Why is mold more prevalent today?

(The following is Part Five in a seven-part series on the growing rate of mold detection, remediation projects and litigation in the US presented by the experts at the Environmental Health services group at LZA Technology, a division of The Thornton-Tomasetti Group.)

Since we know why things go wrong in buildings, why don't we build them correctly?

One reason is that there is no unquestioned cultural body of knowledge that constitutes what is correct, as there was in historical times.

As a culture we put the wrong types of buildings in the wrong places, put the wrong components in them, build them of the wrong materials, and don't integrate the building with the environmental equipment.

This is not done with malice; it is done simply out of lack of knowledge, or a lack of ability to predict how a building will function.

But there are more difficult reasons why we don't build correctly. There are powerful pressures in the cultural environment today not to build correctly. One pressure is simply the resistance to the high cost of doing things right. Proper building costs more per square foot than incorrect building.

The right materials cost more, and sometimes more material is required to build it better, and more material costs more than less material. Skilled labor is more expensive than unskilled. Sometimes more skilled labor is required. It costs more to have the Architect properly design and observe the work during the construction. Low initial cost is a powerful incentive to those that are put ting product onto the market, and high long-term costs are no disincentive.

The second pressure is the cost of time. Proper building requires adequate time to design and adequate time to construct. It is profoundly true in the construction industry that time is money; the longer it takes to proceed from the first investment to recouping the investment, the lower the profit margin.

The third pressure is the current American cultural appeal of appearance and scale. Thorstein Veblen's commentary on conspicuous consumption is as relevant today as it was nearly a century ago. One need only contrast the buildings upon which modern "McMansions" are modeled to see that there is a cultural disconnect.

Historical homes are by today's standards extremely modest and small, even those of the wealthy and powerful. Visitors to Monticello or Mount Vernon are often struck by how "small" they seem.

Today's homes, with their great-rooms and walk-in closets and four-car garages and explosions of turrets, dormers and bay windows are bloated, overwrought and gargantuan by comparison. But the market naturally responds to the public demand by providing products that appeal to the public.

The combination of the three pressures of the cultural environment results in very large, poorly designed, quickly built and very poorly constructed homes. Many of the homes that have reported actual mold problems are just these; those that are built too quickly, built without care and built of cheap materials.

The design and construction is not informed by any ingrained cultural understanding of the function of their components. Wood is piled upon piles upon wood, and then stuffed with or wrapped in plastic in the hope that things will stay dry until the statute of limitation has run out.

Mold is the symptom of a failure of building to manage water properly. Buildings are not "catching" mold more today than in the past. Buildings are simply built so that they don't manage water properly.

Is There a Decreased Tolerance to the Presence of Mold?

Offering an opinion on this is highly speculative, but the answer appears to be yes. Not only are the ideal homes of today bloated, overwrought and gargantuan, they are also on the whole cleaner, and they even attempt to be antiseptic.

Part of this desire for hypoallergenic surroundings is in reaction to the fear of exposure to mold. The heightened awareness has lowered the level of mold that may be acceptable to the general public to a near zero-tolerance level that cannot be attained or maintained.

This antiseptic style is reflected in the designs that are routinely projected in the popular press. Home interior design magazines are filled with images such as sunlight-flooded rec-rooms with clean white walls, pink-checked children sprawled on the floor with a Labrador retriever, parents benignly looking on as they relax, maybe in a Jacuzzi surrounded by immaculate white carpeting. This is an ideal that exists virtually nowhere except on glossy pages.

Homes are not photo-shoots. They contain food, animals, dirt, human waste, water and dirty clothes. The model of the perfect home has been introduced to popular culture represented by these unattainable pictures of perfection. Yet despite the fact that at some level most people understand that life is not fairly represented in advertisements, the products that they represent are appealing. Introducing easily soiled surfaces such as white carpeting, sources of moisture such as Jacuzzis, and sources of spores such as dogs (and children) into the home only sets up a recipe for mold contamination. In response to this escalation of likelihood of mold, the market has responded with ever more effective anti-bacterial cleaners and scrubbers that promise to eradicate contamination.

These antimicrobial agents are necessary because certainly any contamination is going to be more evident if the standard against which a clean house is measured is an operating room. Houses have never been antiseptic. Healthy houses simply have an acceptably low level of contamination. A zero-tolerance position is simply unrealistic.

NEXT INSTALLMENT: "Why is There So Much Mold Litigation Today?"