Cottage Cheese

In the 1960’s and 1970’s builders made use of a spray-on ceiling material often containing asbestos to dampen sound and cover up for shabby construction. Generally considered ugly, builders returned to more aesthetically pleasing ceiling covering techniques when asbestos was banned. Today, these ceilings are derisively known as “popcorn” or “cottage cheese” ceilings and are a definitive mark of economy construction from that era.

Around the time that this fell out of favor, US builders began to experiment with synthetic stucco treatments for the exteriors of buildings. Starting with commercial construction, by the mid-1980’s most residential construction was making the use of various hybrid compounds. Much like the spray-on cottage cheese ceilings of the earlier era, the synthetic stucco compounds were a cheap and economical way to cover up bland, unskilled craftsmanship.

Curiously, the surface texture chosen by virtually all synthetic stucco advocates is not at all different from the cottage cheese ceilings. It’s as though everybody decided that what was too ugly to have over our heads in every room of the apartment or house was perfectly fine to slather all over the exterior. Where smooth concrete or paneled siding would be appropriate, no such consideration is made - the sprayers do their work, covering every square inch of the outsides of our buildings with a rough crumbly material - the latest fad of which is to paint with garishly bright “happy” colors - oranges and yellows.

Because this material is designed to emulate something that it is not, the cumulative effect is that of turning our newest built environments into Disneyland - full of buildings “in the style of southwest adobe” or “in the style of Tudor cottages.” While there are builders and architects who understand the aesthetic limitations of stucco materials and are capable of creating beautiful buildings with them, most are content to define the lowest common denominator of housing construction.