A Comprehensive Taxonomy of Unfairly Maligned Building Materials
This story is part of Pretty Ugly, a package celebrating design that’s so bad, it’s good.
There are no absolutes when it comes to design. What was ugly yesterday is ugly-cool today, cool tomorrow, and played out the day after that. This can be seen as an exhausting cycle of trend-chasing, for the literal-minded, or as an opportunity, for the optimist. If there are no absolutes, and nothing is objectively "good," "bad," or "ugly," then a whole new world of possibilities opens up.
We may instinctively scoff at materials of past generations, but look, there was a reason they had their moments. Many have even had issues that hampered them in the past resolved, most notably in components that were hazardous to human or environmental health. Some of them were always kind of great, viewed through the right lens. Some are too utilitarian to be truly ugly, or the victims of being paired with historically maligned types of architecture, or were used in ways that masked their beauty.
(On the other hand, asbestos, while possessing many useful traits, is not redeemable as a building material. Sorry to asbestos. Maybe stop killing people and we’ll talk about your place on this list.)
So let’s get to the building materials and finishes that draw widespread ire!
Leave linoleum alone!
Linoleum is not vinyl flooring, and it is insulting to linoleum to conflate the two materials. Vinyl is a synthetic material made of plastic and derived from natural gas; it will basically never biodegrade, releases microplastics as it falls apart, and is rarely recycled. Linoleum, on the other hand, is crafted from linseed oil and, usually, cork or sawdust. It is flexible, water-resistant, and biodegradable, and available in a wide variety of patterns, thicknesses, and colors.
The difference between linoleum and vinyl is a bit like the difference between brewing a cup of coffee in a real coffee machine, whether that’s a drip cone, French press, or Mr. Coffee, and brewing a cup of coffee in a Keurig. Is vinyl (and Keurig) easy? Sure. But there are penalties for that. Linoleum requires more upkeep than vinyl, isn’t quite as waterproof or scratch-proof, and can be harder to find. But it’s also just better—better for the environment, with a more interesting history and more ethical production.
Drop ceilings can be okay...
Ah, the sterile desperation of the drop (or dropped) ceiling. Those off-white, oft-stained foam tiles. That damnable reduction in vertical space. The association with dentist’s offices and seemingly endless middle school math classes.
But the actual intention of the drop ceiling isn’t always so depressing. Drop ceilings are most commonly used to hide the guts of a building, like electrical cabling and heating or cooling ducts. They also, however, provide a host of unexpected benefits. Drop ceilings can serve as effective acoustic modifiers, dampening sound or providing a more precise audio environment. Speaking of the environment, drop ceilings can also be extremely effective at providing increased energy efficiency through the use of insulation, reducing the need to expensively heat and cool a room.
There are also many currently non-ugly types of drop ceiling! Some use inches rather than feet of space to maintain cubic footage, and many varieties, like stretch ceilings—architectural fabric that tucks neatly into a perimeter track—avoid that cursed grid of foam squares.
Formica is fabulous!
Artist Richard Artschwager once described formica as "the great ugly material, the horror of the age." He also used it in his work, where nobody could quite figure out whether, or how much, he was joking. Formica, a type of layered plastic, was invented in 1913 by a pair of American engineers who immediately quit their day jobs to take advantage of their new wonder-material. It’s most known, and probably most reviled, as an inexpensive surface for tables, bar tops, and, especially, countertops. It then showed up in countertops starting around the 1940s, and became ubiquitous in the midcentury houses we all love so much. But look, you can’t love midcentury without respecting what formica brought to the table (top).
Is it a useful material for countertops? Sure! It’s cheap, easy to install, and easy to clean. In that it is very susceptible to scratches and that it will burn and/or melt if hot pots are placed on it, well, yeah, that’s kind of an issue. But formica, created from layers of resin-soaked paper, is also beautiful, if its perfect unnaturality is embraced. It is entirely too smooth. Its colors can be too deep and regular. It attempts to disguise itself as wood, marble, or granite, while having exactly none of the qualities of those materials. It is a liar, a pariah, a pox. It is weird as hell, and that’s cool.
Popcorn ceilings... maybe?
Popcorn ceilings are so loathed that few new homeowners would even consider, upon being presented with its pointy, lumpy, stupid surface, allowing it to survive. Considering that the vast majority of popcorn ceilings before the passage of the Clean Air Act in the 1960s were made with our aforementioned enemy asbestos, sometimes that loathing is tempered with sensible fear. So why does it exist at all?
