we are living at the nadir of flooring: an essay

This article has been updated to replace 'PVC' with the building trade term LVT -- luxury vinyl tile.

Make no mistake: the gray fake-wood floor is an architectural illness of epidemic proportions. If you browses Zillow on the reg, you can find a veritably endless expanse of greige plastic slop and other forms of insultingly ersatz timber, often branded under the term LVT - luxury vinyl tile. In a casual browse through houses for sale in the county where I grew up, I counted that seven of the ten top listings featured some form of artificial flooring. While there are no official statistics on just how many houses use plastic alternatives, one cannot empirically deny that their use has increased dramatically over the last ten or so years, to the point where they have become increasingly inescapable.

The problem is not limited to either new houses nor flip jobs. One of the more interesting developments I've seen come from listings for recently renovated apartments, where these types of floors are, thanks to the rhetorical sleight of hand used by developers, considered an amenity over their ill-fated predecessors. If you consider newness itself to be an amenity, something we'll get to later in this essay, they're not entirely wrong. (Another instance of real estate cynicism I've seen floating around is the idea of LVT flooring as being an environmentally sustainable substitute for wood, not unsimilar to how the fashion industry positions plastic as 'vegan leather'.)

So: what is going on here? Why all the plastic? Is it really because it's sturdier than wood? Do people really yearn for the greige frontier? Are we all being gaslit by landlords? Well, if we consider architecture to be a reflection of the society we live in, this seemingly innocuous question of flooring actually has rather substantial implications. It can even be said that what we walk upon sometimes walks upon us.

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1935 advertisement for Armstrong Linoleum. Note the technological rhetoric in the copy.

The predominant type of flooring used today is artificial. Its two most common iterations are patterned and textured ceramic tile and LVT, PVC or other kinds of vinyl flooring which is often referred to colloquially as laminate. Regarding the former: silkscreening and other printing methods to produce tile that looks like another material has been common since midcentury, though before the imitation wood craze it was mostly used as faux marble or stone in kitchens and bathrooms with varying degrees of veracity. The major change on this frontier is digital printing, which allows for more complex designs (such as the faux-Moroccan tiles popular in the 2010s) to be produced at scale. I find ceramic tile less offensive than LVT in part because it carries a material heft and in part because, unless it's produced in particularly unnatural colors, it is often more convincing as a wood substitute thanks to texturing applied to the ceramic.

Plastics, on the other hand, are a more interesting story. Back in 2018, when I was writing about Superfund sites for an essay in The Baffler, I ended up learning a lot about the plastics industry and its various uses, whose environmental impacts we're still living with and will be living with for untold generations. Imagine a beautiful future in which there are no trees because of topsoil loss from climate change, all while tons of Millennial Gray flooring glisten amongst the dumpsters in the central mega-landfill of the Illinois Desert.

Dystopia aside, we may think the use of fake plastic floors is a recent one because of its ubiquity. In reality, the history of using plastic for flooring is rather long! Artificially-derived substitutes for wood themselves date back to the late 19th century, when linoleum (which is not actually a plastic but rather a mix of linseed oil, pine resin, cork and sawdust, all backed with some form of fiber such as linen) was invented in 1855 by the British chemist Frederick Walton. Asbestos-based flooring (under brand names like Tile-Tex) were another short-lived phenomenon. But it was actually wartime shortages in linoleum that led to experimentation with plastics in flooring around WWI. In one notable example, rubbery substitutes such as Triolin were used by Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus in Dessau, though according to my tour guide, these early attempts were unsustainable due to varying degrees of toxicity as the floors began to decay.

The flooring commonly employed in today's dated kitchens, often given the name linoleum, is actually Polyvinyl Chloride, or PVC. PVC is only slightly older than linoleum, having been synthesized in Germany by Eugen Baumann in 1872, though it wouldn't be effectively utilized for high-impact uses until the good fellows at BF Goodrich, while trying to make PVC into a weather-resistant adhesive, stumbled upon the process of plasticization in the mid-1920s. Vinyl flooring made its first appearance in 1933, where it was on display for the wide-eyed masses in the Century of Progress exhibition at the Chicago World's Fair, among many other modernizing household goods and new frontiers in mass production. (It can sort of be seen in this video from the fair of a new, technologically advanced kitchen organized by the Heinz Ketchup company.)

Flooring was a natural use for these new, tough plastics, because, as an object, it is both expensive to produce at scale and vulnerable to wear and tear. That being said, it would take some time before plastic became a common - much less a predominant - type of flooring. This was in part because, in the United States, wood was still relatively cheap and plentiful. Tile, too, was common, and the same assembly lines that gave us vinyl both brought tile costs down further and enabled more adventurous designs. We only think of wood as a luxury item now because so many alternatives have since become available.

The question of wear and tear only partially explains why plastic flooring saw its first widespread uses in high-traffic, moisture-prone areas such as kitchens, bathrooms, and basements. The other reason was cultural. Not only were bathrooms and kitchens imbued with all kinds of hygienic rhetoric originating in the mainstream adoption of germ theory, they were also seen as the most technologically progressive and forward-thinking frontiers of the new American house. (See the Armstrong ad at the beginning of this section for an example of such progressive rhetoric.)

