Yeah, and again, I place most of the blame on the designers/architects, or rather the educational institutions for those trades. Hardly any programs include anything about building science for durability or human comfort. Even if the client appears not to care, the professionals should bring it up over and over.
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Indeed, 97F in May isn’t uncommon in this part of Alabama. Visited in May two separate years thinking “how bad could it possibly be in May?” It was stifling humid hot. 
So weird that twice this week BB has had threads in NE Alabama. If you’re traveling south on I-65, you get to this house at the exit after the one you need to get to Jasper (missing radio tower town). 
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Right-energy efficiency and thermal comfort are reasonable issues. I see glass-sided buildings here in Chicago that must be enormously expensive to thermally regulate and wonder why they were built that way, but I don’t carp about the aesthetics.
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I aspire to be a better person than I am, and to avoid complaining about things that might irritate or offend others.
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Heard.
Too bad more people in the world are not on that same mission.
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So I gather you’re not a fan/regular reader of McMansion Hell.
To each their own, eh?
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If you look at an Arts and Crafts home, or an old British country town, you’ll see a kind of concatenation of styles and features from various eras, but they gel as if they have grown into each other. In the case of the town it’s because they have. The Arts and Crafts home has been carefully designed.
A McMansion looks like someone ate a big pile of architecture mod board, jumped up and down until they projectile vomited, then took the dried spew for a plan.
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This is closer to the truth than you could ever imagine.
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Most people are not in the positon to employ architects to design their own homes. Homebuyers take what’s given to them. (Or, believing their houses to be an investment, feel obliged to consider the inanities of the “free market” over their gut.)
The rich, who can afford to have their houses handcrafted to their specifications, frequently destroy what has been built.
Ordinary mortals, hoever, can enjoy a bit of architectural snark, knowing that their choices aren’t backed up by enough capital to really matter.
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I enjoy the genuine old school details, preferably more than 100 years old.
I love seeing that door whenever we return home.
1910 Queen Anne
3704 14th St, Detroit. A few blocks from us. It sold for $170K three years ago, and will need more than twice as much to restore it to its former splendour. 6 BR, 3.5 bath; 3,332 sq ft.
Commonwealth St, Detroit
These three are all on Trumbull Ave; these and the one above are 2-4 blocks from us.
Former cop shop at Grand River Ave and Rosa Parks. We can see bits of it from the living room, front bedroom, and third floor of our home.
The architect was the same chap responsible for
The Hecker House on Woodward Ave.
The Heckers’ carriage house is pon the left hand side.
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The math building UC Berkeley (Evans Hall, I think) used to have a tragic reputation because quite a few students had unalived themselves by jumping from the top. In response, somebody put up stickers all over campus saying the building should jump off of itself.
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Reminds me…
Oh, I have former colleagues who worked on that. Self-cleaning roof tiles, using a photocatalytic coating.
Yeah, in case of the superhydrophobic coating it’s both microstructure and the ubiquitous detergents. I would need to ask the former colleagues what about the ceramic coating on the roof tiles, or the outdoor paint stuff. Generally, I would assume it’s a matter of cost/benefit analysis, since costs for the already established processes and products are way to low to compete against. However, I fully expect to see more and more real-world use cases for microstructured and physicochemically active surfaces, albeit in niche markets.
Just FTR, the whole Lotus effect stuff is really fascinating, because it is based on research in plant systematics, and is thus a classic by-products of basic research.
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That’s a great ambition. I aspire to be a better person than you are, too. 
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