How Buildings Learn
Chapter 1
Between the world and our idea of the world is a fascinating kink. Architecture, we imagine, is permanent. And so our buildings thwart us. Because they discount time, they misuse time.
Almost no buildings adapt well. They’re designed not to adapt; also budgeted and financed not to, constructed not to, administered not to, maintained not to, regulated and taxed not to, even remodeled not to. But all buildings (except monuments) adapt anyway, however poorly, because the usages in and around them are changing constantly.
University donors invest in “bricks and mortar” rather than professorial chairs because of the lure of a lasting monument. In wider use, the term “architecture” always means “unchanging deep structure.”
The word “building” contains the double reality. It means both “the action of the verb BUILD” and “that which is built”—both verb and noun, both the action and the result. Whereas “architecture” may strive to be permanent, a “building” is always building and rebuilding.
First we shape our buildings, then they shape us, then we shape them again—ad infinitum. Function reforms form, perpetually.
Form follows funding.
A fix becomes a feature.
Homes are the domain of slowly shifting fantasies and rapidly shifting needs.
There is a universal rule—never acknowledged because its action is embarrassing or illegal. All buildings grow. Most grow even when they’re not allowed to. Urban height limits and the party walls of row houses, for instance, are no barrier. The building will grow into the back yard and down into the ground—halfway under the street in parts of Paris.
Genuinely old buildings are constantly refreshed, but not too far, and new buildings are forced to ripen quickly.
The widespread fakery makes us respect honest aging all the more.
Are there blue-jeans buildings among us? How does design honestly honor time?
We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution.
Between the dazzle of a new building and its eventual corpse, when it is either demolished or petrified for posterity as a museum, are the lost years—the unappreciated, undocumented, awkward-seeming time when it was alive to evolution.
Almost no buildings adapt well. They’re designed not to adapt; also budgeted and financed not to, constructed not to, administered not to, maintained not to, regulated and taxed not to, even remodeled not to. But all buildings (except monuments) adapt anyway, however poorly, because the usages in and around them are changing constantly.
University donors invest in “bricks and mortar” rather than professorial chairs because of the lure of a lasting monument. In wider use, the term “architecture” always means “unchanging deep structure.”
The word “building” contains the double reality. It means both “the action of the verb BUILD” and “that which is built”—both verb and noun, both the action and the result. Whereas “architecture” may strive to be permanent, a “building” is always building and rebuilding.
First we shape our buildings, then they shape us, then we shape them again—ad infinitum. Function reforms form, perpetually.
Form follows funding.
A fix becomes a feature.
Homes are the domain of slowly shifting fantasies and rapidly shifting needs.
There is a universal rule—never acknowledged because its action is embarrassing or illegal. All buildings grow. Most grow even when they’re not allowed to. Urban height limits and the party walls of row houses, for instance, are no barrier. The building will grow into the back yard and down into the ground—halfway under the street in parts of Paris.
Genuinely old buildings are constantly refreshed, but not too far, and new buildings are forced to ripen quickly.
The widespread fakery makes us respect honest aging all the more.
Are there blue-jeans buildings among us? How does design honestly honor time?
We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution.
Between the dazzle of a new building and its eventual corpse, when it is either demolished or petrified for posterity as a museum, are the lost years—the unappreciated, undocumented, awkward-seeming time when it was alive to evolution.
Chapter 2
The peculiarity of buildings that turned Architectural Digest into a contradiction of itself is that different parts of buildings change at different rates.
Many buildings are demolished early if their outdated systems are too deeply embedded to replace easily.
The layering also defines how a building relates to people. Organizational levels of responsibility match the pace levels. The building interacts with individuals at the level of Stuff; with the tenant organization (or family) at the Space plan level; with the landlord via the Services (and slower levels) which must be maintained; with the public via the Skin and entry; and with the whole community through city or county decisions about the footprint and volume of the Structure and restrictions on the Site.
...ecosystems could be better understood by observing the rates of change of different components.
“The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components, with the rapid components simply following along.” Slow constrains quick; slow controls quick.
The slower processes of a building gradually integrate trends of rapid change within them. The speedy components propose, and the slow dispose.
The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint.
Small lots will support resilience because they allow many people to attend directly to their needs by designing, building, and maintaining their own environment. By ensuring that property remains in many hands, small lots bring important results: many people make many different decisions, thereby ensuring variety in the resulting environment. And many property owners slow down the rate of change by making large-scale real estate transactions difficult.
The longevity of buildings is often determined by how well they can absorb new Services technology.
Many buildings are demolished early if their outdated systems are too deeply embedded to replace easily.
The layering also defines how a building relates to people. Organizational levels of responsibility match the pace levels. The building interacts with individuals at the level of Stuff; with the tenant organization (or family) at the Space plan level; with the landlord via the Services (and slower levels) which must be maintained; with the public via the Skin and entry; and with the whole community through city or county decisions about the footprint and volume of the Structure and restrictions on the Site.
...ecosystems could be better understood by observing the rates of change of different components.
“The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components, with the rapid components simply following along.” Slow constrains quick; slow controls quick.
The slower processes of a building gradually integrate trends of rapid change within them. The speedy components propose, and the slow dispose.
The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint.
Small lots will support resilience because they allow many people to attend directly to their needs by designing, building, and maintaining their own environment. By ensuring that property remains in many hands, small lots bring important results: many people make many different decisions, thereby ensuring variety in the resulting environment. And many property owners slow down the rate of change by making large-scale real estate transactions difficult.
The longevity of buildings is often determined by how well they can absorb new Services technology.
An adaptive building has to allow slippage between the differently-paced systems of Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space plan, and Stuff. ... Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first, but over time it is the opposite, and destructive as well.
“You can’t get that structure except dynamically. Period. In nature you’ve got continuous very-small-feedback-loop adaptation going on, which is why things get to be harmonious. That’s why they have the qualities that we value. If it wasn’t for the time dimension, it wouldn’t happen. ...” —Christopher Alexander
“What does it take to build something so that it’s really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you’ve made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? ... ” Christopher Alexander
Or the building may be blessed with durable construction and resilient design which can forgive insult and hard swerves of usage. A brick factory from the 1910s, with its intelligent daylighting and abundant space, can stand empty for a decade and still gain value. Age plus adaptivity is what makes a building come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants, and they learn from it.
“What does it take to build something so that it’s really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you’ve made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? ... ” Christopher Alexander
Or the building may be blessed with durable construction and resilient design which can forgive insult and hard swerves of usage. A brick factory from the 1910s, with its intelligent daylighting and abundant space, can stand empty for a decade and still gain value. Age plus adaptivity is what makes a building come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants, and they learn from it.
Chapter 3
Although Building 20 was built with the intention to tear it down after the end of World War II, it has remained these thirty-five years providing a special function and acquiring its own history and anecdotes. Not assigned to any one school, department, or center, it seems to always have had space for the beginning project, the graduate student’s experiment, the interdisciplinary research center.
The building was too humble for anyone to worry about whether they were violating its historical or aesthetic integrity.
Henry Zimmerman, commented, “I believe the horizontal layout helped to encourage interaction between groups. In a vertical layout with small floor areas, there is less research variety on each floor. Chance meetings in an elevator tend to terminate in the lobby, whereas chance meetings in a corridor tended to lead to technical discussions.”
...building: elegant because it is quick and dirty.
...full of small microenvironments.
Temporary is permanent, and permanent is temporary.
The projects flourish in the low-supervision environment, free of turf battles because the turf isn’t worth fighting over.
Such buildings leave fond memories of improvisation and sensuous delight.
...building: elegant because it is quick and dirty.
...full of small microenvironments.
Temporary is permanent, and permanent is temporary.
The projects flourish in the low-supervision environment, free of turf battles because the turf isn’t worth fighting over.
Such buildings leave fond memories of improvisation and sensuous delight.
Chapter 4
Those are the basics of what makes a High Road building acquire its character—high intent, duration of purpose, duration of care, time, and a steady supply of confident dictators. In time such a building comes to express a confidence of its own.
By showing a tangible deep history, the building proposes an equally deep future and summons the taking of long-term responsibility from its occupants.
...filled with obsolete oddities, preserved out of habit until odd new uses are found for them.
Institutions aspire to be eternal, and they let that ambition lead them to the wrong physical strategy. Instead of opting for long-term flexibility, they go for monumentality, seeking to embody their power in physical grandeur.
A frozen bureaucracy and a frozen building reinforce each other’s resistance to change. Change is obligatory, since bureaucracies always grow, but responsibility is dispersed and delayed in a maze of anxious responsibility-avoidance, and the building sits heavy and inert.
Trust, intimacy, intense use, and time are what made these buildings work so well. They are not distinguished-looking. What such buildings have instead is an offhand, haphazard-seeming mastery, and layers upon layers of soul. They embody all the meanings of the word “mature”—experienced, complex, subtle, wise, savvy, idiosyncratic, partly hidden, resilient, and set in their ways. Time has taught them, and they teach us. [Boston Athenaeum ...]
Many High Road buildings are very high-cost, but since maturity can’t be bought, some of the best manage almost without money, lavishing time and attention instead.
...a labor of love measured in lifetimes.
By showing a tangible deep history, the building proposes an equally deep future and summons the taking of long-term responsibility from its occupants.
...filled with obsolete oddities, preserved out of habit until odd new uses are found for them.
Institutions aspire to be eternal, and they let that ambition lead them to the wrong physical strategy. Instead of opting for long-term flexibility, they go for monumentality, seeking to embody their power in physical grandeur.
A frozen bureaucracy and a frozen building reinforce each other’s resistance to change. Change is obligatory, since bureaucracies always grow, but responsibility is dispersed and delayed in a maze of anxious responsibility-avoidance, and the building sits heavy and inert.
Trust, intimacy, intense use, and time are what made these buildings work so well. They are not distinguished-looking. What such buildings have instead is an offhand, haphazard-seeming mastery, and layers upon layers of soul. They embody all the meanings of the word “mature”—experienced, complex, subtle, wise, savvy, idiosyncratic, partly hidden, resilient, and set in their ways. Time has taught them, and they teach us. [Boston Athenaeum ...]
Many High Road buildings are very high-cost, but since maturity can’t be bought, some of the best manage almost without money, lavishing time and attention instead.
...a labor of love measured in lifetimes.
Chapter 5
Most buildings have neither High Road nor Low Road virtues. Instead they strenuously avoid any relationship whatever with time and what is considered its depredation. The very worst are famous new buildings, would-be famous buildings, imitation famous buildings, and imitation imitation buildings. Whatever the error is, it is catching.
...enough, if you look at the history of architecture as a profession, it was always around distinctions of “art” that architects distinguished themselves from mere “builders”—starting in the mid-19th century, when the profession emerged, and continuing to the present day.
Few modern artists approve of anything static. Artistic architects should be the most accepting of all of interactivity with their audience. The problems of “art” as architectural aspiration come down to these:
...enough, if you look at the history of architecture as a profession, it was always around distinctions of “art” that architects distinguished themselves from mere “builders”—starting in the mid-19th century, when the profession emerged, and continuing to the present day.
Few modern artists approve of anything static. Artistic architects should be the most accepting of all of interactivity with their audience. The problems of “art” as architectural aspiration come down to these:
- Art is proudly non-functional and impractical.
- Art reveres the new and despises the conventional.
- Architectural art sells at a distance.
... if architects simply decided that what they do is craft instead of art. The distinction is fundamental, according to folklorist Henry Glassie: “If a pleasure-giving function predominates, the artifact is called art; if a practical function predominates, it is called craft.” Craft is something useful made with artfulness, with close attention to detail. So should buildings be.
Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically.
Art begets fashion; fashion means style; style is made of illusion (granite veneer pretending to be solid; facade columns pretending to hold up something); and illusion is no friend to function. The fashion game is fun for architects to play and diverting for the public to watch, but it’s deadly for building users. When the height of fashion moves on, they’re the ones left behind, stuck in a building that was designed to look good rather than work well, and now it doesn’t even look good. They spend their day trapped in someone else’s taste, which everyone now agrees is bad taste. Here, time becomes a problem for buildings. Fashion can only advance by punishing the no-longer-fashionable. Formerly stylish clothing you can throw or give away; a building goes on looking ever more out-of-it, decade after decade, until a new skin is grafted on at great expense, and the cycle begins again—months of glory, years of shame.
