The Architecture of Persistence

Designing for Future Use

David Fannon, Michelle Laboy, Peter Wiederspahn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000410471
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Architecture of Persistence argues that continued human use is the ultimate measure of sustainability in architecture, and that expanding the discourse about adaptability to include continuity as well as change offers the architectural manifestation of resilience. Why do some buildings last for generations as beloved and useful places, while others do not? How can designers today create buildings that remain useful into the future? While architects and theorists have offered a wide range of ideas about building for change, this book focuses on persistent architecture: the material, spatial, and cultural processes that give rise to long-lived buildings.

Organized in three parts, this book examines material longevity in the face of constant physical and cultural change, connects the dimensions of human use and contemporary program, and discusses how time informs the design process. Featuring dozens of interviews with people who design and use buildings, and a close analysis of over a hundred historic and contemporary projects, the principles of persistent architecture introduced here address urgent challenges for contemporary practice while pointing towards a more sustainable built environment in the future.

The Architecture of Persistence: Designing for Future Use offers practitioners, students, and scholars a set of principles and illustrative precedents exploring architecture's unique ability to connect an instructive past, a useful present, and an unknown future.

Part I
Material Ecologies

M. Laboy

Figure I.0 Precedent Matrix: Structural Material and Building Size. This image shows 43 case study buildings on a graph, all plans at the same scale, and all oriented to true north. The vertical axis tracks the primary structural material from wood at the bottom to brick masonry, then concrete, and steel at the top. The horizontal axis measures the total area of the building footprint (floor plate) from the smallest at the left to the largest at the right.

Drawing by authors.

The Poetics of Material Decay

Architecture is defined by many intangibles: space, light, memories; but mostly, change in architecture involves a physical change to its materiality. From the moment a raw material is extracted from the earth, through the transformation of resources into building products, starts a process of environmental deterioration and human-led modification. The eventual failure of some or all components leads to the removal, replacement, reuse, and end-of-life deconstruction. This chapter examines the history of theories and practices that take a critical approach to material change in architecture, and explores the meaning of material persistence as the foundation of persistent architecture. Tracing what changes in architecture, both as a result of environmental exposure and human acts, helps understand the more constant and unchanging, that which can or should be designed to remain throughout the life of a long-lasting building.

Architects seldomly think of the life of the building after design—somewhat considering it during construction, hardly at all post-occupancy, and much less at the end of its life. By engaging in a nuanced examination of material change in architecture, this chapter argues the ecological basis and motivations for an architecture of persistence, and theorizes material approaches that extend the life of the most resource-intensive and place-specific elements of construction. Architectural theory and history are full of conflicting views about architecture as both permanent and transient, monumental and ephemeral. On one hand, as historian Daniel Abramson shared during an interview with the authors, embracing continuous change in architecture runs somewhat counter to fundamental assumptions about architecture’s aesthetic and psychological role as a stable object providing permanent identity (D. Abramson 2018). Edward Ford acknowledges this “ideological baggage” often makes us “uncomfortable with the idea of transience and impermanence in thinking of the institution and the monument” (Ford 1997, 5). On the other hand, the evidence for Ford’s argument for a theory of impermanence is the many historically significant structures still perceived to be long-lasting and monumental despite alterations and near-full replacements, which were suppressed from collective memory to preserve their image rather than their materiality (3).

The notion of impermanence in architecture is as much rooted in the material reality of buildings, as it is connected to the emotional power and creative potential of history and memory. In fact, the decaying edifice, real or imaginary, played an essential role in the study and representation of architectural history and in the formulation of new theories and methods. The artist recognized as archaeologist Giovanni Battista Piranesi represented the architectural ruin as a history partly erased, which has to be examined closely in order to be reconstructed. Piranesi’s quote from 1743: “Speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images that accurate drawings could never have succeeded in conveying” is believed to credit their physical incompleteness with stimulating the imagination of the architect to enter into the surviving work and exercise their creativity (Translation quoted in Pinto 2013, 231; from Wilton-Ely 1978, 45). Pinto connects the eighteenth-century English idea of empiricism—the importance of evidence—with the idea of the imaginary—the role of myth and fantasy in recovering the past and introducing subjectivity (45). This is at the core of what Stan Allen called a paradox: while claiming to record evidence in Rome’s Campo Marzio, Piranesi in fact achieves what no single author has achieved, a “paradigmatic formal method” to author the city where “time is represented by the accumulation of material and its decay and transformation” (Allen 1989, 76–77). This creative potential serves as a premise for a theory of persistence in architecture. The idea that some materials are erased over time in order to reveal more enduring elements is powerful, especially when what remains becomes an invitation to reconstruct the past and imagine better versions of what architecture could have been. A critical awareness of material change in design can create a framework for future appropriation, reinterpretation, and reinvention, giving architecture the potential to fulfill its original promise.

Figure I.1 Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Ichnographia of the Campus Martius of the Ancient City. 1757.

