50/2025: Walls of Convenience

Image © Jose 2025

Anyone know where I can buy 3 boards of 3/8 in. 4 ft. x 10 ft. drywall, preferably with a mold-resistant side??

The joys of renovating when you just need to substitute a part of a job that was done with a material that is now hard to find, only available by special order, and because I only need 3 boards, and they should match what is already there, something tells me this will be either hard to find, expensive, or both. Pros out there might be either itching to suggest I can do this without going through all this, others might be saying “good luck”!

Let me ramble a bit about drywall, this ubiquitous construction material that’s been around for quite a while. The area I am renovating has a very nice drywall job that was done perhaps 40 or 50 years ago. I need to confirm this, but it’s been there for a while, judging from the bruises and aging in some areas. Just as an intro, drywall is basically a gypsum core with paper faces on both sides; sometimes the paper can have specific attributes (fire- and mold-resistant, etc.). Before drywall, doing a nice wall, let alone a nice ceiling, was hard work: wood or metal strips and multiple layers of wet plaster, and then gypsum on top. In 1894, Sackett Board patented what is often referred to as the predecessor of the modern gypsum board. In 1917, USG (United States Gypsum Company) introduced the brand Sheetrock and has since ruled the market, creating a proprietary eponym. Europe had Eurogypsum and the first factory in Liverpool in 1917. This is everywhere.

It’s sort of easy to understand why this material grew so fast and is everywhere. If you have seen a pro crew installing these panels, you will understand speed. The baseline labor is not that complex; getting to a good finish is a different thing. Predictability comes with standardization, and this material has chemically bound water, which basically slows the progress of fire. For those interested, the Life Cycle Assessment of Plasterboard is one of the more formal public reports often cited in industry and sustainability reports.

But as I was taking down the old gypsum that needed to be substituted and bagging it, I found myself questioning what I have questioned so many times during this renovation: where is this going to end, and how will it go away into the good night? A little bit of research and, let’s just say, not very well. When this stuff hits landfills, it is not pretty, and it can get dangerous for human beings and animal life. Recycling is, like in so many other cases, constrained by limits in infrastructure, and with an estimated ~700 million tons of construction and demolition debris just in the U.S., we can see this material is consequential. I could add other materials to this list — carpets and vinyl flooring, fiberglass insulation, asphalt shingles — but I’ll keep this conversation focused on drywall.

I was looking at alternatives when I am not trying to complete a job where drywall is already there, and there aren’t many that pass codes and don’t break the budget. I love wood-based panels, but much of the plywood and MDF alternatives are also not that clean, process-wise. I have seen people exploring different ways of building, some going back to traditional methods, some using modern materials and technology, but the reality is, when you go to Home Depot, you have drywall — and even that only in standard sizes, pallets and pallets of it. Basically, this has become systemically convenient, like so many other things. And designers have a role to play here, since we tend to focus on customer experience, and that is usually all about comfort and convenience. But let’s be honest: what is the role of the designer in issues like speculative real estate deals, fragmented labor markets, codes written around a product, manufacturer, or association, insurance schemes, financing models, demolition economics, waste management rackets? I wonder how innovation disrupts so many different areas. What would that look like in the building industry? And what would that look like for the humble, yet omnipresent and clean-faced drywall? Where would that innovation have to start to undermine such a systemic setup?

Maybe drywall is not the problem. Maybe it’s just the perfect expression of a system optimized for speed, scale, and convenience, where consequences are pushed far enough away that we no longer see them. And maybe innovation here won’t start with a new material, but with a willingness to question what we’ve normalized, even when it looks clean, simple, and harmless.

Ok, José, focus: where can I buy 3 boards of 3/8 in. 4 ft. x 10 ft. drywall, preferably with a mold-resistant side??