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An empty building rots fast and attracts trouble.
Since the downward spiral of dilapidation can accelerate so quickly, the trick is to keep a building from entering the spiral at all. Two methods are supposedly standard, but both are in practice somewhat rare.
One is “preventive maintenance”—
The other is designing and constructing the building in such a way that it doesn’t need a lot of maintenance.
Building maintenance has little status with architects. They see the people who do the maintaining as blue-collar illiterates and the process of upkeep as trivial, not a part of design concerns.
“a staggering one-fifth of the sample said that the need to clean their windows had not even been considered during the design and construction of the building.”
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.
“The older a building, the more likely it is to be right. Since the 1970s, buildings don’t work.”
European families think in generations while Americans are still trying to master decades.
The longer that buildings are expected to last, the more you can expect maintenance and other running costs to overwhelm the initial capital costs of construction, and the more inclined owners will be to invest in better construction so they can spend less on maintenance.
How long is software expected to last?
The worst of it is, when water comes through a flat roof, you can’t tell where the leak is
Washington left abundant (if often angry) correspondence about what he wanted for the building because he expanded the house while battling the British.
Kind of funny to think about the banality of normal life even while fighting a war.
Like people, buildings would have far fewer upkeep problems if they had no orifices.
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?
Remodelers love shingled and tile-hung walls because changes are so easy to make and then hide.
Design for replacement.
Maintenance is no mystery.
New materials are unproven, by definition. Like most experiments, they tend to fail.
Redundancy of function is always more reliable than attempts at perfection,
The Sydney Opera House, one of the most memorable buildings built during this century, was finished in 1973 at a cost of $120 million, with a cost overrun of roughly 1,700 percent.
The materials are often one-offs that would take a whole industry to reproduce, and the failures can be massive.
walls, it appears, are better if they’re low-maintenance rather than no-maintenance.
Wood and brick walls invite change by involving us in their upkeep. What begins as repair easily becomes improvement—
“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.
If that small stuff isn’t happening all the time, you’re not going to take care of it, and it isn’t going to come to order.”
“Large-lump development is based on the idea of replacement. Piecemeal growth is based on the idea of repair.
Large-lump development is based on the fallacy that it is possible to build perfect buildings. Piecemeal growth is based on the healthier and more realistic view that mistakes are inevitable….
Maintenance, in this light, is learning.
feed it money, but not too much and not too little. Too much encourages orgies of radical remodeling that blow a building’s continuity and integrity. Too little, and a building becomes destructive to itself and the people in it.
As-builts are building plans that show in detail exactly what was built, which is always significantly different from what was in the original plans.
‘The more complicated the system the greater the chance of things going wrong.”’
I’d like to see building designers take on problem transparency as a design goal.
Once attention is deferred, deferring of maintenance comes naturally. It might be better if some of the original work were intentionally ephemeral, with everyone knowing it will require maintenance or replacement within a year. “How might a new building teach good maintenance habits?” is a question worth giving to architecture students.
Maintenance comes in two major flavors, especially around houses—cosmetic and real. Unfortunately the cosmetic is more fun.
Or be sure that any repair includes the reward of some improvement.
I.e., never refactor just for its own sake.
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.1
Vernacular builders, he says, are content to accept well-proven old solutions to old problems. Then they can concentrate all their design ingenuity strictly on new problems, if any.
no two communities dwell alike.
Each person becomes a vernacular builder and a vernacular speaker by growing up, by moving from one initiation to the next in becoming either a male or a female inhabitant.
Vernacular building historians excel at “reading” buildings—analyzing the physical evidence of what actually happened in a building, and when, and why.
they are universally expert at growing by stages.
Style is the last thing that I would teach a student about architectural history, because it’s so misleading.
native adaptivity got left behind when vernacular form was translated into “vernacular” style.
Specialized knowledge distances buildings from users. Specialized space hinders future flexibility.
That’s why 10 percent of all houses in America are mobile homes, housing 12.5 million people. In 1985, mobile homes comprised one-fifth of all new houses sold in the US, and two-thirds of all new low-cost single-family houses.
Builders of would-be popular buildings do better when they learn from folklore than when they ape the elite.
the constant change in homes and offices is usually done by the occupants in a manner classically vernacular—informal, pragmatic, alive with offhand ingenuity, officially invisible. Direct, amateur change is the norm.
Too eager to please the moment, over-specificity crippled all future moments.
The credo “form follows function” was a beautiful lie. Form froze function.
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.
“Every house is a work in progress,”
