I tip my hat to inventors and innovators who continuously look for ways to make things better. There is always room for improvement, but there are plenty of instances of movements or specific products introduced to market that were “better” than the one that came before, only to be put back in their place over time. This goes well beyond New Coke, too. Gardening has seen resurgence with a whole new generation of people whose parents shopped for produce, brought in from all around the world, at grocery stores, but whose grandparents picked what was in season from their back yards. Today’s grocery stores tout aisles in their produce sections of locally-grown produce, often even naming the farms from which things come, bringing back that close to home, seasonal feel.
The built environment has gone away from and come back to operable windows. Once upon a time, they were the only way to cool an interior space, and then there were decades when it was thought best to mechanically regulate interior air and windows were for “looking only.” That has changes again and operable windows are back in good graces.
That’s not all though.
In his article “Old Buildings Combine Sustainability, Preservation”, John McKinney for Miller-McCune references US Department of Energy research on the energy performance of existing buildings, which “ascertained that commercial buildings constructed before 1920 use less energy per square foot than buildings from any other period of time except after 2000. Older buildings, it seems, were constructed with high thermal mass, passive heating and cooling. And, obviously, were built to last.”
Really?
Guess what materials were used to construct buildings before 1920. Masonry. Multiwythe masonry. Multiwythe masonry that was designed to account for natural elements like temperature changes and rain, yet still provide effective and efficient structure and enclosure.
Today, the guts of a masonry wall have changed to reflect technological advancements and the walls still benefit from the same added value as pre-1920: high thermal mass, passive heating and cooling capability and long life. Today they aren’t ultrathick, rather engineered to be only about 16”, not 6’ like Chicago’s Monadnock Building. And they’re even more energy efficient, thanks to revolutionary products like insulation, which wasn’t even invented and used until closer to the mid-20th Century.
The beauty of masonry is so much more than its beauty. It is its added value. In the current issue of MasonryEdge/theStoryPole, masonry’s added value abounds. Its fire safeness, especially for stairwells. Its durability and long-life were the reason it was chosen for two featured university residence hall projects and the reason an AIA chapter has its office in a 150 year-old urban residence. Its ability to reduce the number of materials required for a job provided the added value to the budget and schedule of several new Detroit Public Schools.
In the next issue, we’ll take a look at how thermal mass is considered in determining a building’s Effective R-value. Energy efficiency isn’t about achieving a single number; it’s about performance. Masonry performs.
The building community relied on and trusted masonry once. There are a lot of reasons why it’s time they should be again.
