How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

Buildings that last are made of quality materials and with quality craftsmanship. It costs. Lumber that is close-grained, straight, and well dried is expensive. Quality builders are expensive too, but the investment pays well later in terms of durability and flexibility. Fine artisans treat code requirements as setting a minimum standard rather than a maximum. They know that step dimensions in stairs have to be consistent to within three-sixteenths of an inch or people will stumble and get hurt. (A major source of architectural malpractice suits is for sloppy or overly creative stairs.)6 Good carpenters employ measuring distinctions as fine as the “RCH.”7 Contractor Matisse Enzer explains: “RCH is a technical term, a unit of measurement an order of magnitude smaller than the last unit mentioned in a stream of adjustment commands—’Up an inch. Down a half. Down a quarter. OK, up an RCH and nail it.”’ An American carpenter apprenticing in Japan reported on their version: I watched four senior carpenters standing at attention, silently accepting a stiff rebuke from the master. Their crime: someone had miscalculated a few millimeters on a hip rafter. The difference was hardly noticeable, even close up, but since the beam was designed to achieve its perfect form only after several years of sagging and shrinking, this small error would be magnified and possibly distort the whole. Fumed Nishioka, “They’ll laugh at me. ‘They’ll say, That’s not the way a hip rafter should look!’ And...