The Idea of Building

Thought and Action in the Design and Production of Buildings

Steven Groak

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135827830
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book is unique in its attempt to explore the many ways we have of thinking about buildings. In particular it raises questions about the kinds of knowledge we have and will need in designing, making and enjoying our buildings. At the very least this book provides an overview of the fragmented construction industry, making it a vital purchase for all construction related students. However, the author has written for a wider audience making the book an essential guide for those interested in the form of buildings or the deliberate ways in which people build them.

BOOK TWO

Building Knowledge and Building Experience

Book Two develops the issues presented in the Preliminaries and Book One, in a series of essays which—in some measure—stand alone. In certain cases, similar topics are explored in different places, in different ways. The intention is to offer commentaries and clarifications based on the alternative proposals developed in Book One.

What kinds of knowledge are gained as feedback from building use or people’s experience? How can they be used by designers and constructors? What do we mean by ‘feedback’ when the process is so ambiguous?

Can we find the common ground between architectural criticism and building science, within ‘building’ as a noun and ‘building’ as a verb? Will we attend more to what a building does and less to what it is? Remember the maxim of the apocryphal hardware store: ‘Our customers want 10mm holes, not 10mm drills.’

CHAPTER ONE

Historical concepts of building science

The array of explicit knowledge about buildings is vast. It includes the work of historians of art and architecture. It is embedded in myriad textbooks and primers for the different occupations in the building industry. It is contained in research reports, building appraisals, surveyors’ reports, mandatory standards and codes of practice, do-it-yourself manuals and other forms of record. It is underpinned by many theoretical treatises.

Nevertheless, the central issue of building technologies is often remote, partly tacit. Those in practice have tended not to publish the full richness of their knowledge and experience, their knowhow, relying instead on oral traditions and the examples available in existing buildings. Even today, even in highly industrialized economies, this remains largely the case. It may be that the techniques developed in TV for explaining processes will be more appropriate for the analysis of building craft traditions and their mutation into industrial technologies.

I cannot pretend to encompass all this material. This is a preliminary inquiry: to identify why and how certain kinds of knowledge and experience of buildings have been formulated—with particular reference to ‘scientific principles’ of building.

Building science is concerned to apply the methods and knowledge of general science to the specific issues of buildings. In some areas, this has reached a high level of understanding; in other areas, we are still at the beginning.

Some believe that the scientific study of buildings and people is strictly objective, restricted only by lack of information. This is plainly an oversimplification. Yet the wide array of work under the general heading of building science is of great importance and utility. Immediate questions come to mind: what kind of knowledge is it? How do we make best use of it? First, we need to understand something of its origins and how the ideas emerged.

The question of principles

Are there ‘building principles’, in the sense of scientific analysis? And in the sense of today’s meaning of science? Perhaps they are mostly the principles of natural science, of physics, chemistry and—as we have increasingly come to realize—biology, as applied to buildings, their environments and their implications for the people occupying them.

These principles have had a broader meaning in Western societies, incorporating ideas from mathematics and mensuration (procedures for measurement), the Ancient Greek basis of science. For many in Western countries and elsewhere, ‘principles’ still includes architectural composition and proportion, established over centuries by a process of (depending upon your standpoint) scientific testing or cultural tradition.

We find these themes in Vitruvius, Roman author from the 1st century BC, whose Ten Books on Architecture is the earliest surviving theoretical treatise on building in Western culture and which had renewed impact during the Renaissance. In the initial chapters, he set out the need for scientific understanding of materials, of healthy sites. He formulated the famous dictum of building needing durability, convenience and beauty—the most familiar English translation is ‘firmness, commodity and delight’.

The Renaissance also rekindled an awareness of Greek mathematics and theoretical physics which has survived to this day. It combined with the development of experimental science to demonstrate the great power of theory in solving practical problems.

We find, too, an increasing separation of explicit and tacit knowledge as science crystallized out from medieval practices—e.g. astronomy differentiated from astrology, chemistry from alchemy, early medicine from herbalism through the rise of anatomy and pharmacy, and mechanics from practical masonry. There was a further division of labour as those who explored fundamental theories diverged from those who found practical applications.

Since then, the acceleration of science in various cultures has been remarkable. Its effects have continued to permeate the study and practice of building. However, in significant measure, it has to be distinguished from the evolution of building technologies.

The rise of building technologies

Over a similar period, we have seen the rise of various systematic forms of engineering design, although major engineering feats were accomplished earlier, despite the apparent lack of formalized knowledge—e.g. the Pyramids of Ancient Egypt, Roman engineering, the Gothic cathedrals. (The histories of engineering thought are now recognized to be an important field in their own right—partly because we are now more conscious of the fact that many successful technologies preceded the scientific understanding of their behaviour by decades, even centuries.)

