Buildings come down all of the time. Some are simply not pretty enough for people, and get replaced with the newest trend. Some collapse from having poor structural integrity, like the condominium in Florida that came down on June 24th, 2021 (Fitz-Gibbon). As the environment continues to change, we are entering an era that demands a push for sustainable architecture. Ultimately, this push compels an architect to design something meant to last, because tearing down and replacing buildings every few years is not a sustainable practice. To design buildings that will last, an architect must be familiar with all of the reasons that they may come down in the future, and design counter-active measures in defense of their architecture.
This gives an architect a lot to think about, and understandably so. It is difficult to design something static in an ever-changing world. How do we know what buildings will be fashionable in twenty years? How can we expect a building to persevere through the impact of climate change and natural disasters? An architect has to ask all of these questions in order to anticipate every possible mode of failure.
I started thinking about buildings and their failure since I was seven years old. I remember the exact moment that I decided I wanted to become an architect. When I chose my career path, I was getting done with an evening of playing with Jenga blocks that had left me wondering people only ever made towers. With the right concept, you could make something stronger and much better looking. Many of my classmates pursued architecture because of their childhood passion for Legos, and I find myself the odd person out in the category of Jenga fans. Legos, to me, seem far too stable of a building block to get a good understanding of how buildings come to be. Wouldn’t you feel more accomplished if you built something that could have fallen, and didn’t? How do you know that something you design is successful unless there’s a possibility that it’s going to fail?
The way I was thinking as a child proves that I was already in the right mindset for what kind of buildings are capable of withstanding the test of time. I’d already identified two key points: the importance of aesthetics and stability. Other sustainable design motivations, which I hadn’t begun to conceptualize at age seven, are economic feasibility and appropriate response to the surrounding environment. These categories put the concerns of an architect very broadly, but they go further to embody the thought process that goes into making good architecture.
Architectural education systems spend years teaching students how to think like an architect. Regardless of what field you’re in, you can only develop a response to a problem if you can comprehend it. Engaging with the practice of architecture requires a particularly trained mind capable of analyzing the context of situations and figuring out what spaces need to become better for the communities they’re embedded in.
At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, one of the first classes that architecture students take is called Materials and Design. This class is designed to engage us with materials, structures, and functioning assemblies. The professor who had taught the course during my freshman year, Demitrios Comodromos, seemed like he was entirely out of his mind.
“Please bring a few bricks,” he once emailed us about the upcoming class. “This time I don’t really need more than ten total.”
Each week, our assignment was to make cheap models out of cardboard, paper, and wooden sticks. Comodromos would look through them thoroughly. If he found something he liked, he would add it to a pile of his favorites: the models he felt were worthy of being put to the test.
"Whose is this?" he would ask the class, picking up something that he could use to demonstrate his point. A group of students would sheepishly raise their hands before he asked them what they were thinking when they made it. Then, he would see how much force it would take to destroy it. Some students were able to build something that was able to support the weight of five or six bricks. Stronger ones were ultimately crushed by the professor's hands and boots. The creators of each mangled model came away with more pride than they'd gone into class with, honored to have their design broken to pieces. It meant that the professor wanted to show them not only the strengths of their design, but also the weaknesses, so that they could learn to create something better.
In a sense, we were learning one lesson by means of another. That course was meant to make us analyze failure, or inadequacy, so we could generate future success in an informed way. This sort of thought process is important to teach in the early stages of architectural education, because it gives us a lot of opportunities to blend creativity with rationale. We start out with abstract issues, and gradually the knowledge we need to resolve real architectural problems that may arise in our futures.
One summer, I shadowed a landscape architect named Joy Kuebler. While I was at her firm, I was able to sit in on meetings with her clients, which helped me get perspective on how design problems are processed by people who aren’t designers. At my first day on the job, there was a meeting about a playground at a community center.
“We’re going to put some wooden playground equipment here,” Joy said, handing them a catalogue of expensive, handcrafted wooden play features. “Here’s what the pieces are going to look like.” The directors of the community center looked at each other, and started talking amongst themselves.
“I think that this one would be better,” one of them commented.
“Yeah, and cheaper,” someone replied.
Joy was mad about their response on the car ride back to the office, saying, “Can you believe they wanted to pick out the equipment by themselves?”
Personally, I found it very easy to believe. I believe that was the first moment I realized that not everyone approaches problems with an architectural mind. I started to realize why so many people dislike architects; the profession seems to require that an architect lose the part of them that understand spaces structures from a human perspective. How can you explain an issue with a building if you only consider the problem from the point of view of that building?
This disconnection dominates conversation about architecture. Energizing people about architecture and climate change. Despite everyone knowing that the environment is changing, it’s going to be difficult to design for the dynamic world. It’s impossible for architects to fully understand every facet of the problem at hand without becoming informed. That’s why we will need the help of people outside of architecture to tell us, because creating sustainable architecture is only achievable by opening up a dialogue.
Buildings don’t have to come down, if everyone is conscious of the problems they face. For months, the condo wreckage in Florida has undergone investigation to determine the cause of the tragedy, and several structural weaknesses have been identified since (Fitz-Gibbon). I can’t help but wonder, what would have happened if there had been community outcry for repair years before the people who had to pay for them deemed them “necessary”? What if the tenants of the building had made it seem like it was worth the cost to the owner? Of course, these questions is completely unfair. It isn’t the fault of the victims, it is the fault of a system that never taught them how to express their dissatisfaction with the built environment, or with the world’s architects. We can start to build sustainably together by expressing concerns to people in a position to change the world, if we ourselves are not in the position to change it.
Works Cited
Fitz-Gibbon, Jorge. “‘Astronomical’ corrosion at site of the Florida building collapse: experts.” The New York Post, 26 August 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/08/26/astronomical-corrosion-at-site-of-florida-building-collapse-experts/. Accessed 26 September 2021.