Image courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

Like Stan Allen’s idea for the city, time in the landscape is also represented by material accumulation and decay. The architectural ruin in a natural environment has a long tradition in landscape painting, mediating the sublimity of the natural landscape and the smallness of human figures to create narratives about the power of nature, the passage of time, and the enduring aspects of everyday life. The caprice or capriccio, a genre of dreamlike ruin painting, usually depicts a change in the material and human use of buildings as signs of both persistence and decay of architecture. “The crumbling, though sacred edifice, populated not by worshipers, but by itinerants who display drudgery or everyday existence along its walls…” become building blocks, a fabrique that “makes a landscape agreeable to look at and be in, the most basic definition of the picturesque… the representation of ruins to include the spectator’s own sense of drama” (Augustyn 2000, 335–41). Analyzing the work of Denis Diderot in Salon de 1767, the ruin is revealed to engage two drivers of human imagination—memory as the “vehicle for daydream” of the creative amateur, and fear of a “universe in ruins” (442–44). The nostalgia and fear inspired by material decay are recurrent elements in the architectural imagination, but these emotions alone cannot advance the contemporary practice of designing for persistence without proactive approaches to material change.

Figure I.2 Hubert Robert. The Return of the Cattle. Oil on Canvas. ca. 1773–75. Pendant to The Portico of a Country Mansion (35.40.2).

Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Lucy Work Hewitt, 1934.

Figure I.3 Shearing Layers of Change with added arrows and the additional layer of Surroundings, to illustrate the shearing dynamism of the site’s constantly changing conditions.

Drawing by authors, adapted from Stewart Brand and Frank Duffy.

Material decay fuels the work of artists and architects because it imbues buildings with the passage of time. A pragmatic approach to an architecture of persistence recognizes the emotional and creative power of allowing traces of time to be registered in buildings while negotiating the inherent risks, technical dimensions, and performance criteria for contemporary material culture. This is not an argument for an uncritical acceptance of impermanence, nor an appeal for traditional but naïve notions of permanence. This is an argument for embracing the role of materiality in the cultural persistence of buildings, to guard against unnecessarily accelerating the path to decay or demolition long before a building’s material life span. This section of the book examines the material dimensions of durability, stability, resourcefulness, open-endedness, and place specificity, in order to extend the life of the building beyond expected moments of temporary obsolescence.

Ecological Metaphors and Realities of Long-Life Buildings

Buildings emerge from and contribute to a constantly evolving global ecosystem, regardless of how long they last or what impact they have on a specific ecosystem. The last 50 years can be described as a progression towards an ecological moment in architecture, where architectural theory shifted from ideas of continuity and permanence to ideas of temporal cycles and dynamic equilibria. Ecology is a field that studies the relationships between living organisms—including people—and their environment. The influence of ecology in design practice prompted a shift from thinking of buildings as static objects to understanding them as dynamic configurations of matter, energy, and populations in constant flux. Ecological theories in design often represent buildings either as organisms (living things in relationship to environments) or as habitats (environments for species, including people). Architectural theory often adopts metaphors from ecology that relate to the environment of a species: cradles, graves, affordances, and niches (O’Donnell 2015; Laboy 2017). An ecological paradigm means seeing the context of the building as a dynamic system, where buildings can settle into many different conditions, rather than a fixed situation or a single equilibrium. The concept of dynamic equilibrium emerged in ecology to describe periods of gradual and rapid change in ecosystems (Folke 2006), related to the flows of material and energy in systems. This ecological metaphor in architecture expects buildings to exist in multiple states throughout their life, resulting in constant material and energy flows triggered by social and environmental forces that weather, destroy, strengthen, and rebuild materials.

The focus of ecological design on regeneration and restoration of lost or damaged ecosystems connects architecture with principles and theories emerging from landscape theory, to conceive of buildings and their sites as productive parts of multi-scalar systems (Laboy 2016, 83). Recent calls from professional practice to integrate principles of regenerative design in architecture (Busby, Richter, and Driedger 2011) borrow from John Tillman Lyle’s theory, which sought to achieve a sustainable and dynamic balance with ecosystems (Lyle 1994). Lyle used ecosystem theory and biological processes as the model for design; most notably “seeking optimum levels for multiple functions, not the maximum or minimum level for any one” (Lyle 1994, 40–42)— an idea analogous to designing architecture for future-uses.

Steward Brand’s (1995) seminal book How Buildings Learn (a title that assigns buildings human intelligence) used O’Neill’s Hierarchical Concept of Ecosystems (O’Neill 1986) as a metaphor for how the material systems in buildings change over time. Categorizing components based on different rates of change, what Brand called Shearing Layers of Change: Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space Plan, Stuff—was an adaptation of Frank Duffy’s Shell, Services, Scenery, and Set (Brand 1995, 12–13). In this ecological metaphor, the slowest-changing components, such as structure, are analogous to the redwood trees in a forest that not only are “in charge” but also mostly oblivious to but gradually integrating the rapid changing components—especially at times of major changes—most influenced by them: “the speedy components propose, and the slow dispose” (17).

Figure I.4 Interior lobby space, exposed bolted connections in timber structure. Bruner/Cott Architects, RW Kern Center in Hampshire College (Amherst, Massachusetts), 2016.

Photograph by © Robert Benson Photography, courtesy of Bruner/Cott Architects

In Brand and Duffy’s theory, the site is a static element and structure is the next most resistant to change. The structure does tend to last longest—using more robust materials and static patterns that are often protected by the enclosure and other interior systems. But according to George Gard, one of the team members in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Motive, Context, Method
• Part I Material Ecologies
• Part II Changing Uses
• Part III Alternative Futures
• Conclusion: Towards an Architecture of Persistence
• List of Interviews
• Index