Building With Style: Techniques That Don’t Work

Building good buildings is hard enough without dealing with materials or techniques that just don’t work. Here are four that I feel work so rarely, or so poorly, that they should virtually never be used. Exterior Foundation Insulation While working on several statefunded housing projects, I was instructed to use exterior foundation insulation. Every installation was a problem, and I vowed never to use it again. There is no solution to the termite problem posed by exterior foundation insulation. Termites crawl through very small gaps, and you cannot create a reasonably priced, gap-free barrier at the top of a foundation. At best, the barrier forces the termites to tunnel around it. The mythical “maintenance personnel” that are supposed to see these tunnels won’t, since the tunnels