The future of buildings is low-tech and dumb
Digital vs Analog
In a little over a week my wife and I are going to see Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. I can’t wait. Once again a new movie will satisfy my desire to experience the aesthetics of the Star Wars universe: a science fiction society depicting an analog future-one where gears, buttons, pistons, and levers reign supreme. The Millennium Falcon isn’t a fly-by-wire spaceship. Somewhere behind the bolted and screwed panels are probably something that more closely resembles the inner workings of a steampunk dirigible than what’s under the hood of an F-35. This vision of the future is why the Prequels are such an affront to all things Star Wars. It’s not the thin plots, horrid characters, or poor acting. It’s the digitization of the technology (the technology in the movie, not the technology of how the movie was created). Everything in the Prequels looks wrong because it describes a digital future, a future where software and electrons matter more than hardware and mechanical energy. There is too much glossy smoothness in the prequels. Sand everywhere, but not enough grit. The Prequels fail to give us the aesthetic of a Star Wars universe. And for that they can never be forgiven.
Fortunately, The Force Awakens begins to make things right. It once again shows an analog future. Unlike the dumb prequels, The Force Awakens feels like Star Wars because it shows a future imaged by people who didn’t understand the digital revolution of the 1990s and beyond. It gets all the details right.
Foreground vs Background
I watched Star Wars: The Force Awakens three times in the theater, once this past weekend, and many times in between. Each time I watched Episode Seven in the theater, I focused on different aspects of the movie. The first time it was all about the story and experiencing a new Star Wars movie that was awesome: one that captured not only the aesthetic of the original movies but also the magical space opera qualities. It just felt good to watch the spectacle and see a triumphant return of something that I loved so much.
The second time I watched Episode 7, I did my best to listen to the movie. I paid attention to what music was played, when music started or disappeared, what the various spaceships, lightsabers, and machines sounded like (I love how Kylo Ren’s spaceship and lightsaber purr), and how long it took people to speak. Fin gets an entire dialog free introduction. Rey has multiple scenes on screen before uttering a word, and then those words are in a gibberish alien language. That’s cool. When my daughters watched Episode 7 for the first time this past weekend, it wasn’t until Rey removed her goggles and scarf that they even realized she was a girl.
The third time I watched the movie in the theaters, I did my best to ignore the action and just look at the scenery. I learned this technique from watching Disney movies billions of times with my daughters. There was a time when I was watching The Frog Princess almost daily. After awhile you learn to ignore the foreground and focus on the background.
The scenery in The Force Awakens is gorgeous. There are some very impressive set pieces, and the one that stuck in my mind was Maz Kanata’s castle. She’s a thousand year old alien running a restaurant of sorts. The obvious link to the original trilogy is that her watering hole is a callback to Mos Eisley Cantina. But watching the scenes on Takodana, it was the material of the structure that interested me, not references to background characters from A New Hope. Maz Kanata’s establishment is made out of stone. Why in a space traveling universe is her building made of stone? Because it’s old. And stone lasts. If you live hundreds of years, why build with materials that rot or need replacing every couple of decades? That’d be like us having to replace our home’s windows yearly. That’s dumb. For someone thinking about buildings in terms of centuries rather than decades, more durable materials like stone make sense.
I want high tech stuff in a low tech home
Stone is not only durable, it’s also low-tech. And low-tech answers are the best way to future proof a building. Low-tech solutions are not only about durability (long lasting or easy to replace), they are also about complexity. If you want a building to last centuries, are you really so arrogant as to assume the functions of the rooms will remain static? That how people consume media today will be the same as in a hundred years (or even ten)? Or that how we generate light will be constant? A building designed and constructed to last needs to be adaptable, but adaptable on a coarse scale, not a finicky one.  A durable building is a long-lasting shell. Which again brings me back to Maz Kanata’s castle. Her castle can handle fads in technology and shifts in usage. It is a low tech shell that can handle high-tech activities. Think about it: while the cooking fire might feel archaic, the amount of tech-portable tech-carried by all the patrons is astounding. And while the analog future of Star Wars is just fantasy, the shift from fixed to portable technology is quite real. The activities inside Maz Kanata’s castle are transient and ephemeral, but the castle is constructed to last.
How many built-in shelves do you need if you don’t invest thousands of dollars in books? How does a living room change in layout when once again we can ignore the existing of TVs; when our main gathering space isn’t a slave to a static, immobile aging technology? Should we really sacrifice the insulation value of an exterior wall to fit more wires doomed to obsolescence? If there are no active systems (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) in our exterior walls, what simple construction can be used to maximize durability and insulation? And how does that simplification of all materials and systems ease construction?
