I received a phone call from a longtime friend, and former co-worker of mine, Dave O’Neil. He had called to inquire about pop-outs over stucco and it is from our great conversation that I write this month’s article.
Somewhere in the ’70s and ’80s stucco buildings began to be designed with what us plasterers called “gingerbread,” those decorative embellishments on the stucco houses, apartments and office buildings. The designers threw them all in on the same elevation; quoins, window surrounds, belly bands and cornice details. The generic term for these embellishments was pop-outs, but plasterers referred to them as “stucco speed bumps.” This popular look is still in many of today’s building designs to varying degrees. In the beginning, most of these decorative features were framed out of wood and then covered with two layers of black paper, a metal lath and cornerbeads galore. As EIFS began to get popular, plasterers figured out that they could use EIFS technology for those decorative embellishments instead of wood.