*This comic was about France in 2021, but this style seems much more widespread.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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This is dictated by cost and the desire to insulate. It's possible to build well insulated buildings that look traditional, but it's going to cost more and it's not going to improve the quality of living inside the house.
Flat rectangular insulation panels with plaster on top placed on large flat surfaces -vs- irregularly shaped insulation with a cavity and a bespoke brick façade. Just the bricks alone, so without the labour, is going to cost about the same as the finished plaster. In the long term brick and a sloped roof should require less frequent renovations, but I doubt that it would ever offset the higher initial cost.
You can stick a fancy facade on basically any wall construction to make it look like an old-half timbered style, or brick, or stone, etc.
But trying to actually build an old brick/stone/plaster and timber monstrosity today wouldn't be smart. Insulation, moisture control, energy efficiency, and even creature comforts like wifi signal penetration are all miles better with newer construction methods.
I agree the architecture is boring, but again, it doesn't have to look this way. However, I think most people would rather have the soulless gray box than have uncontrollable mold spreading across their walls unless they leave the windows open in winter.
Exactly, the vernacular of the past was based on the materials that were available and practical at the time, for the demands of the time. Whatever came out was just the practical way to build under these conditions, not necessarily a choice.
In that sense, the rectangular box IS the vernacular of our time. Practical materials that fulfill the needs people have to present-day homes. Straight walls, insulation, energy efficiency. Of course you can plaster on a fake facade but it's a choice, not a consequence.
In Australia, you can get the soulless grey box with shit insulation and mold problems, so it's twice as good! /s
You mean soulful mold?
Yep, I've lived in old buildings most of my life (very german predilection for the "Altbau" I guess) and I'm not sure whether people are aware how much energy it costs.
I love 3.5m ceilings and 2.5m high windows, I love thick walls made from solid stone, that's how I grew up, in a rented place in a wonderful turn-of the century building. ... it's not even expensive to rent compared to where I live now. But heating alone costs enough that it could pay for a single room somewhere else. And given that the walls are thick, but not insulated, you have to make sure you heat it, make sure you don't put things too close to the wall, otherwise you might have to battle moisture and moldy walls. In fact, if the windows insulate too well it might even be a drawback because the moisture can't escape, and you have to air the rooms (the very german habit of "Stoßlüften") frequently to not get mold.
The rectengular zero-energy buildings of today, you probably don't need to heat much. Friends of mine used to live in a building like that. Well insulated, three-pane windows, all that. They barely had to turn the heat on in the middle of winter. Body heat, residual heat from cooking and what not, it's practically enough to keep the place warm.
I live in the Philadelphia area and a lot of the row houses here dating to a century or more ago have absolutely beautiful brickwork, incredibly creative and interesting stuff, often on houses that these days barely sell for $100K. It would be completely impossible to duplicate this kind of thing today even with a construction budget of millions. The craftsmen who can do that kind of work are nonexistent now -- today you're lucky to find somebody who can lay bricks in a straight line.
Yeah, I'm looking into insulating my 100+ year old house, and it might mean the stones on the base need to be flattened and covered up. The windows and some of the doors are now plastic, since the previous ones (that were already not the original) were water damaged, which somehow involved the indoor doors too.
Covering up can't be avoided unless you want to insulate on the inside. And insulating on the inside is a real pita to do right, so covering up it will be :) It's a shame to lose the old stone + brick look, but energy wise we must.
Flattening the outside might not be necessary if you've got local contractors who can do carpentry + flexible insulation solutions. See the first option for an example: https://www.eurabo.be/nl/updates/buitenmuren-isoleren-langs-buiten In Dutch because I don't know the terminology to find something like this in English.
Unless you build the house to last 200 years, with occasional maintenance. No drywall monstrosity will survive that long.
Is that good though? In Japan they build houses with the expectation that they’re only going to last one generation and then will be rebuilt, and the result is that housing is actually affordable because there isn’t nearly as much speculative investing in housing driving up house prices.
That's a great point. Alternative is that once you build enough housing (admittedly that would take some doing to redo everything, best bet is slow replacement) you wouldn't really need that large industry to begin with. You just have houses everywhere that are good and you build a few here or there to replace accidental damage or the slow turnover of old ones.
Idk if that's possible. Humans never did it before.
I'd think it was always quite expensive to build like that, and what we see today is what survived. A lot of (european) vernacular architecture is just ... not that.
In fact I'd think the "old" houses in the comic, would need constant maintenance. Paint the wooden windows, make sure they don't distort, a new roof every 20-30 years. The places you see in a deserted italian, french or spanish village might have been uninhabited for a few decades, and are basically ruins.
It's true. But also could be less true. With our modern tech, we could build like they did back then, but much better. If we built for longevity. But we won't.