Clare Cooper Marcus said it most clearly: “You get work through getting awards, and the award system is based on photographs. Not use. Not context. Just purely visual photographs taken before people start using the building.”
A building’s exterior is a strange thing to concentrate on anyway. All that effort goes into impressing the wrong people—passers-by instead of the people who use the building.
Frank Duffy observes, “The only area of architectural discretion in artistic or financial terms is the skin. The architectural imagination has allowed itself to be well and truly marginalized.” It happened because architects offered themselves as providers of instant solutions, and only the look of a building gives instant gratification.
Reputations based on exterior originality miss everything important. They have nothing to do with what buildings do all day and almost nothing to do with what architects do all day.
A building’s exterior is a strange thing to concentrate on anyway. All that effort goes into impressing the wrong people—passers-by instead of the people who use the building.
Frank Duffy observes, “The only area of architectural discretion in artistic or financial terms is the skin. The architectural imagination has allowed itself to be well and truly marginalized.” It happened because architects offered themselves as providers of instant solutions, and only the look of a building gives instant gratification.
Reputations based on exterior originality miss everything important. They have nothing to do with what buildings do all day and almost nothing to do with what architects do all day.
Does the building manage to keep the rain out? That’s a core issue seldom mentioned in the magazines but incessantly mentioned by building users, usually through clenched teeth. They can’t believe it when their expensive new building, perhaps by a famous architect, crafted with up-to-the-minute high-tech materials, leaks.
Leaping at the look prevents the reality.
Occupants are always intuitively oriented in rectangular buildings. (Orientation itself is a right-angle concept, the cardinal directions being at 90 degrees.) Since buildings inevitably grow, it is handy to have the five directions (including up) that rectangular buildings offer for expansion. Right-angled shapes nest and tile with each other universally, so tables fit into corners, and clothes into closets, and buildings into city lots, and lots into city blocks. Humanity’s first cities in Sumer had rectangular street grids. Tribal cultures the world over have beautiful round dwellings, but the shape of civilization is rectangular.
Architects are a minor ornament of the culture. Developers build America. There are countless departments and schools of architecture, but the only training for developers is deep within a few business schools.
Fragmentation envelops the customer as well. Clients often are no better at representing building users than architects are. Usually a building is so large and complex an undertaking that the “stakeholders” are too diverse, scattered, and at odds to agree on much of anything.
Sometimes the company’s single most knowledgeable person about what is happening with the projected building is the lawyer hired to supervise all the multidirectional negotiations and agreements. Major design decisions wind up being made semi-randomly by the lawyer because no one is crisply in charge.
The percent approach is a conflict of interest for the architect; it encourages buildings that try to be too perfect and too large too soon. Better would be to agree with the architect in advance on a set budget and set fee for the building, with a significant bonus for the architect if the project stays within the budget.
Occupants are always intuitively oriented in rectangular buildings. (Orientation itself is a right-angle concept, the cardinal directions being at 90 degrees.) Since buildings inevitably grow, it is handy to have the five directions (including up) that rectangular buildings offer for expansion. Right-angled shapes nest and tile with each other universally, so tables fit into corners, and clothes into closets, and buildings into city lots, and lots into city blocks. Humanity’s first cities in Sumer had rectangular street grids. Tribal cultures the world over have beautiful round dwellings, but the shape of civilization is rectangular.
Architects are a minor ornament of the culture. Developers build America. There are countless departments and schools of architecture, but the only training for developers is deep within a few business schools.
Fragmentation envelops the customer as well. Clients often are no better at representing building users than architects are. Usually a building is so large and complex an undertaking that the “stakeholders” are too diverse, scattered, and at odds to agree on much of anything.
Sometimes the company’s single most knowledgeable person about what is happening with the projected building is the lawyer hired to supervise all the multidirectional negotiations and agreements. Major design decisions wind up being made semi-randomly by the lawyer because no one is crisply in charge.
The percent approach is a conflict of interest for the architect; it encourages buildings that try to be too perfect and too large too soon. Better would be to agree with the architect in advance on a set budget and set fee for the building, with a significant bonus for the architect if the project stays within the budget.
What is punished by claims is any kind of adaptivity during construction—exactly the time when you most want it, because the building is incomplete enough to fix and improve easily. Also that’s when you can take advantage of the skills and intelligence of the artisans to fine-tune design solutions on the site.
The simultaneous seizing of power and shedding of responsibility by contractors puts the onus on architects to anticipate perfectly all of a building’s needs. Nothing is left to the builders, to the client, or to actual usage. But if architects are now in a bind with that, they asked for it. They sought total control and promised total prescience.Instead of steady accumulation, the business of contemporary architecture is dominated by two instants in time. One is the moment of go-ahead, when the architect’s reputation and the beguiling qualities of the renderings and model of the building-to-be overwhelm the client’s resistance. The other is the moment of hand-over, when the building shifts from the responsibility of the builders to the responsibility of the owner, and occupancy begins. These are necessary moments to make coordination possible, but they distort everything. Each instant is a massive barrier to learning.
The effort is to make everything perfect and final for each of these opening nights. The finished-looking model and visually obsessive renderings dominate the let’s-do-it meeting, so that shallow guesses are frozen as deep decisions. All the design intelligence gets forced to the earliest part of the building process, when everyone knows the least about what is really needed. “A lot of the time now, you see buildings that look exactly like their models,” one model maker told me. “That’s when you know you’re in trouble.”
The separation of design from making has resulted in a built environment that has no ‘flow’ to it—you simply cannot design an improvisation or an adaptation.
The race for finality undermines the whole process.
Landscape architects don’t think that way. They know that what they design has its own life, and they plan accordingly. ... Neither do space planners think about finality.
POEs [post-occupancy evaluation] are a shockingly direct procedure for judging how well a building works by formally surveying the occupants, especially the people who clean, service, or repair the building and know its failures all too well. Trained observers also watch and photograph how the building is used, comparing what actually is happening against what was intended.
It is in the nature of hustling for a living that the hustler must always focus on the next job, giving just enough attention to current jobs to get by, and no attention at all to past jobs.
Unchallenged practices persist for decades—sliding glass doors and floor-to-ceiling glass partitions that people smash their noses on; extensive south- and west-facing windows that become solar ovens; extensive ground-floor windows that people invariably curtain for privacy; women’s rooms designed symmetrically to be the same size as men’s rooms, when double the size and facilities are needed; and the innumerable sad, dry, leaf-filled courtyard fountains that looked so cheery on the renderings but were too much trouble to maintain.
The race for finality undermines the whole process.
Landscape architects don’t think that way. They know that what they design has its own life, and they plan accordingly. ... Neither do space planners think about finality.
POEs [post-occupancy evaluation] are a shockingly direct procedure for judging how well a building works by formally surveying the occupants, especially the people who clean, service, or repair the building and know its failures all too well. Trained observers also watch and photograph how the building is used, comparing what actually is happening against what was intended.
It is in the nature of hustling for a living that the hustler must always focus on the next job, giving just enough attention to current jobs to get by, and no attention at all to past jobs.
Unchallenged practices persist for decades—sliding glass doors and floor-to-ceiling glass partitions that people smash their noses on; extensive south- and west-facing windows that become solar ovens; extensive ground-floor windows that people invariably curtain for privacy; women’s rooms designed symmetrically to be the same size as men’s rooms, when double the size and facilities are needed; and the innumerable sad, dry, leaf-filled courtyard fountains that looked so cheery on the renderings but were too much trouble to maintain.
We need to honor buildings that are loved rather than merely admired. Admiration is from a distance and brief, while love is up close and cumulative. New buildings should be judged not just for what they are, but for what they are capable of becoming. Old buildings should get credit for how they played their options.
The transition from image architecture to process architecture is a leap from the certainties of controllable things in space to the self-organizing complexities of an endlessly raveling and unraveling skein of relationships over time. Buildings have lives of their own.
Chapter 6
What the street lost in civility it gained in entertainment value, and how fortunate that no bland design review board got in the way.
Every building leads three contradictory lives—as habitat, as property, and as component of the surrounding community. The most immediate conflict is financial.
Seeking to be anybody’s house it becomes nobody’s. Whole neighborhoods tend toward uniformity as everyone avoids being the money-wasting best house on the block or the sore-thumb worst house on the block.
Buildings can’t learn if they don’t last. Most building code systems are a manifestation of the whole community learning. What they embody is good sense, acquired the hard way from generations of recurrent problems. Form follows failure.
Gene Logsdon points out the trade-off: When building codes came to our unusually stable community, it was the more honest builders who fought them. They argued quite rightly that codes established minimal standards, and minimal standards sanctify mediocrity.
Small lots give greater individual control and thus greater variety, and they encourage more pedestrian activity. The more owners, the more gradual and adaptive the ongoing change. It’s a conservative, wholesome kind of change—the place looks a little different every year, but the overall feel is the same from century to century.
Communities that want their built environment to improve over time would do well not to punish remodeling work. They could keep tax reassessment separate from improvement—do it strictly by calendar or only at the time of resale. They could revamp the permit and inspection process to become one of welcome guidance that helps people reduce costs and hassle. The procedure could even be linked to such services as tool-lending from the town library.
The planning profession keeps oscillating between being destructively radical and destructively conservative.
That is the essence of good urban design—respect for what came before.
Quelling change, zoning quells life.
This degree of institutionalization of real estate value over use value is odious enough as an invasion of privacy, but it also prevents buildings from exercising their unique talent for getting better with time.
Even the up part of the real-estate cycle is crippling to buildings. People get into a “trade up” mentality about their houses and treat them as investments. Any improvements made are for the imaginary next buyers, not themselves.
The form of cities persists for centuries, but their intense economic metabolism consumes their physical substance.
Cities are just as destructive when the real estate market dives. Lower value means less rent, hence less maintenance, which leads to even lower rent. If the trend goes far enough, eventually it’s not worth it to the owner to have any tenant at all, and the building burns in an insurance fire or it stands empty, begging to be demolished.
Every building leads three contradictory lives—as habitat, as property, and as component of the surrounding community. The most immediate conflict is financial.
Seeking to be anybody’s house it becomes nobody’s. Whole neighborhoods tend toward uniformity as everyone avoids being the money-wasting best house on the block or the sore-thumb worst house on the block.
Buildings can’t learn if they don’t last. Most building code systems are a manifestation of the whole community learning. What they embody is good sense, acquired the hard way from generations of recurrent problems. Form follows failure.
Gene Logsdon points out the trade-off: When building codes came to our unusually stable community, it was the more honest builders who fought them. They argued quite rightly that codes established minimal standards, and minimal standards sanctify mediocrity.
Small lots give greater individual control and thus greater variety, and they encourage more pedestrian activity. The more owners, the more gradual and adaptive the ongoing change. It’s a conservative, wholesome kind of change—the place looks a little different every year, but the overall feel is the same from century to century.
Communities that want their built environment to improve over time would do well not to punish remodeling work. They could keep tax reassessment separate from improvement—do it strictly by calendar or only at the time of resale. They could revamp the permit and inspection process to become one of welcome guidance that helps people reduce costs and hassle. The procedure could even be linked to such services as tool-lending from the town library.
The planning profession keeps oscillating between being destructively radical and destructively conservative.
That is the essence of good urban design—respect for what came before.
Quelling change, zoning quells life.
This degree of institutionalization of real estate value over use value is odious enough as an invasion of privacy, but it also prevents buildings from exercising their unique talent for getting better with time.
Even the up part of the real-estate cycle is crippling to buildings. People get into a “trade up” mentality about their houses and treat them as investments. Any improvements made are for the imaginary next buyers, not themselves.
The form of cities persists for centuries, but their intense economic metabolism consumes their physical substance.
Cities are just as destructive when the real estate market dives. Lower value means less rent, hence less maintenance, which leads to even lower rent. If the trend goes far enough, eventually it’s not worth it to the owner to have any tenant at all, and the building burns in an insurance fire or it stands empty, begging to be demolished.