Popcorn ceilings are made by spraying irregular lumps of…something onto a ceiling, a wall, or any flat surface that could use some texture. In the wake of the asbestos ban, it was most commonly Styrofoam or some other kind of polystyrene, or sometimes paper or other wood products. They were designed to hide imperfections in the ceiling and to provide some sound-dampening effects. Given that they can now be applied safely, is there any way to make them non-ugly?
Sure! At least, if we move away from the traditional look of popcorn ceilings and broaden our search to all textured ceilings. There are ways to apply paint or drywall mud to a ceiling to give the appearance of stucco, or to add quirky sculptural patterns. Three-dimensional ceilings are a cool idea!
Wall-to-wall carpeting can work if you want it to
We are still in an era where "tearing up the carpets in the hopes that hardwood lies underneath" is a recurring trend in home renovations. This makes sense! Hardwood floors can be very nice. Old carpets can be dirty and unpleasant. We get it. But are we perhaps overlooking the extremely nice feeling of carpet on the toes? Are we discarding the sound-dampening effects, the wide range of textures and shags and colors, the affordability, and the possibility that vinyl flooring that looks like gray wood is a disgusting material that should never have existed in the first place? (Wood isn’t even gray. There is no gray wood. Are you suggesting with this gray wood pattern flooring that you have discovered a heretofore unknown species of tree?)
Carpet can provide a nice warm environment for cold feet. It can go over uneven materials and easily be evened out. It comes in whatever colors and textures you want. If you buy an ugly carpet, that’s on you, not on the entire concept of carpeting. Just get a nice carpet-cleaning vacuum and you’ll be in business—the business of basically ensuring that your floor wears its own socks.
Glass blocks aren’t ugly, they’re amazing!
Glass blocks are dope, sorry. They make you feel like you live inside an ice cube tray. If you think they’re ugly, you should look inward. Glass blocks, by the way, are very good at allowing you to look inward and also outward. Because they’re made of glass, which is a transparent material.
Hear us out... wood paneling!
Most associated with the 1970s, wood paneling could once be found on living room walls, on rec room ceilings, and on the sides of gigantic station wagons and primitive single-digit-per-gallon SUVs. The knock on wood paneling has long been that it creates a dark, depressing atmosphere, or that it is horrendously outdated.
At its core, though, we’re just talking about strips of wood on a wall. Wood paneling has actually become quite desirable; unlike, say, drywall, wood ages in a pleasing way and can be sustainably sourced or reused. There’s also no rule insisting all wood paneling must be dark; wood comes in many colors and shades, and can also be used as an accent wall if desired. What once was heavy and dark can instead be light and natural. Or it can be what it was in the 1970s: cozy, woodsy, and comfortable.
OSB is fine
Oriented strand board, or OSB, took over the crown of "wood that’s made from smaller wood" from plywood, and now significantly outsells plywood. Like many other materials, it’s maligned for being cheap, for being ugly, and, occasionally, for being unsafe. OSB is made by taking thin shavings of wood, aligning them in alternating directions for maximum strength, and coating them in resin.
OSB might be cheap, but it has some major benefits. Without the need for huge pieces of wood, OSB can be made from exceedingly fast-growing, small trees like aspen and poplar, which can be farmed in much more responsible ways than the old, slow-growing trees prized for their wood. The resin used in OSB has raised health concerns thanks to its formaldehyde, but, you know, there’s no reason why those resins can’t be updated. In fact you can find Forest Stewardship Council-approved OSB that forgoes formaldehyde in its resins.
OSB is also not necessarily ugly! It can in fact be striking in its combination of minimal (it’s just one material) and maximal (there’s a lot going on in that one material). Some designers have embraced OSB as not just an efficient and inexpensive material, but a beautiful one as well.
Recon-cinder these blocks...
Nobody will deny the utility of cinder blocks; the concrete cuboids are an essential part of construction house foundations, retaining walls, and other instances where you need something exceedingly heavy duty. As an aesthetic choice, cinder blocks have risen and fallen over the years; they’ve been embraced for their brutalist and industrial character, dismissed as dorm-room-like or state-park-bathroom-like, and used with wood planks as shelving by those who are almost, but not quite, handy.
As with other concrete, cinder blocks are created from a cement binder and some kind of particulate, typically sand and/or gravel. It’s ideally used in ways that embrace its strengths: sturdiness, texture, and angularity. It can be smooth, rough, or anywhere in between. It can be painted, though its heft is best felt when left in its natural gray. Using raw cinder blocks for, say, an interior wall isn’t for everyone, but in the right hands can be lovely.
Illustration by Kaitlin Brito
Related Reading:
17 Projects That Use "Ugly" Materials in Beautiful Ways
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