Uploaded on 2014-11-21 by fledersau

[1]: https://edxuploads.s3.amazonaws.com/14165893131413876.jpg I live in Quebec city, Canada. The houses in my neighborhood where built in the beginning of the 20'st century. I took a picture of the house of my neighbor because he changed the lower facade last week and it revealt, how the building was built in it's origins. **Facade** On the picture you see the facade and the windows which were added a lot after the construction of the building. The facade you see here is quite often used in north america. It looks like painted wood, but it is plastic. It provides quite a good protection against the elements but its production process isn't that sustainable as plastic is a product based on petrol and usually the transformation and production of those pieces is made in china so this material may has travelled around the globe. The material for the windows (Glass, Metal frame or wood frame) is available in Quebec, but often those pieces are imported from cheaper countries as the transformation and production of those are more expensive in north america than in china for example. **Behind the facade** This building exists since the beginning of the 20'st century, the industrial revolution was happening at this time, but most of the stuff was produced locally and this you can see in the material used for the building. The main material used are bricks, which are made of clay and can be found 15 kilometer from the building and wood, which is everywhere in Quebec (really everywhere except the far north and the cities). The steel used for the construction was surely made from somewhere around here, ressources are available. **Summary** So here we have a building which has both, local materials which were used before transport became cheap and international materials which are used since just a few decades.