Plummeting real-estate value is devastating, and soaring real estate value paralyzes homes and guts commercial districts. But in a slow down market, people stay where they are, improving their property for themselves and becoming real denizens of their neighborhoods. In a slow up market, they are rewarded for rehabilitating marginal structures, gradually turning factory lofts into artists’ studios or townhouses, retaining a civilized urban mix.
You have to maintain a steady flow of money into a building, and mortgages skim that.
Buildings do better over time when they are closely held and closely cared for. Most are not. Quick-buck speculation and abstract investment is the norm.
A command economy displaces responsibility even further outside the building than a market economy does.
The building can’t learn much with all those shock treatments. On the other hand, turnovers can help upgrade some of the basics such as roof, foundation, and services. The increasing use by buyers of private building inspectors in recent years has helped this process.
Adaptive life re-enters the building when it becomes too cheap for speculation.
A triumph of abstraction, real estate operates distant from the daily life of building use, distant from the real. The “real” in “real estate” derives from re-al—“royal”—rather than from res—“thing”—which is the root of “reality.” Realty is in many ways the opposite of reality.
All that is solid melts into cash. Real estate turns buildings into money, into fungible units devoid of history and therefore of learning.
Buildings do better over time when they are closely held and closely cared for. Most are not. Quick-buck speculation and abstract investment is the norm.
A command economy displaces responsibility even further outside the building than a market economy does.
The building can’t learn much with all those shock treatments. On the other hand, turnovers can help upgrade some of the basics such as roof, foundation, and services. The increasing use by buyers of private building inspectors in recent years has helped this process.
Adaptive life re-enters the building when it becomes too cheap for speculation.
A triumph of abstraction, real estate operates distant from the daily life of building use, distant from the real. The “real” in “real estate” derives from re-al—“royal”—rather than from res—“thing”—which is the root of “reality.” Realty is in many ways the opposite of reality.
All that is solid melts into cash. Real estate turns buildings into money, into fungible units devoid of history and therefore of learning.
Chapter 7
Preservation was one of the swiftest, most complete cultural revolutions ever, yet because it happened everywhere at once, without controversy or charismatic leadership, it never got the headlines of its sibling, the environmental movement.
Preservationists have a philosophy of time and responsibility that includes the future.
There is more to continuity of the physical environment than just habit and nostalgia. Old buildings embody history. They are worlds; in old buildings we glimpse the world of previous generations.
Ivan Illich remarked once, “History gives us distance from the present, as if it were the future of the past. In the spirit of contemplation it releases us from the prison of the present to examine the axioms of our time.” Old buildings give us that experience directly, not through words.
“Beauty is in what time does, ...” —Frank Duffy
Up until the 20th century, people thought that they were building for the ages.” Traditional materials like brick, stone, stucco, slate, and wood show age attractively, whereas recent materials such as aluminum, plastic, and exposed concrete age ugly.
Preservationist Paul Goldberger: “A lot of our belief in preservation comes from our fear of what will replace buildings that are not preserved; all too often we fight to save not because what we want to save is so good but because we know that what will replace it will be no better.”
...preservationists learned to think and act like developers and property owners in order to recast economic incentives in favor of preservation.
Rehabilitation of an old building may be expensive, but it’s still significantly less than comparable new construction.
Rehabbed buildings can help revive a whole neighborhood, even a whole town or city, with resulting higher rents and tax revenues.
“It is better to preserve than to repair, better to repair than to restore, better to restore than to reconstruct.” —A. N. Didron
In the intensely public debate it was Victorian “scrape” versus Ruskin’s and Morris’s “anti-scrape”—tear off the plaster to expose ancient stones (even if they were plastered originally) versus Leave The Building Be, including the original plaster and everything that was added later to keep the building working. “Scrape” won the 19th century, “anti-scrape” the 20th.
The cumulative effect of such widespread preservation activities—amateur, professional, and governmental—is a country [England] that feels solidly rooted in its own history, culture, and place.
Preservation in America has a broad base of support, but much of the leadership has come from the wealthy. They’re the ones with the time, taste, influence, money, generosity, and concern for generations of time. Old money likes old things, and new money imitates old money. More than with other forms of philanthropy, the donors get to join in themselves—save a public building and help enjoy it, save a private building and live in it.
“Facadism” is the dirty word preservationists use for projects that save the illusory fronts of old buildings to mask entirely new construction. The passerby doesn’t know whether to be insulted by the crude lie or delighted by the surreal kitsch.
Preservationists have a philosophy of time and responsibility that includes the future.
There is more to continuity of the physical environment than just habit and nostalgia. Old buildings embody history. They are worlds; in old buildings we glimpse the world of previous generations.
Ivan Illich remarked once, “History gives us distance from the present, as if it were the future of the past. In the spirit of contemplation it releases us from the prison of the present to examine the axioms of our time.” Old buildings give us that experience directly, not through words.
“Beauty is in what time does, ...” —Frank Duffy
Up until the 20th century, people thought that they were building for the ages.” Traditional materials like brick, stone, stucco, slate, and wood show age attractively, whereas recent materials such as aluminum, plastic, and exposed concrete age ugly.
Preservationist Paul Goldberger: “A lot of our belief in preservation comes from our fear of what will replace buildings that are not preserved; all too often we fight to save not because what we want to save is so good but because we know that what will replace it will be no better.”
...preservationists learned to think and act like developers and property owners in order to recast economic incentives in favor of preservation.
Rehabilitation of an old building may be expensive, but it’s still significantly less than comparable new construction.
Rehabbed buildings can help revive a whole neighborhood, even a whole town or city, with resulting higher rents and tax revenues.
“It is better to preserve than to repair, better to repair than to restore, better to restore than to reconstruct.” —A. N. Didron
In the intensely public debate it was Victorian “scrape” versus Ruskin’s and Morris’s “anti-scrape”—tear off the plaster to expose ancient stones (even if they were plastered originally) versus Leave The Building Be, including the original plaster and everything that was added later to keep the building working. “Scrape” won the 19th century, “anti-scrape” the 20th.
The cumulative effect of such widespread preservation activities—amateur, professional, and governmental—is a country [England] that feels solidly rooted in its own history, culture, and place.
Preservation in America has a broad base of support, but much of the leadership has come from the wealthy. They’re the ones with the time, taste, influence, money, generosity, and concern for generations of time. Old money likes old things, and new money imitates old money. More than with other forms of philanthropy, the donors get to join in themselves—save a public building and help enjoy it, save a private building and live in it.
“Facadism” is the dirty word preservationists use for projects that save the illusory fronts of old buildings to mask entirely new construction. The passerby doesn’t know whether to be insulted by the crude lie or delighted by the surreal kitsch.
The Low Road, of course, has no use for such preciousness. Its route to authenticity is through directness, not time and continuity. The Improviser’s Standards would read: “Mess with the building as needed until it works.”
There is also the romantic attraction of participating in the local myth.
Cultural historian Chris Wilson has a less romantic interpretation. He sees preservation as in part a bourgeois control scheme. Being against mixture and change, old white families promote purity and stability through shaping buildings to reflect the pre-industrial order of things. The South goes pre-Civil-War. New England goes pre-immigrant. California goes Spanish Colonial and carefully excludes contemporary Hispanics. Aware of the charge, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has developed a new emphasis on cultural diversity in its programs.
In Charleston, which was full of the townhouses of plantation gentry, the tradition was to keep the home in the family no matter what—no improvements, few repairs, and hang on. When the city came back to economic life in the 20th century, it found itself with 3,600 suddenly priceless historic buildings. The buildings had survived that crucial second thirty years when a building is out of fashion, out of repair, and most vulnerable to demolition.
The most spectacular example in this century of a city preserving its story by preserving its buildings is the Polish capital of Warsaw. World War II left the historic city a desert of ruins and rubble, with 88 percent of its buildings destroyed. But hidden away from the shelling in a provincial town was an exhaustive inventory of Warsaw’s historic buildings—photographs and measured drawings that had been made in the 1930s. Over the next eight years Warsaw painstakingly reconstructed itself in its own past image as a vivid symbol and tool of the rebirth of Poland.
When the Wall came down, East Berlin was found to have a splendid collection of glorious old Prussian buildings amid the socialist junk. They were in horrible repair, of course. Author Pamela McCorduck noted, “Part of reunification is fixing these up again, especially since the West Berliners, in a frenzy of Modernism, tore down everything, even the buildings that might have been saved, and everything on that side looks like it appeared one night in 1955. They see the wonderful old buildings of East Berlin as part of their patrimony.”
Vernacular building historian J. B. Jackson insists that a form of death must precede rebirth: “There has to be that interval of neglect, there has to be discontinuity; it is religiously and artistically essential. That is what I mean when I refer to the necessity for ruins: ruins provide the incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins.” ... Jackson's version of reincarnation works best on masonry buildings in the countryside or in old factory and warehouse districts.
Cultural historian Chris Wilson has a less romantic interpretation. He sees preservation as in part a bourgeois control scheme. Being against mixture and change, old white families promote purity and stability through shaping buildings to reflect the pre-industrial order of things. The South goes pre-Civil-War. New England goes pre-immigrant. California goes Spanish Colonial and carefully excludes contemporary Hispanics. Aware of the charge, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has developed a new emphasis on cultural diversity in its programs.
In Charleston, which was full of the townhouses of plantation gentry, the tradition was to keep the home in the family no matter what—no improvements, few repairs, and hang on. When the city came back to economic life in the 20th century, it found itself with 3,600 suddenly priceless historic buildings. The buildings had survived that crucial second thirty years when a building is out of fashion, out of repair, and most vulnerable to demolition.
The most spectacular example in this century of a city preserving its story by preserving its buildings is the Polish capital of Warsaw. World War II left the historic city a desert of ruins and rubble, with 88 percent of its buildings destroyed. But hidden away from the shelling in a provincial town was an exhaustive inventory of Warsaw’s historic buildings—photographs and measured drawings that had been made in the 1930s. Over the next eight years Warsaw painstakingly reconstructed itself in its own past image as a vivid symbol and tool of the rebirth of Poland.
When the Wall came down, East Berlin was found to have a splendid collection of glorious old Prussian buildings amid the socialist junk. They were in horrible repair, of course. Author Pamela McCorduck noted, “Part of reunification is fixing these up again, especially since the West Berliners, in a frenzy of Modernism, tore down everything, even the buildings that might have been saved, and everything on that side looks like it appeared one night in 1955. They see the wonderful old buildings of East Berlin as part of their patrimony.”
Vernacular building historian J. B. Jackson insists that a form of death must precede rebirth: “There has to be that interval of neglect, there has to be discontinuity; it is religiously and artistically essential. That is what I mean when I refer to the necessity for ruins: ruins provide the incentive for restoration, and for a return to origins.” ... Jackson's version of reincarnation works best on masonry buildings in the countryside or in old factory and warehouse districts.
The building became more interesting when it left its original function behind. The continuing changes in function turn into a colorful story which becomes valued in its own right. The building succeeds by seeming to fail.
“The slight misfit between old and new—the incongruity of eating your dinner in a brokerage hall—gives such places their special edge and drama…. ” Robert Campbell
Invention becomes a habit as you proceed.
“Why are old buildings more freeing?” They free you by constraining you.
It is much easier to continue than to begin. Less money is needed, as well as less time, and fewer people are involved, so fewer compromises are necessary. And you can do it by stages while using the space. The building already has a story; all you have to do is add the interesting next chapter.
What about previous improvements and additions to an old building that might be seen as violating its original intention and integrity? Current preservationist doctrine says to respect them; they are a valid part of the building’s history. Clem Labine takes a pragmatic approach: “If it works, and it’s built well, and it’s a nice example of whatever it was intended to be, and it’s not getting in the way, then I say leave it.”
Invention becomes a habit as you proceed.
“Why are old buildings more freeing?” They free you by constraining you.
It is much easier to continue than to begin. Less money is needed, as well as less time, and fewer people are involved, so fewer compromises are necessary. And you can do it by stages while using the space. The building already has a story; all you have to do is add the interesting next chapter.
What about previous improvements and additions to an old building that might be seen as violating its original intention and integrity? Current preservationist doctrine says to respect them; they are a valid part of the building’s history. Clem Labine takes a pragmatic approach: “If it works, and it’s built well, and it’s a nice example of whatever it was intended to be, and it’s not getting in the way, then I say leave it.”