Certain aspects of our buildings will increase in complexity (windows and doors today are way more complicated than they were fifty years ago), but most parts will get simpler. So much of the technology we cram into our walls is trend-obsessed. We string knob and tube wiring, then copper wire, then copper wire in metal conduit or ENT or whatever comes next; we add phone wires, then ethernet cables and speaker wires. Then we stop using phone wires, ethernet and speaker wires. We add USB 2.0 ports to our outlets then our favorite tech company starts switching to USB-C. In the future our buildings will be disconnected from the day to day technology we interact with. A screen will be portable, not fixed. Nothing will need to be permanently attached or integrated into buildings.
Analog vs Organic
Star Wars would make us believe the answer is stone. But of course Star Wars is an analog future, a fantasy world that can never exist. Analog technology didn’t take us to space, digital technology did. But the digital tech we know now has limits as well. If we build modern buildings that will last centuries, or spacecraft that can take us to other solar systems, the technology underlying those masterpieces will be organic. This type of tech will be grown, either in a factory or in situ. It will consist of materials that are not found naturally. They might act like natural objects, but do unnatural things-or natural things we’re not used to seeing at such a large scale. The buildings will feel low tech because they will be simple on the scale we can understand. We’ll perceive degrees of solidity and transparency in our built environment; levels of reflectivity; light emitience. Joints will be minimized. Things will feel monolithic in the sense that a tree or a human is understood as one thing, not vast networks of hidden, naturally formed structures.
This is not a prognostication of curvy, fluid formed buildings. Vertical walls and flat floors have value. Organic materials do not require organic shapes. That’s a mistaken reading of this potential future. Further discussions of this are beyond my musings on Star Wars, so I’ll save the details for another day. Until then, check out the article I wrote for Clog back in 2013: Analog – Digital – Organic.
Subscribe to my blog to read more about the tricky world of being an Architect in the 21st century: Shoegnome on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube. For more on buildings constructed to outlast the memories of their builders, check out this video by Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell called A New History for Humanity — The Human Era that suggests we should be celebrating New Years even 12,017 in a few weeks, as our calendar should start from the completion of the first known big construction project, the Göbekli Tepe.
Dr Walter Black
This is a rich article, philosophically. I appreciated your discussion and comparisons of reading/looking/viewing styles. Too often we are stuck in the NOW and don’t realize we are really stuck in a small part of our time-warp. Will our technology even last a year, much less a thousand years.
Jared Banks
Thanks!
Phil Allsopp
Jared:
As I’ve mentioned before in reply to one of your articles, it was space and technology (Dan Dare in the Eagle – A UK publication from the 1950s and 1960s) that inspired me to become an architect. Your point about durability, simplicity and the ability to adapt to changing ways of living are on point. I wonder though whether the rocket-like acceleration of technological advances might taper off such that things like smart phones or flat screen TVs (getting thinner by the year) might stabilize substantially? When I see Kubrick’s brilliant and prescient 2001:A Space Odyssey, I’m struck by the fact that “technology” is nowhere near as bulky and “untidy” as what we see on the International Space Station, for example. Its there but isn’t in our faces as much as what we see today. Same with today’s TVs for example. In the 80s and early 90s we were designing living rooms to accommodate huge and bulky projection TVs or earlier still ultra heavy vacuum tube TVs that needed small bridge structures to keep them from crashing through chipboard TV cabinets.
I’m in London this week and have spent some time walking the streets around Portland Place (where the RIBA is headquartered – #66 Portland Place). Many of the old buildings constructed from stone and brick with solid – really solid – walls and floors are filled with high tech operations. They are clean, efficient and pretty cool places to work in I imagine. Most have been cleanly triple-glazed. The buildings endure and are capable of being adapted to a wide variety of functions. Their street-side eye candy is terrific and a world apart from the beige and bland strip malls we see far too much of in the US. If these London buildings had been designed and built according to today’s mantra from the banking sector (build it on the cheap so we can rake in fast profits), the average stick frame and stucco strip mall office building might last a decade before serious repair work is needed. Thus we have no durability to speak of which enabled our built environments to endure and be adapted to changes in technology. My guess is that as technologies become more wireless, thinner, lighter and smaller and communication screens become capable of being projected, rolled up or set into thin recesses in wall surfaces, our habitats might well be able to be designed for a lifespan measured in many decades or even a few hundred years (as we see in cities like London, Paris, Vienna, Chicago, New York etc.). So what’s stopping us? Its our banking and finance sector, which includes real estate investment trusts, development companies and high street banks, whose addiction to fast profits is driving the tawdry cheapness we see in almost every project being built these days. Human habitat plays a decisive role in wellbeing, health, community resilience and economic diversity. To continue treating it as a mere real estate commodity to be built on the cheap impoverishes us all while the banking sector enjoys their seven figure Christmas bonuses. Obviously the architecture profession has a responsibility to engage in shaping public policies to change this state of affairs and also increase its sphere of influence well beyond the small marble its has become over the past few decades. In 2015 the United States spent $2.5 trillion treating chronic diseases, many of which are either caused by or aggravated by the placed we inhabit. This huge economic boat anchor suggests that our profession can and must do more to move the needle from extreme profiteering by the banking sector to a saner balance than enables the benefits of better quality, more durable habitats to be realized by people and enterprises whose lives and value depend on them.