With the rise of the world maritime powers—i.e. Portugal, Spain, Holland, France and England—the concept of ‘Europe’ supplanted that of the Mediterranean as the locus of commercial power in the 16th century. The decline of the Catholic Church was followed by the rise of city states and the absolute monarchies, although Europe continued to be the battleground of warring factions. The emergence of the engineer thus was fuelled by the simultaneous demands of ocean-borne commerce—e.g. for navigation and cartography—and of military confrontation—e.g. fortifications, weapons, machines of war, etc. The term ‘civil engineer’ emerged to distinguish those practitioners from ‘military engineers’. Parallel developments, for instance in 16th century Florence under the Medici family, included the emergence of the architect as a distinct profession.

It was, however, the Industrial Revolution which gave firm definition to the idea of engineering, particularly in building. The distinction between designer and constructor became more marked as the role of the master mason—powerfully established as designer/builder throughout Europe from the 11th century onwards—was supplanted.

The engineer initially was concerned with work with iron-founders, who made engines; they became increasingly involved with building when they helped to design buildings to house the engines and the manufacturing processes thus powered. The iron components they developed were later found to be useful in other buildings and could be used ‘off the shelf by designers.

The structural engineering profession began to emerge during the 18th century as a distinct version of civil engineering. By the 19th century, the advances in mathematical theory and industrial know-how led to a series of spectacular structures, associated with a mastery of metal, glass and masonry. The Crystal Palace in London and the Eiffel Tower in Paris were part of an extraordinary series of demonstration pieces at international exhibitions organized to promote the new industrial powers (did they mark the beginning or the end of an era?). Less obvious but just as significant in their way were a series of metal-framed buildings for commerce and industry.

It was the critical period of the rise of materials and component manufacturing for the building industry; however, it also began a greater fragmentation of technical knowledge which has continued to the present.

This period also saw the transition from the emphasis on invention—based on the independent inventor—to the idea of ‘research and development programmes’—based on industrial laboratories. The increased contact which also resulted between industrial development and academic research further contributed to changes in the concepts of science as part of industrial (including military) production.

The rise of building research

With the example of the First World War, and the impact of advanced manufacturing, those concerned with urgent problems in building recognized a need for much more research. The striking successes of scientific (and hence engineering) research, based on fundamental theories of materials, ensured that this became the model for building research from the 1920s onwards. This is enshrined in the character of the Conseil International du Bâtiment (CIB).

The 19th century’s legacy of theory in structures, overcoming gravity, and in thermodynamics, understanding energy and its transmission through fluids, was crucial in developing an overall framework of research. This legacy also remains in what is known as the Helmholtz School, from 19th century Vienna (and the intellectual arena of the Austro-Hungarian Empire), which sought to bring medicine more completely into the realm of natural science. Man was treated as any other natural organism, subject to physical science. It was the beginning of psychophysics—the study of sensation, with its mechanistic analyses of sound and hearing, vision, and the other senses. Around the same period, reforms in housing and factory conditions had generated great interest in building comfort, and the combination of practical action and new theories provided a potent mix.

From these two strands eventually grew the exploration of the physiological framework of people’s experience of buildings and how this could be expressed as scientific knowledge: explicit, measured, systematically spelled out, based in a general theory, subject to experimental testing—and useful to the designer. This programme continues today, although we have become more conscious of its underlying complexity. Parallel attempts to find similar knowledge through the methods of psychology, sociology and anthropology have been more equivocal.

The empirical knowledge from these endeavours comes in two forms. First, there is that established through statistical and/or experimental procedures. There are several examples. The proof in 19th century London that certain diseases were transmitted in water led to greater control of the water supply, and initiated a surge towards public health engineering more generally (still a vital issue). Systematic tests are used to identify the fire-resistance performance of materials. Other tests are used to define acoustic insulation (i.e. the resistance of a material to the transmission of sound energy through it) and acoustic absorption (i.e. the measure of how much sound energy is reflected from a surface).

Secondly, there is the scientific knowledge derived from investigating well-established procedures but where people did not always know why these methods worked well and therefore could not easily apply them to new situations. (Some authors call this the study of the inherent ‘logic’ of buildings themselves—e.g. their spatial structure.) The behaviour of masonry domes in large Roman buildings or the structures of Gothic cathedrals provide stark examples: even today, there is still argument about how exactly the antique and medieval masons constructed these extraordinary structures, notwithstanding some famous collapses. Other examples include the development of reinforced concrete or the evolution of timber-frame construction as it emerged from pragmatic practice into a strong engineering capability based upon calculation.

The evolution of science and technology, within which today’s ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Foreword
• Preliminaries
• Book One The Flight from Equilibrium
• Interlude Thin Cities 4
• Some Polemical Remarks
• Book Two Building Knowledge and Building Experience
• Book Three Another Critical Position
• Author index
• Subject index