Warehouses and factories that were built between 1860 and 1930 are endlessly adaptable. They are broad, raw space—clear-spanned or widely columned, with good natural illumination and ventilation and high ceilings of 12 to 18 feet. The floors, built strong enough for storage or to hold heavy machinery, can handle any new use. Their heavy timbers and exposed brick appeal to the modern eye. Architectural ornament, if any, is likely to be modest and therefore appreciated. The buildings are honest, generic, sound, and common. They welcome any use from corporate headquarters to live/work studios. The modern equivalents of these buildings—the windowless tilt-up concrete structures out on the edge of town—have nothing like the adaptivity of the old brick warehouses.
Adaptive use is the destiny of most buildings, but the subject is not taught in architectural schools. Any kind of remodeling skills are avoided in the schools because they seem so unheroic, and the prospect of remodeling or rehabilitation happening later to one’s new building is even more taboo. Predictably paralyzed buildings are the result.
The subject would not be how to make new buildings look like old ones. It would be: how to design new buildings that will endear themselves to preservationists sixty years from now. Take all that a century of sophisticated building preservation has learned about materials, space-planning, scale, mutability, adaptivity, functional tradition, functional originality, and sheer flash, and apply it to new construction.
The wisdom acquired looking backward must be translated into wisdom looking forward.
The subject would not be how to make new buildings look like old ones. It would be: how to design new buildings that will endear themselves to preservationists sixty years from now. Take all that a century of sophisticated building preservation has learned about materials, space-planning, scale, mutability, adaptivity, functional tradition, functional originality, and sheer flash, and apply it to new construction.
The wisdom acquired looking backward must be translated into wisdom looking forward.
Chapter 8
No wonder people get in a permanent state of denial about the need for building maintenance. It is all about negatives, never about rewards. Doing it is a pain. Not doing it can be catastrophic. A constant draining expense, it never makes money. You could say it does save money in the long run, but even that is a negative because you never see the saving in any accountable way.
Since the downward spiral of dilapidation can accelerate so quickly, the trick is to keep a building from entering the spiral at all.
One is “preventive maintenance”—routinely servicing materials and systems in the building before they fail, thereby saving considerable expense and greatly extending the life of the building. The other is designing and constructing the building in such a way that it doesn’t need a lot of maintenance.
Incompetent design often is matched by hurried, shoddy construction, which can be concealed or can get by on being just good enough, just long enough. A building scientist I talked to, Terry Brennan, observed that builders now don’t take the time to test and tune a new building.
The Eiffel Tower’s lasting message to architecture is: exposed structure can be gorgeous. Pompidou’s lasting message: never expose services.
The trend in construction during this century has been toward ever-lighter framing, at least in America, with the result that buildings look and feel increasingly like movie sets: impressive to the eye, flimsy to the touch, and incapable of aging well. Only the buildings that are aggressive about energy conservation have countered the trend, with their thicker, well-insulated walls and carefully airtight construction. European houses, one hears, are still being built robustly, often of masonry. They cost 50 percent more than American homes to build, but they make that up in saved maintenance expenses over the first fifteen years, after which they are ever more economical than their American equivalents. European families think in generations while Americans are still trying to master decades.
Leon Battista Alberti, inspirer of architects, lamented in the 15th century, “Rain is always prepared to wreak mischief, and never fails to exploit even the least opening to do some harm: by its subtlety it infiltrates, by softening it corrupts, and by its persistence it undermines the whole strength of the building, until it eventually brings ruin and destruction on the entire work.”
A building’s most important organ of health is its roof. Roof effectiveness is determined most by its pitch and shape, next by its detailing, next by its materials, and last by its look, which is irrelevant.
Modernist architects bought into flat roofs as a standard idiom because they were new and radical (back then). They were consistent with the idea of building-as-machine-for-living, and they were seen as ultimately flexible—you could put a stairwell and skylight any place you wanted. ... In theory, flat roofs can work if the covering surface is a perfect membrane. In practice they fail because the membrane isn’t perfect.
The worst of it is, when water comes through a flat roof, you can’t tell where the leak is because the water travels great distances hidden in the roof, ceilings, and walls before visible damage shows up. (In a pitched roof, damage is limited to the area, usually visible or traceable, just below the leak.)
The easiest solution, and a common one, is just put in a pitched roof over the old flat one. It seems obvious, but people keep having to rediscover it: pitched roofs shed water well. Also, they provide a volume of air under the roof that absorbs radiant heat and water vapor and vents them to the outside. That space can be used for storage and for service equipment that otherwise would be outside in the weather or down in the building bothering people.
Built-in gutters look nice, but they often wind up leaking into the walls. ... Much better are the standard clunky hanging metal gutters.
Hand-crafted skylights always leak; factory-built almost never do. A seldom-utilized but highly important roof element is color, the lighter the better.
The 100-year-plus materials are lead, tile, slate, and metal. ... Tile and slate are heavy, expensive, and sometimes breakable, but they are fireproof and beautiful, and they will last the life of most buildings (often much longer, since they can be recycled).
The question is this: do you want a material that looks bad before it acts bad, like shingles or clapboard, or one that acts bad long before it looks bad, like vinyl siding? What you want in materials is a quality of forgivingness. Shingles and clapboard expand and contract comfortably with temperature extremes, they let water vapor through, they show you when they’re getting worn, and they’re easy to replace piecemeal.
The attraction of traditional materials such as shingles and clapboard is more than just aesthetic. Their whole use cycle is a highly evolved system of trade skills, reliable supply sources and routes, generations-deep familiarity, and even a market for reuse of durable materials such as slates, tiles, bricks, and timbers. The problems of traditional materials are thoroughly understood, and the solutions are equally well known. Maintenance is no mystery. In some cases maintenance can be a matter of steady improvement, as with the now-unfashionable use of whitewash on masonry or stucco walls. In the days when medieval castle walls were routinely brightened inside inside with fresh whitewash, it was said that the whitewash “fed the stonework.” It did, and it does so to this day on the dazzling rubble-and-stucco buildings of the Greek islands which are required by local law to get a new coat of whitewash annually. The lime or chalk in the whitewash fills hairline cracks before they expand and helps keep water out.
Aluminum siding hides sins and gains only the illusion of lower maintenance.
Just as any building over a hundred years old is declared to be beautiful, any venerable material is given the same courtesy. New materials are unproven, by definition. Like most experiments, they tend to fail. If the experiment is the whole exterior of a highly visible building, they fail big.
Intelligently designed exterior walls employ what is poetically called “rainscreen” design, which assumes that water will occasionally get through the exterior layer, but it is intercepted and quickly returned to the outside. The multiple layers of shingles, clapboards, and cavity-wall masonry all work that way. Redundancy of function is always more reliable than attempts at perfection, which time treats cruelly.
The life of a timber frame is at least 300 years, and some over 1,000 years old survive.” Even if the building has to be demolished for economic reasons, the timbers have salvage value in the flourishing old-timbers market, because they can be easily disassembled and reassembled.
All brick walls need is to be repointed (the outer 3/4 inch of the mortar joints replaced) every sixty to one hundred years.
That is, it was after he had coated the two most weatherly walls with clear silicon seal and had one whole course of bricks near the ground damp-proofed by silicon injection.
“Bricks are heavenly,” says contractor Matisse Enzer, “because they require relatively little technology to create, build with, and modify. Bricks allow a wonderful variety of patterns and degrees of softness-hardness, permanence-temporariness. Most of all, they are intuitively obvious.”
Bricks manage time beautifully. They can last nearly forever. Their rough surface takes a handsome patina that keeps improving for centuries. Walls of brick invite and then record alterations. You can read in the bricks that an original arched window was later bricked in, then was partially opened and extended to a wide doorway with a stone lintel, then was narrowed a bit, and so on. Recycled brick is considered to have aesthetic as well as economic virtue. The mortar-mottled look of reused brick is so valued that Americans often fake it with blotchy white paint on new brick. The British don’t do that. But many of the samples at London’s brick library offer fake patina or a fake handmade look, and many a medieval English structure prominently displayed recycled Roman brick.
Brian Eno suggests, “Stained concrete and dirty steel will look rather quaint and friendly and welcoming, like exposed brick does now.” [called it :]
Roofs should be as close to no-maintenance as possible, but walls, it appears, are better if they’re low-maintenance rather than no-maintenance.
“It’s one thing with a building if it’s going downhill and you know you can fix it and bring it into a perfect state, but if it’s generally starting to go downhill, and you know that it’s not going to last more than thirty years, then the motivation is not there.
“Large-lump development is based on the idea of replacement. Piecemeal growth is based on the idea of repair. Since replacement means consumption of resources, while repair means conservation of resources, it is easy to see that piecemeal growth is the sounder of the two from an ecological point of view.” —Christopher Alexander
Maintenance, in this light, is learning. ... The three things that change a building most are markets, money, and water.
In the best operations, still rare, any responsible person in the building can send a work request direct to the maintenance people and get a quick response, and the facilities manager reports directly to the president. Buildings in general should imitate the practice of factories, where the building itself is considered to be the company’s most basic and expensive tool, and it is treated with respect and close attention as a profit center.
If the as-builts aren’t updated constantly, each bit of repair or remodeling, each new contractor, each change of property management makes the plans more misleading.
Too much is invisible—the pressure regulator in the gas meter, the rot in the walls, the location of the short circuit. Ventilation is especially elusive.
Manufacturers eager to sell electronic products are beginning to produce a variety of systems to sense and report incipient maintenance problems. Buildings will become automatically self-diagnosing like an office copier or an airplane, and that’s fine. But I’d like to see building designers take on problem transparency as a design goal. Use materials that smell bad when they get wet. Build in inspection windows and hatches. Expose the parts of service systems that are likeliest to fail.
Maintenance tasks are divided into “preventive” and “corrective.” In-house maintenance staffs are on call 24 hours a day, and all working equipment is kept in good-as-new condition. So far as I know, ships and hospitals have never been studied as design exemplars for other kinds of buildings.
Maybe the trick for homeowners is to mix serious and frivolous chores: replace the air filter in the furnace, then go putter in the garden.
One is “preventive maintenance”—routinely servicing materials and systems in the building before they fail, thereby saving considerable expense and greatly extending the life of the building. The other is designing and constructing the building in such a way that it doesn’t need a lot of maintenance.
Incompetent design often is matched by hurried, shoddy construction, which can be concealed or can get by on being just good enough, just long enough. A building scientist I talked to, Terry Brennan, observed that builders now don’t take the time to test and tune a new building.
The Eiffel Tower’s lasting message to architecture is: exposed structure can be gorgeous. Pompidou’s lasting message: never expose services.
The trend in construction during this century has been toward ever-lighter framing, at least in America, with the result that buildings look and feel increasingly like movie sets: impressive to the eye, flimsy to the touch, and incapable of aging well. Only the buildings that are aggressive about energy conservation have countered the trend, with their thicker, well-insulated walls and carefully airtight construction. European houses, one hears, are still being built robustly, often of masonry. They cost 50 percent more than American homes to build, but they make that up in saved maintenance expenses over the first fifteen years, after which they are ever more economical than their American equivalents. European families think in generations while Americans are still trying to master decades.
Leon Battista Alberti, inspirer of architects, lamented in the 15th century, “Rain is always prepared to wreak mischief, and never fails to exploit even the least opening to do some harm: by its subtlety it infiltrates, by softening it corrupts, and by its persistence it undermines the whole strength of the building, until it eventually brings ruin and destruction on the entire work.”
A building’s most important organ of health is its roof. Roof effectiveness is determined most by its pitch and shape, next by its detailing, next by its materials, and last by its look, which is irrelevant.
Modernist architects bought into flat roofs as a standard idiom because they were new and radical (back then). They were consistent with the idea of building-as-machine-for-living, and they were seen as ultimately flexible—you could put a stairwell and skylight any place you wanted. ... In theory, flat roofs can work if the covering surface is a perfect membrane. In practice they fail because the membrane isn’t perfect.