Simple, durable, delightful, cool, adaptable, technologically rich, clean and personal…..yup, buildings can and should be a great deal better than the average pieces of junk being built today with all their style du jour facial makeup masquerading as “design”. We can and should do a lot better than that.
My 2 cents……thanks for the provocative article, Jared.
Jared Banks
Phil. Thanks for once again adding a comment which totally enhances the original blog post and should just be an article itself! And as always you’re giving me more and more to think about.
Phil Allsopp
Delighted that my reply sparked some ideas….as always there are no clear black and white answers. I do think, though, that accommodating massive population growth has to be done in a way that doesn’t involve perpetually tearing down cheap structures that have reached their 20 year life to replace them with even shorter life-span cheaper ones.
When I hear on NPR the economics news that speaks of “housing starts”, we have our core monetary system basing its policies on the idea that buildings are throw-away things and that investing in new build is the indicator of economic strength. What if the metrics talked about spending on rehab as well as new housing starts? We might end up with a different picture being presented to architects by developers and bankers that describes durability goals. These goals, if achieved, may end up being proxies for more resilient, vibrant communities in which the value and success of a person’s life isn’t measured by how many times they’ve relocated for work or bought and sold the places they inhabit.
One of my Board members lives in Royal Albert Hall Mansions just across from London’s Royal Albert Hall. These apartment buildings were built in 1876 as a hedge against the rapidly-rising prices of real estate in London so as to give established families (middle and upper middle class economically) a chance to remain in central London and remain part of the city’s economy and social life. The buildings used an advanced form of fireproof construction including shallow barrel-vaulted reinforced concrete floors. The quality of construction was excellent and they remain today amazing apartments. And boy are they quiet!! Sure, real estate speculation was going on all the time in the great cities of Europe and London was no exception. But I don’t think that the banking fraternity held anywhere near as much power over day to day decisions affecting construction values, design and durability as they so clearly do today. Back then the dog representing the nation wagged the bankers’ tails by and large even though some massive banking empires obviously existed and, like today’s bankers, were addicted to money, profits and power.
Its worth checking out Royal Albert Hall Mansions…..I bet the construction details are marvels and I’d also bet that there were no small forests of red circles on construction sections saying “details per subcontractor or manufacturer” – the areas of construction where buildings stand the greatest chance of failure.
Best
Phil
Jared Banks
I’ve spent some time this morning researching the Royal Albert Hall Mansions. Beautiful buildings and such simple plans. I like how we started with fantasy movie sets and are half a step away from politics. Architects have a job to do!
Elrond Burrell
Great observations, Jared.
Reminds me of a couple of articles by Lloyd Alter: –
In praise of the Dumb Home http://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/praise-dumb-home.html
Thermostats are getting smarter, but it is still a dumb answer to the problem of saving energy http://www.treehugger.com/sustainable-product-design/thermostats-are-getting-smarter-it-still-dumb-answer-problem-saving-energy.html
And, of course, Passive House (Passivhaus), the world’s leading standard for high-performance buildings, is all about getting the fabric of the build right because that is what lasts, not technological add-ons etc. Build the fabric to be poorly performing (ie code minimum in most places!) and you *lock in* the poor performance since the chances of upgrading the fabric anytime soon is very slim. Easy to upgrade a kitchen or bathroom or a TV etc. anytime, not the windows as you point out!
Jared Banks
I remember reading the Dumb Home article back in 2014 (and I’m friends with both Rob and Mike who are name dropped in the article–they are both fellow Seattle ARCHICAD users and PH consultants). Thanks for pointing out the sequel article. You are absolutely right. I’m basically making a case for Passive House without calling it that.
I find products like the Nest super interesting. Lloyd talks about how the Nest is only good for bad homes, but that’s what a lot of us live in. I’ve had a nest in my house for about three years and love it. And I love it now even more that it is connected to the Alexa in my kitchen. We keep the house on the colder side in the Winter (or warmer side in the Summer). And we are definitely ‘put on a sexy sweater or blanket’ to keep warm people. But there are times that just doesn’t cut it. To be able to tell Alexa to turn up the temperature is awesome. The ease of turning the heat up or down means we’re more likely to keep the furnace or AC off or on low because it’s so convenient to change the temp when we can’t handle it any longer. Oh and another thing I like about the Nest. I can set the temperature low while I’m on vacation and then warm the house up remotely when I’m on my way home. Again a better insulated house wouldn’t get so out of sync when I’m away for a few days, but my house sucks at the moment. Hoping to fix that in a year or three.
This fits with my views as outlined in the article. A Nest and an Alexa are wireless and unobtrusive. They are taking the dumb tech in the house and making it smarter. But if either is superseded by better tech, it’s just unplugged. I am not a handy person and I was able to install the Nest. That’s a sign of good tech.
Thanks for the comments and all the good chats on Twitter.