Vanguard of Hipness

I can't say that I've got everyone in Brooklyn running out to buy the same glasses as I got or anything, but I do live in one banger of a trend-setting house. Refelect, for a moment, on the series of postings concerning the facade renewal effort of several weeks ago. I wondered if there were others out there who subscribed to this suspicious method of applying styrofoam sheet and molding to the side of a house, coating it with something like cement, and then painting it, to achieve a wanna-be stucco, living-in-the-Keys effect. Well, if they weren't before, they certainly are now. And I like to think that it was our pad that inspired several others on the block to give in to the pressure.

We decided that this particular facade treatment needed a nice name instead of "That Weird Coated-Styrofoam Shit." So, after riffing on the idea, journeying to the way-outersphere, then re-entering Earth's atmosphere, Adam and I arrived at our naturally entropic conclusion: Fucco. A simple mash-up of fake (or faux, if you roll that way) stucco. How much better can it get? Fucco: Occum's Razor in effect, yo.

Behold, the actual application of fucco to a building in our backyard, just across the way. Such followers, they. This is a great shot, because it reveals a couple different stages of fucco installation. On the right, we see the freshly-applied styrofoam sheeting. The chicken pox dots are plastic mesh things through which a nail is driven, similar to a drywall anchor. After these have been plopped into place, a thorough sanding of the styrofoam is required. The sanding process releases thousands of tiny particles into the air, which swirl around like gleeful, out-of-season snowflakes. After a while, the fucco flakes land on just about everything, hang around for a couple thousand years, and eventually break down into candy. (If you enlarge the picture, you can clearly see the virtual snowstorm. Consequently, our rear windowsills and screens are layered with little, staticky bits of fucco foam. Yum.) Each of the chicken pox must then be daubed with the concrete-ish stuff, and sanded down. On the left, you can see the next stage, which is a freshly-applied layer of concrete-ish stuff: the actual fucco itself! After drying, the fucco will be ready to receive paint. I've been told that it only takes certain colors: peachy, pinky, or yellowy pastels, maybe a sky blue or a lavender here and there.

By the end of the summer, I'm predicting that the entire block will have been fucco'd. I'm already looking for a palm tree to plant out front in the sidewalk, and may finally break down and buy a Jimmy Buffet record.