The worst of it is, when water comes through a flat roof, you can’t tell where the leak is because the water travels great distances hidden in the roof, ceilings, and walls before visible damage shows up. (In a pitched roof, damage is limited to the area, usually visible or traceable, just below the leak.)
The easiest solution, and a common one, is just put in a pitched roof over the old flat one. It seems obvious, but people keep having to rediscover it: pitched roofs shed water well. Also, they provide a volume of air under the roof that absorbs radiant heat and water vapor and vents them to the outside. That space can be used for storage and for service equipment that otherwise would be outside in the weather or down in the building bothering people.
Built-in gutters look nice, but they often wind up leaking into the walls. ... Much better are the standard clunky hanging metal gutters.
Hand-crafted skylights always leak; factory-built almost never do. A seldom-utilized but highly important roof element is color, the lighter the better.
The 100-year-plus materials are lead, tile, slate, and metal. ... Tile and slate are heavy, expensive, and sometimes breakable, but they are fireproof and beautiful, and they will last the life of most buildings (often much longer, since they can be recycled).
The question is this: do you want a material that looks bad before it acts bad, like shingles or clapboard, or one that acts bad long before it looks bad, like vinyl siding? What you want in materials is a quality of forgivingness. Shingles and clapboard expand and contract comfortably with temperature extremes, they let water vapor through, they show you when they’re getting worn, and they’re easy to replace piecemeal.
The attraction of traditional materials such as shingles and clapboard is more than just aesthetic. Their whole use cycle is a highly evolved system of trade skills, reliable supply sources and routes, generations-deep familiarity, and even a market for reuse of durable materials such as slates, tiles, bricks, and timbers. The problems of traditional materials are thoroughly understood, and the solutions are equally well known. Maintenance is no mystery. In some cases maintenance can be a matter of steady improvement, as with the now-unfashionable use of whitewash on masonry or stucco walls. In the days when medieval castle walls were routinely brightened inside inside with fresh whitewash, it was said that the whitewash “fed the stonework.” It did, and it does so to this day on the dazzling rubble-and-stucco buildings of the Greek islands which are required by local law to get a new coat of whitewash annually. The lime or chalk in the whitewash fills hairline cracks before they expand and helps keep water out.
Aluminum siding hides sins and gains only the illusion of lower maintenance.
Just as any building over a hundred years old is declared to be beautiful, any venerable material is given the same courtesy. New materials are unproven, by definition. Like most experiments, they tend to fail. If the experiment is the whole exterior of a highly visible building, they fail big.
Intelligently designed exterior walls employ what is poetically called “rainscreen” design, which assumes that water will occasionally get through the exterior layer, but it is intercepted and quickly returned to the outside. The multiple layers of shingles, clapboards, and cavity-wall masonry all work that way. Redundancy of function is always more reliable than attempts at perfection, which time treats cruelly.
The life of a timber frame is at least 300 years, and some over 1,000 years old survive.” Even if the building has to be demolished for economic reasons, the timbers have salvage value in the flourishing old-timbers market, because they can be easily disassembled and reassembled.
All brick walls need is to be repointed (the outer 3/4 inch of the mortar joints replaced) every sixty to one hundred years.
That is, it was after he had coated the two most weatherly walls with clear silicon seal and had one whole course of bricks near the ground damp-proofed by silicon injection.
“Bricks are heavenly,” says contractor Matisse Enzer, “because they require relatively little technology to create, build with, and modify. Bricks allow a wonderful variety of patterns and degrees of softness-hardness, permanence-temporariness. Most of all, they are intuitively obvious.”
Bricks manage time beautifully. They can last nearly forever. Their rough surface takes a handsome patina that keeps improving for centuries. Walls of brick invite and then record alterations. You can read in the bricks that an original arched window was later bricked in, then was partially opened and extended to a wide doorway with a stone lintel, then was narrowed a bit, and so on. Recycled brick is considered to have aesthetic as well as economic virtue. The mortar-mottled look of reused brick is so valued that Americans often fake it with blotchy white paint on new brick. The British don’t do that. But many of the samples at London’s brick library offer fake patina or a fake handmade look, and many a medieval English structure prominently displayed recycled Roman brick.
Brian Eno suggests, “Stained concrete and dirty steel will look rather quaint and friendly and welcoming, like exposed brick does now.” [called it :]
Roofs should be as close to no-maintenance as possible, but walls, it appears, are better if they’re low-maintenance rather than no-maintenance.
“It’s one thing with a building if it’s going downhill and you know you can fix it and bring it into a perfect state, but if it’s generally starting to go downhill, and you know that it’s not going to last more than thirty years, then the motivation is not there.
“Large-lump development is based on the idea of replacement. Piecemeal growth is based on the idea of repair. Since replacement means consumption of resources, while repair means conservation of resources, it is easy to see that piecemeal growth is the sounder of the two from an ecological point of view.” —Christopher Alexander
Maintenance, in this light, is learning. ... The three things that change a building most are markets, money, and water.
In the best operations, still rare, any responsible person in the building can send a work request direct to the maintenance people and get a quick response, and the facilities manager reports directly to the president. Buildings in general should imitate the practice of factories, where the building itself is considered to be the company’s most basic and expensive tool, and it is treated with respect and close attention as a profit center.
If the as-builts aren’t updated constantly, each bit of repair or remodeling, each new contractor, each change of property management makes the plans more misleading.
Too much is invisible—the pressure regulator in the gas meter, the rot in the walls, the location of the short circuit. Ventilation is especially elusive.
Manufacturers eager to sell electronic products are beginning to produce a variety of systems to sense and report incipient maintenance problems. Buildings will become automatically self-diagnosing like an office copier or an airplane, and that’s fine. But I’d like to see building designers take on problem transparency as a design goal. Use materials that smell bad when they get wet. Build in inspection windows and hatches. Expose the parts of service systems that are likeliest to fail.
Maintenance tasks are divided into “preventive” and “corrective.” In-house maintenance staffs are on call 24 hours a day, and all working equipment is kept in good-as-new condition. So far as I know, ships and hospitals have never been studied as design exemplars for other kinds of buildings.
Maybe the trick for homeowners is to mix serious and frivolous chores: replace the air filter in the furnace, then go putter in the garden.
Against the flow of this constant entropy, maintenance people must swim always upstream, progressless against the current like a watchful trout. The only satisfaction they can get from their work is to do it well. The measure of success in their labors is that the result is invisible, unnoticed. Thanks to them, everything is the same as it ever was.
The romance of maintenance is that it has none. Its joys are quiet ones. There is a certain high calling in the steady tending to a ship, to a garden, to a building. One is participating physically in a deep, long life.
Chapter 9
In the eyes of tastemakers, old vernacular is lovely. New vernacular (including everything we might call Low Road) is unlovely.
The existence of plans on paper is an indicator of cultural weakening. The amount of detail in a plan is an exact measure of the degree of cultural disharmony; the more minimal the plan, the more completely the architectural idea abides in the separate minds of architect and client.
Vernacular building traditions have the attention span to incorporate generational knowledge about long-term problems such as maintaining and growing a building over time. ... Then they can concentrate all their design ingenuity strictly on new problems, if any.
The heart of vernacular design is about form, not style. Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student.
The lesson for the ages from three-aisled structures is that columns articulate space in a way that makes people feel comfortable making and remaking walls and rooms anchored to the columns.
Hubka carefully distinguishes the vernacular builder’s process of design, in which existing models are conceptually taken apart and then reassembled in new buildings, from the professional designer’s manner of working, in which elements from disparate sources are combined to solve design problems anew. He characterizes the vernacular architect’s process as “preconstrained”; by choosing to limit architectural ideas to what is available in the local context, the vernacular architect reduces the design task to manageable proportions. Although this mode of composition seems superficially to generate monotonously similar structures, it allows in fact for considerable individuality within its boundaries, permitting the designer to focus on skillful solution of particular problems rather than on reinventing whole forms.
The most original hardware’s always at the top of the house. It got the least amount of use, and nobody cares if it doesn’t look great, so it stays there.
“Stucco can be a real problem for people, because they don’t like it aesthetically, and so they take it off, not realizing that usually stucco went on to solve a problem or to cover up messy aesthetics. One reason for stucco is, if you’ve got water penetration problems, it’s the cheapest, fastest fix. In the 1830s it was popular to stucco a building anyway, so often they were built with crummy brick, or broken brick, reused brick. People later spend thousands of dollars to tear all the stucco off, and then they’ve got a wall that’s worthless and they’ve got to put it all right back up.” Orlando Ridout
...said the main survivors were masonry buildings, even though they were only 15 percent of what was originally built.
One of the things that would be worth investigating in contemporary buildings is the informal pathways of influence. ... Even in matters of style, some elements seem to have lives of their own, like classical columns. A decorative Post-Modern column refers to the Beaux Arts column, which referred to the Renaissance column, which referred to the classical Roman column, which referred to the classical Greek column of stone, which referred to the earlier wooden column made of a tree.
Something evidently drives continuity between buildings at a mythic level. Masonry fireplaces and chimneys have been utterly obsolete since the popularization of the Franklin stove by the 1830s, yet 160 years later every house that can afford it still has at least a facsimile of a masonry fireplace and chimney.
In the older world [of Europe], the public facilities tended to copy the private.
Grand hotels, which historians consider to be an American invention, introduced gas light, spring mattresses, running water and central heating by mid-19th century. Guests soon took insistence on such luxuries home with them.
Carl Petersen devised these buildings for several American oil companies from 1914 to 1970, and his designs were copied by the competition. Suburban “ranch houses,” which defined the American 1950s, largely came from a little-known Californian named Cliff May. For years his designs wouldn’t sell. Then a contractor advised him to stop trying to hide the driveway and garage and instead flaunt them, because Americans love showing off their car.
It may be that one of the reasons architects are so driven toward surface originality is that their industry compels them to uniformity throughout the rest of a building.
Children draw houses as unpreventably as they draw faces. ... In its original profusion in coastal Massachusetts (including Cape Cod) the house was built by people dealing with very little money and a lot of wind. ... The Cape is small, solid, simple, cheap, growable, and carries a big roof. It looks respectable but stands apart from fashion, secure in the conservatism of its Yankee vernacular background.
Bungalow scholar Clay Lancaster claims that the bungalow let America escape from the dead weight of Victorian and Queen Anne style: The bungalow vogue made new and definite contributions to the evolution of home planning in the direction of informality and unpretentiousness, use of common, natural materials, integration of house and landscape setting, simplification of design that became closely allied to practical requirements, and concentration on livability…. The American house during the bungalow period became lighter in construction, more flexible and open of plan, and less fussy in its furnishings.
People who live in those old bungalows today say there’s not much occasion to remodel or demolish them because they work so well as is. They’re a little cramped and dark, but the open layout of rooms with space-saving built-in benches and inglenooks keeps them comfortable.
The low initial cost and severe boxiness of mobile homes invites elaboration.
Assembling a mobile home compound has several advantages over just getting a bigger (double-wide) home. It costs less to start; it has better natural lighting; you can adapt better to family, financial, and site circumstances, and you get a nice enclosed courtyard after a while.
... “aesthetic of process.” ... however much buildings may be sold as a product, they are lived as a process.
... small invites the metamorphosis of growth.
The difference between style and form is the difference between a statement and a language. An architectural statement is limited to a few stylistic words and depends on originality for its impact, whereas a vernacular form unleashes the power of a whole, tested grammar.
The existence of plans on paper is an indicator of cultural weakening. The amount of detail in a plan is an exact measure of the degree of cultural disharmony; the more minimal the plan, the more completely the architectural idea abides in the separate minds of architect and client.
Vernacular building traditions have the attention span to incorporate generational knowledge about long-term problems such as maintaining and growing a building over time. ... Then they can concentrate all their design ingenuity strictly on new problems, if any.
The heart of vernacular design is about form, not style. Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student.
The lesson for the ages from three-aisled structures is that columns articulate space in a way that makes people feel comfortable making and remaking walls and rooms anchored to the columns.
Hubka carefully distinguishes the vernacular builder’s process of design, in which existing models are conceptually taken apart and then reassembled in new buildings, from the professional designer’s manner of working, in which elements from disparate sources are combined to solve design problems anew. He characterizes the vernacular architect’s process as “preconstrained”; by choosing to limit architectural ideas to what is available in the local context, the vernacular architect reduces the design task to manageable proportions. Although this mode of composition seems superficially to generate monotonously similar structures, it allows in fact for considerable individuality within its boundaries, permitting the designer to focus on skillful solution of particular problems rather than on reinventing whole forms.
