I was thinking about architecture
today, for some reason, wondering why some buildings just seem to
have odd problems that nobody can ever seem to fix. Weird things,
like a particular vent making a lot of noise, or certain windows
sticking sometimes.
And the thought occurred that an
architectural plan is like a battle plan. It never survives contact
with the enemy. The enemy being, of course, reality.
You can study the ground, the type of
soil, the weather, the bedrock, everything present before the
building is put up. You can study the intended use of the building,
local power and utilities, roads and a thousand other things.
You do all that and put together the
building plan. But you can't study which lot of concrete is going to
be slightly off-spec, and will set, hold and wear slightly
differently. You can't study exactly how the rain is going to fall,
or how the drainage will change over time. You can't predict the
precise expansions and contractions of the frame during construction,
and how this will affect the final structure. You can't know exactly
what human beings will inhabit the building, how they'll walk or make
use of hallways, elevators, stairs and so forth. You can't predict
how the load on local utilities will change over the years, how
traffic patterns will alter the sonic profile of the landscape, what
natural disasters will have an effect even if they never touch that
building.
It also occurred to me that buildings
aren't built to stand up. They are built to fall down so slowly that
one eventually gets sick of waiting and knocks them over. Building
structures to last forever fails to recognize the reality of entropy.
Building them to last for shorter periods recognizes the fact that,
for the most part, the needs of the people who will be using them are
going to change. Maybe some buildings should last forever, but most
are really temporary structures over any serious length of time.
Idle, weird thoughts on the nature of
buildings, I suppose, but new concepts to me.
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