressive. But, you know, if the message that is carrying is outside one day and there's going to be a billboard that someone has commissioned that simply says the pencil very secret service cards are available. Yes, they are. Do not buy a billboard. You don't need to buy a billboard. You can just thank you. All right. We good. I think we're good. I'm going to go eat. The next bonus episode will be about group B rally sports. Yes. Yes. Can't wait for that. Yeah, it's going to be fun.

Okay, we got to record that soon. Yeah. I don't know what a good time is. We'll figure that out after we end the episode. Yes. Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye, everyone.