The most original hardware’s always at the top of the house. It got the least amount of use, and nobody cares if it doesn’t look great, so it stays there.
“Stucco can be a real problem for people, because they don’t like it aesthetically, and so they take it off, not realizing that usually stucco went on to solve a problem or to cover up messy aesthetics. One reason for stucco is, if you’ve got water penetration problems, it’s the cheapest, fastest fix. In the 1830s it was popular to stucco a building anyway, so often they were built with crummy brick, or broken brick, reused brick. People later spend thousands of dollars to tear all the stucco off, and then they’ve got a wall that’s worthless and they’ve got to put it all right back up.” Orlando Ridout
...said the main survivors were masonry buildings, even though they were only 15 percent of what was originally built.
One of the things that would be worth investigating in contemporary buildings is the informal pathways of influence. ... Even in matters of style, some elements seem to have lives of their own, like classical columns. A decorative Post-Modern column refers to the Beaux Arts column, which referred to the Renaissance column, which referred to the classical Roman column, which referred to the classical Greek column of stone, which referred to the earlier wooden column made of a tree.
Something evidently drives continuity between buildings at a mythic level. Masonry fireplaces and chimneys have been utterly obsolete since the popularization of the Franklin stove by the 1830s, yet 160 years later every house that can afford it still has at least a facsimile of a masonry fireplace and chimney.
In the older world [of Europe], the public facilities tended to copy the private.
Grand hotels, which historians consider to be an American invention, introduced gas light, spring mattresses, running water and central heating by mid-19th century. Guests soon took insistence on such luxuries home with them.
Carl Petersen devised these buildings for several American oil companies from 1914 to 1970, and his designs were copied by the competition. Suburban “ranch houses,” which defined the American 1950s, largely came from a little-known Californian named Cliff May. For years his designs wouldn’t sell. Then a contractor advised him to stop trying to hide the driveway and garage and instead flaunt them, because Americans love showing off their car.
It may be that one of the reasons architects are so driven toward surface originality is that their industry compels them to uniformity throughout the rest of a building.
Children draw houses as unpreventably as they draw faces. ... In its original profusion in coastal Massachusetts (including Cape Cod) the house was built by people dealing with very little money and a lot of wind. ... The Cape is small, solid, simple, cheap, growable, and carries a big roof. It looks respectable but stands apart from fashion, secure in the conservatism of its Yankee vernacular background.
Bungalow scholar Clay Lancaster claims that the bungalow let America escape from the dead weight of Victorian and Queen Anne style: The bungalow vogue made new and definite contributions to the evolution of home planning in the direction of informality and unpretentiousness, use of common, natural materials, integration of house and landscape setting, simplification of design that became closely allied to practical requirements, and concentration on livability…. The American house during the bungalow period became lighter in construction, more flexible and open of plan, and less fussy in its furnishings.
People who live in those old bungalows today say there’s not much occasion to remodel or demolish them because they work so well as is. They’re a little cramped and dark, but the open layout of rooms with space-saving built-in benches and inglenooks keeps them comfortable.
The low initial cost and severe boxiness of mobile homes invites elaboration.
Assembling a mobile home compound has several advantages over just getting a bigger (double-wide) home. It costs less to start; it has better natural lighting; you can adapt better to family, financial, and site circumstances, and you get a nice enclosed courtyard after a while.
... “aesthetic of process.” ... however much buildings may be sold as a product, they are lived as a process.
... small invites the metamorphosis of growth.
The difference between style and form is the difference between a statement and a language. An architectural statement is limited to a few stylistic words and depends on originality for its impact, whereas a vernacular form unleashes the power of a whole, tested grammar.
Chapter 10
This “inside-out” design approach was thrilling, but it made the profound mistake of taking a snapshot of the high-rate-of-change “organic life” within a building and immobilizing it in a confining carapace—the expensive, low-rate-of-change Structure and Skin of the building. Too eager to please the moment, over-specificity crippled all future moments. It was the image of organic, not the reality. The credo “form follows function” was a beautiful lie. Form froze function.
Function melts form. You can stupefy a building all you want and it will still learn.
Fantasy palls, but reality sustains.
Home is about the familiar, about gravity, about falling back into the self after being dispersed and overextended in the world. ... (I’ve come home and I am home.)
The combat of extrovert fantasy and introvert reality was fought with fierce unconsciousness in many a 1950s home.
Architects weren’t interested in electricity, but women and builders were—women for the convenience of use, builders for the convenience of construction.
Each stage proposed the next, driven inexorably by climate. Open porches still thrive south of the Mason-Dixon line, but they are absorbed into the house everywhere north—fantasy surrendering to reality. The social climate also changed. The street became loud with cars and trucks, and passers-by diminished. Inside, air conditioning and television beckoned. The porch was functionally obsolete by the 1960s.
When the family looks around for some place to expand, which it always does, the easiest, cheapest, and quietest direction (no building inspectors, please) is into existing “raw” space whose initial function is deemed dispensable—the porch and the garage.
...because so little was left of the structure after all those grand changes had been cut in. Folks move bathroom fixtures around, which means moving pipes around, which means drilling or notching more holes in the floor joists. ... It’s a good example of the destructive power of money and of the way differently paced parts of a building can tear at each other.
Most painful of all is when the expensive improvement turns out to be worse than what it replaced. In recent decades many older houses in the American south that used to be up on wood or masonry stilts were decreed by their owners to look “poor” that way, so the open sides were boarded in. This cut off ventilation—the original reason for the stilts, forgotten when the local vernacular pattern language died—and termites and rot quickly brought the buildings down.
Another frequent error is installing built-in furniture. It works beautifully when the goal is to save space, as in bungalows, but it petrifies rooms around one ephemeral function.
The trick is to remodel in such a way as to make later remodeling unnecessary or at least easy. Keep furniture mobile. Keep wiring, plumbing, and ducts accessible.
... the improvements and corrections that people make have little to do with style and everything to do with amenities. ... Low maintenance is an amenity.
... “finishing is never finished.” ... You’re down to detail, and details are endless.
Function melts form. You can stupefy a building all you want and it will still learn.
Fantasy palls, but reality sustains.
Home is about the familiar, about gravity, about falling back into the self after being dispersed and overextended in the world. ... (I’ve come home and I am home.)
The combat of extrovert fantasy and introvert reality was fought with fierce unconsciousness in many a 1950s home.
Architects weren’t interested in electricity, but women and builders were—women for the convenience of use, builders for the convenience of construction.
Each stage proposed the next, driven inexorably by climate. Open porches still thrive south of the Mason-Dixon line, but they are absorbed into the house everywhere north—fantasy surrendering to reality. The social climate also changed. The street became loud with cars and trucks, and passers-by diminished. Inside, air conditioning and television beckoned. The porch was functionally obsolete by the 1960s.
When the family looks around for some place to expand, which it always does, the easiest, cheapest, and quietest direction (no building inspectors, please) is into existing “raw” space whose initial function is deemed dispensable—the porch and the garage.
...because so little was left of the structure after all those grand changes had been cut in. Folks move bathroom fixtures around, which means moving pipes around, which means drilling or notching more holes in the floor joists. ... It’s a good example of the destructive power of money and of the way differently paced parts of a building can tear at each other.
Most painful of all is when the expensive improvement turns out to be worse than what it replaced. In recent decades many older houses in the American south that used to be up on wood or masonry stilts were decreed by their owners to look “poor” that way, so the open sides were boarded in. This cut off ventilation—the original reason for the stilts, forgotten when the local vernacular pattern language died—and termites and rot quickly brought the buildings down.
Another frequent error is installing built-in furniture. It works beautifully when the goal is to save space, as in bungalows, but it petrifies rooms around one ephemeral function.
The trick is to remodel in such a way as to make later remodeling unnecessary or at least easy. Keep furniture mobile. Keep wiring, plumbing, and ducts accessible.
... the improvements and corrections that people make have little to do with style and everything to do with amenities. ... Low maintenance is an amenity.
... “finishing is never finished.” ... You’re down to detail, and details are endless.
Inhabitation is a highly dynamic process, little studied. There’s a term floating around the fringes of biology that applies—“ecopoiesis”: the process of a system making a home for itself. The building and its occupants jointly are the new system. The dwelling and the dwellers must shape and reshape themselves to each other until there’s some kind of tolerable fit. It takes time and money that are seldom budgeted for. A building can be stillborn if it is too thoroughly finished and fitted out and isn’t given a chance to respond to the life moving into it.
A building is an organizational device, which means it is a communication device, which means that a certain volatility is always carving away at the physical building, making sure that whoever cooks the meals can chat with the family while cooking (kitchen walls melt) or that the boss can be alone on the telephone (cubicle walls suddenly rise to the ceiling). Teenagers isolate themselves, accounting departments drift to the periphery—both to get away from the hourly crises of action central. Often information itself is a cheaper fix than physical correction.
Satisficing doesn’t try to solve problems. It reduces them just enough.
The advantage of ad hoc, make-do solutions is that they are such a modest investment, they make it easy to improve further or to tweak back a bit. This dynamic, of course, is what makes so many “temporary” buildings become permanent. Being conspicuously and cheaply adjustable, they can wrap around any use demanded of them.
“Convenience defines what gets done,” observes software entrepreneur John Pearce. I might add that it defines how things get done.
Another advantage of satisficing is that it’s usually done by the occupants. Along with the efficient directness, you get a correct level of responsibility-taking. When local building adjustments are made by the local occupants, they “own” the improved space. The opposite happens when the occupants have to go through labyrinthine channels to get permission to make a change, and outside professionals are hired. Then the problem gets translated into one of interior design.
Interior designers never satisfice. They are paid to optimize, to make perfect.
In vernacular traditions, the inside and outside of a building were treated as one, but in the academic tradition they have been separated ever since the Renaissance, when sculptors specialized in the shape and exterior of grand buildings, and painters decorated the interiors.
Style cramps life, and life erodes style. All too soon the unified look is polluted by use, and it’s time to hire someone to supply another alien unity.
Paradoxically, habit is both the product of learning and the escape from learning. We learn in order not to learn. Habit is efficient; learning is messy and wasteful. Learning that doesn’t produce habit is a waste of time. Habit that does not resist learning is failing in its function of continuity and efficiency. Buildings keep being changed until they get to a point where they don’t have to be changed so much.
Far from threatening the routine, this kind of incremental refinement enshrines it always further. ... single-loop learning
double-loop learning ... the existing habit, no matter how perfectly refined, no longer serves the larger purpose.
While single-loop refines habit, and double-loop changes habits, learning-to-learn changes how we change habits.
Satisficing doesn’t try to solve problems. It reduces them just enough.
The advantage of ad hoc, make-do solutions is that they are such a modest investment, they make it easy to improve further or to tweak back a bit. This dynamic, of course, is what makes so many “temporary” buildings become permanent. Being conspicuously and cheaply adjustable, they can wrap around any use demanded of them.
“Convenience defines what gets done,” observes software entrepreneur John Pearce. I might add that it defines how things get done.
Another advantage of satisficing is that it’s usually done by the occupants. Along with the efficient directness, you get a correct level of responsibility-taking. When local building adjustments are made by the local occupants, they “own” the improved space. The opposite happens when the occupants have to go through labyrinthine channels to get permission to make a change, and outside professionals are hired. Then the problem gets translated into one of interior design.
Interior designers never satisfice. They are paid to optimize, to make perfect.
In vernacular traditions, the inside and outside of a building were treated as one, but in the academic tradition they have been separated ever since the Renaissance, when sculptors specialized in the shape and exterior of grand buildings, and painters decorated the interiors.
Style cramps life, and life erodes style. All too soon the unified look is polluted by use, and it’s time to hire someone to supply another alien unity.
Paradoxically, habit is both the product of learning and the escape from learning. We learn in order not to learn. Habit is efficient; learning is messy and wasteful. Learning that doesn’t produce habit is a waste of time. Habit that does not resist learning is failing in its function of continuity and efficiency. Buildings keep being changed until they get to a point where they don’t have to be changed so much.