When construction materials became more expensive because of shortages or economic downturns, or when the desired effects of higher-end floors such as parquetry were outside the budget of the homeowner, wood substitutes became both more common and more acceptable. By the 1970s, famously a period of recession, printing processes could achieve suitably realistic looks, as seen in this 1974 advertisement below:

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However, the most popular form of plastic flooring remained on the horizon. We must remember that, at the time linoleum and PVC were being developed, rugs and carpets, still made of silk or wool, remained very expensive. Wall to wall carpeting was not only rare, but considered a tremendous luxury. (Think of all those sheep!) Thus, it would not become commonplace as a flooring type until the 1950s, when plastics (either nylon or acrylic) were extruded to create the carpet fibers themselves -- a vastly cheaper proposition.

We as a society seem to have turned against carpet in the last twenty or so years, in part because it is famously prone to disaster. (I can vividly remember the horror of realizing I was about to puke up gummy worms onto mom and dad's lovingly vacuumed living room floor.) However, in the 50s and arguably through the mid-90s, carpet was considered a middle-class luxury signifier, and carpet fever was seemingly insatiable. It extended, even, into the master bathroom.

A Bigelow carpet ad from 1952.

Part of the reason carpet was so desirable actually has to do with sound. I've spent quite a bit of time researching the houses of the 1950s and 60s for my book, and one of the things I came across was the fascinating role acoustics played in what was considered the good life in the mid-century house. By the late 1950s, housewives had had enough with the oppressive 'togetherness' of both the cramped Levittown-type minimal traditional house and its more open counterpart, the ranch, which encouraged more informal living defined by transitional spaces such as the family room and the opened-up kitchen-living room.

It is no coincidence, then, that right around the time families began desiring separate formal spaces such as sitting rooms and dining rooms, zoned away from high traffic areas, carpet became popular as an additional quieting technique. This was especially true because the materials we've made houses out of since at least the 30s -- wood framing, drywall, and fiberglass insulation -- aren't particularly good at mitigating sound transmission. Reorienting the rooms and stuffing them with carpet and drapery, are among the only ways to compensate for noise.

At the end of the day, mass production had finally made possible the kind of plushness previously afforded to the rich and did so in every conceivable, if sometimes ill-advised, color. Ironically, this may be partially responsible for carpet's downfall, too. When everyone has something, it's no longer special. The once-luxurious becomes dull by way of its ubiquity. The previously desirable object mass production replaced, in this case the hand-woven or natural fiber rug, once more became (and remains) elevated to a special status of high taste. To put it theoretically, it has been given the tinge of originality unique objects have in an age of mass production that Walter Benjamin once called the 'aura.' Not only that, the upkeep of carpet became, in many eyes, too much of a hassle. Anyone who's cleaned pet mess off a rug can understand why.

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If early PVC and early plastics can be seen as an expression of the technological optimism of the new century and carpet as an expression of bourgeois manners, neurotic privacy, and dreams of upward mobility, where does this leave the LVT flooring of today? I would argue that the ire towards plastic (of any chemical composition) has less to do with its suitability as a material -- it's quite useful for mudrooms, laundry rooms, and other such areas of labor -- but what it represents with regard to housing writ large.

First of all, plastic is cheap and it looks cheap. The flooring's coloring and repetitiveness (as opposed to the uniqueness of real wood grain), makes it seem, well, visibly made of plastic. As anyone with a landlord knows, this cheapness is a feature, not a bug. LVT costs significantly less than other materials and requires very little skill to install. In the high-risk, low-margin world of apartment building in particular, renovation is a key tool in the developer's toolbox. Put in some shitty flooring, call it a remodel, and jack up the rent. With regards to our introductory point of LVT as an amenity, it's not that the LVT floor is a luxury, per se, it's because newness is always a luxury and LVT has become a signifier of newness. If profit is your motive, a certain kind of interior has evolved to be associated with it. The two processes are inextricable. (The second chapter of my book is all about this, so consider this a preview!)

There are, however, some historical precedents for the wholly-contrived neutral interior as a function of house-selling. The most complete one is role the model home played and still plays for merchant built housing (i.e. massed produced developments by builders such as Ryan Homes) since the 1940s. It's always been good real estate practice that houses should be touched up before going on the market. Staging them with inoffensive furniture is a very old technique for doing so, dating back to the aforementioned model homes of yore.

But only recently has the imperative been to maximize property values by essentially neutralizing the house via gut renovation. Cultural shifts in shelter media away from redecorating and more towards extreme content such as house flipping play a role in how the public conceives of renovation -- either as something necessary for selling a house at a profit or desirable as a form of personal transformation. Either way, the number goes up, up, up in the corner of the television screen. Couples thud around on gray expanses in tears because their lives have been changed irrevocably.

Finally, the way we as a public primarily interact with design and interiors is increasingly through real estate websites, which, one must remember, are not a representative sample of interiors writ large. Perhaps the only good news here is that it's hard to know how many houses have actually been greigified with LVT, either because the owners are stuck with it or because they find it desirable. It's important to remember that websites like Zillow are only representative of how we view the house as a commodity. Listings are less reflective of how people inhabit their homes than they are of how we view a house's worth or how we imagine houses to be desired by others. Still, those are pretty big parts of the way we view our world. It's also why, until a cheaper alternative comes on the market, or the culture of real estate changes significantly, LVT is, unfortunately, here to stay.