“It occurs to me that if we do all this right, they will still be talking about it in 300 years.”
- Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead
How long should a building last? And what kind of responsibility do those who design and build have toward helping their structures pass along from generation to future generation.
Late in his career/ life, Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead talked about a 300-year legacy for the songbook that he developed, stewarded, re-interpreted and passed along. If a song could last 300 years, surely our buildings can aspire to that kind of longevity.
Conversations about ‘sustainability’ in building, inside and outside of the formal industry, focus mostly on the problem of energy efficiency and sometimes carbon footprint. Additional metrics are added on top by project teams and certifying agencies - but you’ll rarely hear any projections about the building beyond maybe a payback period for solar panels or some other upgrade, measured up to a few decades.
I sat in a recent lecture about a new net-zero energy, mass timber waste facility (read: landfill) and heard about the expensive geothermal system, and the large photovoltaic array and the glue-laminated mass timber construction - I heard a lot about what this building would do for the next 30 years.
When I asked at the end of the lecture what the life-cycle of the building looks like after 30-50 years of functional life, my question was received almost as if it was out-of-line and the architect stumbled through an answer about how they hadn’t really done a ‘life-cycle analysis’ but it can probably be mostly deconstructed and recycled (despite the fact that this practically never happens).
Maybe my question isn’t fair, even though it seemed like an obvious one to me, as this team had apparently already gone above and beyond in the concepting, design and engineering of this new facility that represented a new type of ‘waste facility’ (landfill). They had done good work, above and beyond their professional responsibilities and the ‘standard of care’ of the industry. But I left wondering, in all this talk in the industry of ‘carbon footprints’ and ‘net-zero’ and ‘Passive House’ and ‘LEED’- what are we leaving behind when these structures run the course of their functional life-span? What’s the 50 year plan? 100 years? Beyond? Are we actually talking about ‘good’ ways of building, or just less bad?
The fundamental problem with our most stringent performance and sustainability targets, as I see it, is a disregard for the initial material investment required to build anything. It’s easy to prove in charts and calculations that the high-performance building will outperform the code-minimum building in a few decades maybe. This is obviously less bad, but as we add technology and administrative burden to an already overburdened industry to ensure higher performing buildings, where does this lead us? Is a Passive House that runs off of the energy of a hair dryer for 40 years before being demolished for a new or larger structure really ‘sustainable’? Is it worth the societal investment of resources? Maybe it is, but I think it’s at least worth asking.
That question returns us to the concept of the 300-year legacy. There are structures that have lasted much longer than this - many of indigenous construction, so surely with our resources, tools and technology, we can aspire to at least a couple hundred years in what we bring into existence.
Toward the end of his life, Bob Weir seemed to turn his attention to crossing disciplinary and stylistic boundaries and passing his knowledge to younger generations who can enthusiastically carry on his legacy with their own interpretations. I saw Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros play several shows in classical arrangements with symphony orchestras, with his band members spinning off into their own touring acts with original music.
Ask any Deadhead why they follow the music around on tour and you’ll get some answer that touches on the spirit of the music, and the community of the music. There’s a universal draw that transcends geographic and socio-economic lines to bring all types of people together around the music of the Grateful Dead, which is ultimately the force that carries it forward. Perhaps the closest analogue in the American building industry is Frank Lloyd Wright, who has an impressive number of structures that have been preserved, restored or at least kept intact. THAT spirit, whatever it is, that makes us want to carry something that has been passed down to us into the future, is something that I don’t hear about in conversations about sustainability. That thing, however hard it is to pin down, is probably our best shot at handing something worthwhile to the generations that follow us.
I admit to not currently having a helpful direction in finding this spirit, but I suspect we’ll find it in the past as much or more than in the future. And I expect that we’ll find bits of it in the communities that have kept craft alive, either through practice or preservation. I’m sure we’ll only find it by working more directly with our communities, neighbors and colleagues - and by being open to occasionally stepping outside of the strict ‘professionalism’ of the building and design industries. By asking deeper questions about why we build. What we’re building for. And what we can learn from the builders who left us their own work to learn from and carry on, however many generations ago.