Far from threatening the routine, this kind of incremental refinement enshrines it always further. ... single-loop learning
double-loop learning ... the existing habit, no matter how perfectly refined, no longer serves the larger purpose.
While single-loop refines habit, and double-loop changes habits, learning-to-learn changes how we change habits.
To change is to lose identity, yet to change is to be alive. Buildings partially resolve the paradox by offering the hierarchy of pace—you can fiddle with the Stuff and Space plan all you want while the Structure and Site remain solid and reliable.
Information equipment kept taking up more space and electricity, meanwhile displacing middle management, annihilating low-skill jobs, and increasing the use of specialists and technicians. “It’s such a restless, remorseless, destructive technology,” says Duffy, “it accelerates and destabilizes the whole process.” It was the arrival of the permanent earthquake of information technology that pushed most organizations into hiring facilities managers, many of whom began as computer and communication-system techs.
Though it inspired many other companies to adopt open office space plans, the test did not persuade DuPont. Managers complained they did not have enough privacy, and no great improvement in costs or flexibility was detected. The movement took off anyway.
What is seldom noticed is that raised floor invites recabling by the office users, while dropped ceiling punishes it. ... It got to be standard because it was designed by professionals for professionals and assumed no incremental change and no handling by building dwellers. Liftable floor tiles also were designed by professionals, but incremental change by users was assumed.
Highrise developers and designers were quick to welcome the idea of the open office. They soon discovered that open offices yielded a higher density of workers, hence higher space “efficiency” and higher rents. And all that openness permitted buildings to be much “deeper”—distances could be as great as 60 feet from the center of a floor out to the windowed edge of the building, again translating into higher efficiency.
Seeking to improve control led to loss of control.
What do the linked debacles of deep office buildings, sealed office buildings, and “smart” office buildings have in common? Each was a clever and comprehensive design solution, but each tried to solve just one primary problem and acted as if the problem would hold still over time.
When the trends moved on, the buildings were left standing, good at something that no one wanted any more. Their failure is the failure of optimization as a design strategy.
The new northern European buildings, instead of being 120 feet deep, are 30 feet deep. They’re like hotels—millions of individual rooms, each with a window.” The buildings typically are only five stories high, with lots of public circulation (70 percent “efficient”).
... the most likely place for a piece of furniture to move after it has moved once is back to where it was before.
In “cave-and-commons” offices, both privacy and easy access to other people are treated as crucial amenities.
Small groups adapt more quickly and accurately than large groups, and individuals are even quicker than that. Smart organizations, therefore, push control of space as far “down” the organization as they can. It starts with the kind of space that is leased. Rather than moving into offices already fitted out by some spec developer, adaptive organizations prefer either raw space in an old building or raw space in a new building.
In organizations and in buildings, evolution is always and necessarily surprising. You cannot predict or control adaptivity. All you can do is make room for it—room at the bottom. Let the mistakes happen small and disposable. Adaptivity is a finegrained process. If you let it flourish, you get a wild ride, but you also get sustainability for the long term. You’ll never be overspecified at the wrong scale.
Have any office buildings proven adaptable over the decades on purpose? Some have managed by accident, such as the Chrysler Building (1930) and Empire State Building (1931) in New York. Their high ceilings, daylit shallow depth, and openable windows turned from embarrassments back into virtues without benefit of intent. The severely ecological architect William McDonough imitates them with his insistence that any new office building he designs be potentially convertible into housing, since he regards that as the most fundamental use of buildings, for which there will always be a need and which always guides you toward humane design. ... Modest depth, high ceilings, operable windows, massive construction, raised floor rather than dropped ceiling for services, and individually controllable amenities such as window awnings.
... adaptivity too can be overspecified.
architect-hater named John R. Freeman, an hydraulic engineer by trade, who admired the design of New England’s mills and factories and aimed to base MIT’s new campus on their honesty, pragmatism, and massive connectedness.
Perfection of detail is the enemy of change.
Flexibility is all-important because departmental space is reassigned constantly by the university. Some 5 percent of the university buildings change usage every year, which means a complete turnover every twenty years. Many areas started as laboratories, then converted to offices when technology obsolesced the lab, then became classrooms, then reverted to a new generation of laboratory. Overall the usage is 40 percent labs, 40 percent offices, 7 percent classrooms. This kind of flexibility is administratively possible because, unlike at other campuses, departments do not have their own buildings. [MIT main building]
... areas which are physical cul-de-sacs soon become intellectual cul-de-sacs.
Current planning documents at MIT emphasize future building adaptivity based on: “loose fit”—generous dimensions that permit easy change of Services and usages without having to change Structure; robust construction, so that a present office can later become a lab with heavy equipment or even a library, and horizontality. This last comes from MIT’s Thomas Allen, a researcher on the influence of space organization on innovation: “Both social research and experience at MIT demonstrate the benefits of buildings which are horizontally organized and low enough for stairs to be the predominant method of vertical circulation. ... ”
“Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.” —Antonio Machado
Though it inspired many other companies to adopt open office space plans, the test did not persuade DuPont. Managers complained they did not have enough privacy, and no great improvement in costs or flexibility was detected. The movement took off anyway.
What is seldom noticed is that raised floor invites recabling by the office users, while dropped ceiling punishes it. ... It got to be standard because it was designed by professionals for professionals and assumed no incremental change and no handling by building dwellers. Liftable floor tiles also were designed by professionals, but incremental change by users was assumed.
Highrise developers and designers were quick to welcome the idea of the open office. They soon discovered that open offices yielded a higher density of workers, hence higher space “efficiency” and higher rents. And all that openness permitted buildings to be much “deeper”—distances could be as great as 60 feet from the center of a floor out to the windowed edge of the building, again translating into higher efficiency.
Seeking to improve control led to loss of control.
What do the linked debacles of deep office buildings, sealed office buildings, and “smart” office buildings have in common? Each was a clever and comprehensive design solution, but each tried to solve just one primary problem and acted as if the problem would hold still over time.
When the trends moved on, the buildings were left standing, good at something that no one wanted any more. Their failure is the failure of optimization as a design strategy.
The new northern European buildings, instead of being 120 feet deep, are 30 feet deep. They’re like hotels—millions of individual rooms, each with a window.” The buildings typically are only five stories high, with lots of public circulation (70 percent “efficient”).
... the most likely place for a piece of furniture to move after it has moved once is back to where it was before.
In “cave-and-commons” offices, both privacy and easy access to other people are treated as crucial amenities.
Small groups adapt more quickly and accurately than large groups, and individuals are even quicker than that. Smart organizations, therefore, push control of space as far “down” the organization as they can. It starts with the kind of space that is leased. Rather than moving into offices already fitted out by some spec developer, adaptive organizations prefer either raw space in an old building or raw space in a new building.
In organizations and in buildings, evolution is always and necessarily surprising. You cannot predict or control adaptivity. All you can do is make room for it—room at the bottom. Let the mistakes happen small and disposable. Adaptivity is a finegrained process. If you let it flourish, you get a wild ride, but you also get sustainability for the long term. You’ll never be overspecified at the wrong scale.
Have any office buildings proven adaptable over the decades on purpose? Some have managed by accident, such as the Chrysler Building (1930) and Empire State Building (1931) in New York. Their high ceilings, daylit shallow depth, and openable windows turned from embarrassments back into virtues without benefit of intent. The severely ecological architect William McDonough imitates them with his insistence that any new office building he designs be potentially convertible into housing, since he regards that as the most fundamental use of buildings, for which there will always be a need and which always guides you toward humane design. ... Modest depth, high ceilings, operable windows, massive construction, raised floor rather than dropped ceiling for services, and individually controllable amenities such as window awnings.
... adaptivity too can be overspecified.
architect-hater named John R. Freeman, an hydraulic engineer by trade, who admired the design of New England’s mills and factories and aimed to base MIT’s new campus on their honesty, pragmatism, and massive connectedness.
Perfection of detail is the enemy of change.
Flexibility is all-important because departmental space is reassigned constantly by the university. Some 5 percent of the university buildings change usage every year, which means a complete turnover every twenty years. Many areas started as laboratories, then converted to offices when technology obsolesced the lab, then became classrooms, then reverted to a new generation of laboratory. Overall the usage is 40 percent labs, 40 percent offices, 7 percent classrooms. This kind of flexibility is administratively possible because, unlike at other campuses, departments do not have their own buildings. [MIT main building]
... areas which are physical cul-de-sacs soon become intellectual cul-de-sacs.
Current planning documents at MIT emphasize future building adaptivity based on: “loose fit”—generous dimensions that permit easy change of Services and usages without having to change Structure; robust construction, so that a present office can later become a lab with heavy equipment or even a library, and horizontality. This last comes from MIT’s Thomas Allen, a researcher on the influence of space organization on innovation: “Both social research and experience at MIT demonstrate the benefits of buildings which are horizontally organized and low enough for stairs to be the predominant method of vertical circulation. ... ”
“Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.” —Antonio Machado
Chapter 11
All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong. … Buildings can be designed and used so it doesn’t matter when they’re wrong.
Where a plan is based on prediction, a strategy is designed to encompass unforeseeably changing conditions.
Anita Lewis-Antes notes that the generous width of the corridors, designed for conviviality, turned out to be essential for materials-handling on flatbeds and glassware carts (that was a surprise not designed for), and the labs designed to share technical equipment—for conviviality as well as economy—were able to absorb many more users than expected when the building population grew from the anticipated 100 people to 300.
Where a plan is based on prediction, a strategy is designed to encompass unforeseeably changing conditions.
Anita Lewis-Antes notes that the generous width of the corridors, designed for conviviality, turned out to be essential for materials-handling on flatbeds and glassware carts (that was a surprise not designed for), and the labs designed to share technical equipment—for conviviality as well as economy—were able to absorb many more users than expected when the building population grew from the anticipated 100 people to 300.
The great vice of programming is that it over-responds to the immediate needs of the immediate users, leaving future users out of the picture, making the building all too optimal to the present and maladaptive for the future. An old saw of biology decrees, “The more adapted an organism to present conditions, the less adaptable it can be to unknown future conditions.”
Vision is generic, and generic is adaptive.
The goal is to develop scenarios that are both plausible and surprising—shocking, in fact. …. Let people top each other in imagining terrible and delightful things that might happen, exacerbated by the crucial uncertainties.
Naming the scenarios is important. The probability of one or another happening is not useful to explore, except for including one or more “wildcard” scenarios considered to be quite unlikely but horrifying if they occur.
The job of scenario planning is to question whether a building is really needed at all and, if it is, to convert it from a potential prison into a flexible tool.
“To an experienced board member, when you see a business getting a big new building, it’s a bad sign.” … The trick is to frame the building question in a larger context, so instead of leaping to “We need a bigger building,” really explore the more general problem, “We need to handle our growth.”
The worst mistakes come not from wrong decisions but from not doing the right thing that never occurred to anybody to do.
debug the building
The goal is to develop scenarios that are both plausible and surprising—shocking, in fact. …. Let people top each other in imagining terrible and delightful things that might happen, exacerbated by the crucial uncertainties.
Naming the scenarios is important. The probability of one or another happening is not useful to explore, except for including one or more “wildcard” scenarios considered to be quite unlikely but horrifying if they occur.
The job of scenario planning is to question whether a building is really needed at all and, if it is, to convert it from a potential prison into a flexible tool.
“To an experienced board member, when you see a business getting a big new building, it’s a bad sign.” … The trick is to frame the building question in a larger context, so instead of leaping to “We need a bigger building,” really explore the more general problem, “We need to handle our growth.”
The worst mistakes come not from wrong decisions but from not doing the right thing that never occurred to anybody to do.
debug the building
What might be the rules of thumb for strategic building designers? Some can be borrowed directly from chess players: “Favor moves that increase options; shy from moves that end well but require cutting off choices; work from strong positions that have many adjoining strong positions.” More specific to buildings: overbuild Structure so that heavier floor loads or extra stories can be handled later; provide excess Services capacity; go for oversize (“loose fit”) rather than undersize. Separate high- and low-volatility areas and design them differently. Work with shapes and materials that can grow easily, both interior and exterior. “Use materials from near at hand,” advises Massachusetts builder John Abrams. “They’ll be easier to match or replace.”
When in doubt, add storage :)
As energy analyst John Holdren says to all futurists, “We overestimate technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.”
Some design is better if it’s postponed. … Postponing some of the design yields more building for less money, since less is spent on detail design and detail finish. And adaptivity is built in.
A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
As energy analyst John Holdren says to all futurists, “We overestimate technology in the short run and underestimate it in the long run.”
Some design is better if it’s postponed. … Postponing some of the design yields more building for less money, since less is spent on detail design and detail finish. And adaptivity is built in.
A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
“Evolutionary design” sounds like a contradiction, but it needn’t be. In the 1980s, both ecology and economics underwent a quiet revolution when they began to realize that natural and market systems were “variance-driven” rather than “equilibrium-based.” There is no “climax” in ecological communities; irregular oscillation drives the continued self-tuning of the system. Adaptivity was said to thrive “on the edge of chaos.” Likewise in economics. With the failures of the world’s command economies (communist and strict socialist), it was noted that governments that institutionalized stability suffered systemic chaos, whereas market economies and democracies that institutionalized chaos enjoyed systemic stability. Command economies collapsed. Market economies muddled through. By making more mistakes they had less failure.
Evolution is always away from known problems rather than toward imagined goals. It doesn’t seek to maximize theoretical fitness; it minimizes experienced unfitness. Hindsight is better than foresight. That’s why evolutionary forms such as vernacular building types always work better than visionary designs such as geodesic domes. They grow from experience rather than from somebody’s forehead.
wholesome chaos
Let people try things. When some of them don’t work, honor the effort, notice the lesson if any, and move on.
…architects maturing from being just artists of space to artists of time.
It seems to me that the best designs are those which accommodate the most contradictions.
Let people try things. When some of them don’t work, honor the effort, notice the lesson if any, and move on.
…architects maturing from being just artists of space to artists of time.
It seems to me that the best designs are those which accommodate the most contradictions.
It wouldn’t take much adjustment to unleash the full ingenuity of architects on the juicy problems of designing for time. They could supplement the dutiful process of programming with the enjoyable practice of scenario planning. They could do more post-occupancy evaluation, particularly of their own buildings, but also of existing buildings that relate to new projects. They could seek the stability of ongoing relationships with clients instead of the all-at-once, do-or-die, design-crisis approach now employed. They could seek new ways to employ time as a tool in building design and use.
Chapter 12
An adaptive building would not surprise us if it started conventional and became unique, started conservative and became radical by being true to its unique life.
Initial conservatism would be the natural result of a scenario approach to design, with its cautiousness about innovation and its imperative to protect the option of varying paths of development for the building. Furthermore, anything borrowed from local vernacular design is bound to look conservative—for the very reason that it is the familiar, well-tried, nuanced product of local climate, local culture, and standard building use. Also traditional materials, which age well and take advantage of deep experience in the building trades (and avoid the chanciness of trendy new materials) can be counted on to look good but ordinary. And respect for existing older buildings nearby obliges a polite blending in by anything new. Honoring the future begins with honoring the past.
fragmented design
The client population should be able to speak through one person who reflects their experience and desires and has the authority to make decisions in their behalf.
Following Chris Alexander’s formula, there needs to be more money than usual spent on the basic Structure, less on finishing, and more on perpetual adjustment and maintenance.
If you want a building to learn, you have to pay its tuition. … Since about 30 percent of the operating costs in most buildings goes to paying for energy, significant money for maintenance, tuning, and remodeling of the building can be freed up by designing in energy efficiency through well-proven techniques—insulation, tightly crafted windows and doors, orientation to the sun, use of foliage (for summer shade), and appropriate color (light in hot climates, dark in cold).
Columns provide a physical grid for space plan changes. They make it easy to imagine changes, easy to put them in, easy to remove them. They also are handy as risers to run cable, conduit, and other services.
Sixty percent of the final cost of a mortgaged building disappears as interest to the bank instead of going into the building. What if the usual down-payment money were spent instead to complete a small core building or a large but rudimentary building?
The A-frame vacation houses of the 1960s hemorrhaged energy through the huge windows, and the lack of ceilings made them impossible to heat. They wasted space, and the pitched roof-walls were unusable for anything, but everybody built the things.
Let the technology adapt to the building rather than vice versa, and then you’re not pushed around when the next technology comes along.
As for shape: be square. … If you start boxy and simple, outside and in, then you can let complications develop with time, responsive to use. Prematurely convoluted surfaces are expensive to build, a nuisance to maintain, and hard to change.
San Francisco's, long scorned for being over-ornate, survived to become one of the city’s signature attractions. Though wood-frame, and their ornament invited rot, they survived because their room layout was so adaptable. … The generous width of the hall is also the major reason for the inherent flexibility of the box.
… construction for long life is what invites the long-term tampering it takes for a building to reach an adapted state.
Some of the solidest buildings in America were constructed during the 1930s by the New Deal programs of the Public Works Administration and the Works Projects Agency—libraries, schools, park buildings, bridges, dams, viaducts. That investment by government in “infrastructure” is seen by historians as having been the basis for the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s.
Some industries, led by the German auto manufacturers, are adopting “design for reuse” (DFR) and “design for disassembly” (DFD) engineering. Design for disassembly in building construction is doubly appealing because it invites later reshaping of a building even at the Structural level.
Throughout medieval northern Europe, timbers were handed on from building to building for centuries.
Complexity can come later if it must.
Unlike the countless forms of fake stone cladding which always look corny, stucco is an ancient and honest material.
The conservative tactic—at higher initial cost—of installing over-capacity electrical feeders and breakers, oversize chases, and an apparent excess of outlets is nearly always rewarded.
Computer-aided design (CAD) has led to weaker building that can't handle unusual circumstances such as hurricanes. Before computers, engineers dealt with uncertainty by building in a large safety margin. They were right. Oversize your components.
… treat code requirements as setting a minimum standard rather than a maximum.
The client population should be able to speak through one person who reflects their experience and desires and has the authority to make decisions in their behalf.
Following Chris Alexander’s formula, there needs to be more money than usual spent on the basic Structure, less on finishing, and more on perpetual adjustment and maintenance.
If you want a building to learn, you have to pay its tuition. … Since about 30 percent of the operating costs in most buildings goes to paying for energy, significant money for maintenance, tuning, and remodeling of the building can be freed up by designing in energy efficiency through well-proven techniques—insulation, tightly crafted windows and doors, orientation to the sun, use of foliage (for summer shade), and appropriate color (light in hot climates, dark in cold).
Columns provide a physical grid for space plan changes. They make it easy to imagine changes, easy to put them in, easy to remove them. They also are handy as risers to run cable, conduit, and other services.
Sixty percent of the final cost of a mortgaged building disappears as interest to the bank instead of going into the building. What if the usual down-payment money were spent instead to complete a small core building or a large but rudimentary building?
The A-frame vacation houses of the 1960s hemorrhaged energy through the huge windows, and the lack of ceilings made them impossible to heat. They wasted space, and the pitched roof-walls were unusable for anything, but everybody built the things.
Let the technology adapt to the building rather than vice versa, and then you’re not pushed around when the next technology comes along.
As for shape: be square. … If you start boxy and simple, outside and in, then you can let complications develop with time, responsive to use. Prematurely convoluted surfaces are expensive to build, a nuisance to maintain, and hard to change.
San Francisco's, long scorned for being over-ornate, survived to become one of the city’s signature attractions. Though wood-frame, and their ornament invited rot, they survived because their room layout was so adaptable. … The generous width of the hall is also the major reason for the inherent flexibility of the box.
… construction for long life is what invites the long-term tampering it takes for a building to reach an adapted state.
Some of the solidest buildings in America were constructed during the 1930s by the New Deal programs of the Public Works Administration and the Works Projects Agency—libraries, schools, park buildings, bridges, dams, viaducts. That investment by government in “infrastructure” is seen by historians as having been the basis for the economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s.
Some industries, led by the German auto manufacturers, are adopting “design for reuse” (DFR) and “design for disassembly” (DFD) engineering. Design for disassembly in building construction is doubly appealing because it invites later reshaping of a building even at the Structural level.
Throughout medieval northern Europe, timbers were handed on from building to building for centuries.
Complexity can come later if it must.
Unlike the countless forms of fake stone cladding which always look corny, stucco is an ancient and honest material.
The conservative tactic—at higher initial cost—of installing over-capacity electrical feeders and breakers, oversize chases, and an apparent excess of outlets is nearly always rewarded.
Computer-aided design (CAD) has led to weaker building that can't handle unusual circumstances such as hurricanes. Before computers, engineers dealt with uncertainty by building in a large safety margin. They were right. Oversize your components.
… treat code requirements as setting a minimum standard rather than a maximum.
Well-made buildings are fractal—equally intelligent at every level of detail.
Chris Alexander routinely cites the authority of the Japanese artistic virtue of wabi sabi—“the recognition that in a beautiful thing there is always some part which lovingly and carefully done, and some parts which are very roughly done, because the compensation between the two is necessary in a real thing.”
… humiliated by the building, by a nuance untended to. [use other door]
In buildings the record of work done can sometimes be attached to the point of work, such as servicing tags on equipment. A room’s paint, wallpaper, and carpet specifications can be taped to the inside of a light switch cover in the room.
People are happiest also in buildings where change occurs at every scale from weeks to centuries. Such buildings are fractal in time.
In a healthy building, maintenance, correction of faults, and improvements all blend together.
[In developing a college campus] there must be as much attention to the repair of the details—rooms, wings of buildings, windows, paths—as to creation of brand new buildings. Only then can an environment stay balanced both as a whole, and in its parts, at every moment of its history.
“healing the whole”
Nuances are as important as systemic problems.
… humiliated by the building, by a nuance untended to. [use other door]
In buildings the record of work done can sometimes be attached to the point of work, such as servicing tags on equipment. A room’s paint, wallpaper, and carpet specifications can be taped to the inside of a light switch cover in the room.
People are happiest also in buildings where change occurs at every scale from weeks to centuries. Such buildings are fractal in time.
In a healthy building, maintenance, correction of faults, and improvements all blend together.
[In developing a college campus] there must be as much attention to the repair of the details—rooms, wings of buildings, windows, paths—as to creation of brand new buildings. Only then can an environment stay balanced both as a whole, and in its parts, at every moment of its history.
“healing the whole”
Nuances are as important as systemic problems.
Fine-tuning is what turns a building from a nuisance into a joy.
The process embraces error; it is eager to find things that don't work and to try things that might not work.
All it takes is keeping most everything that works, most everything that is enjoyed much of what doesn't get in the way, and helping the rest evolve. That goes better if the place is neither owned nor maintained by remote antagonists, because they distance the building from its users. What makes a building learn is its physical connection to the people within.
… theories mislead as much as they lead.
Photographs are evidence, memories, history—peerless records of how something actually was. Precise dates multiply their value.
“Sloppiness is everywhere. Our results are too private. We measure what is easy to measure and ignore what is difficult. Real issues such as the use of space through time, productivity, and environmental responsibility thus tend to get ignored.” —Frank Duffy
time as formgiver
We're too immersed in the onrush of change to do much looking backward or forward, and so we put ourselves at the mercy of events, repeatedly surprised and baffled.
self-sensing and self-healing materials
learn by paying attention
All it takes is keeping most everything that works, most everything that is enjoyed much of what doesn't get in the way, and helping the rest evolve. That goes better if the place is neither owned nor maintained by remote antagonists, because they distance the building from its users. What makes a building learn is its physical connection to the people within.
… theories mislead as much as they lead.
Photographs are evidence, memories, history—peerless records of how something actually was. Precise dates multiply their value.
“Sloppiness is everywhere. Our results are too private. We measure what is easy to measure and ignore what is difficult. Real issues such as the use of space through time, productivity, and environmental responsibility thus tend to get ignored.” —Frank Duffy
time as formgiver
We're too immersed in the onrush of change to do much looking backward or forward, and so we put ourselves at the mercy of events, repeatedly surprised and baffled.
self-sensing and self-healing materials
learn by paying attention