Theory And Practice Of Impermanence

This article appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 1997, Number 3. To order this issue or a subscription, visit the HDM homepage at . © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and The MIT Press. Not to be reproduced without the permission of the publisher

The Theory and Practice of Impermanence
The Illusion of Durability, by Edward Ford
IN 1988,

ten years after itsopening, the entire cladding of Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Center for the Visual Arts was replaced, its aluminum panels having deteriorated beyond repair. In 1988, thirteen years after its completion, Peter Eisenman’s House VI in Cornwall, Connecticut, was essentially rebuilt, primarily as a result of numerous leaks and the resulting structural damage. House VI has experienced no problems since itsrebuilding, but Eisenman’s 1971 House III in neighboring Lakeville was, as of 1995, a plywood ruin. Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Center, finished in 1972, is currently the subject of a $120 million renovation, including the replacement of all the acrylic glazing of the escalators. These examples would be taken by many as evidence, if any were necessary, of the decline of the art and craftof building in the late 20th century. There are other signs of a larger trend; in the December 1995 Progressive Architecture, Stephen Ruggiero wrote of “the legacy of poorly designed and detailed curtain walls” of the building boom of the 1980s, which he called

“cladding’s ticking time bombs.” Is there something inherently flawed in Modern architecture’s conception of good building? Is theresomething inherently flawed in the practices of modern construction (it should be noted at the start that these are very different questions)? Or is this phenomenon illusory?1 Each of these building failures illustrates a slightly different problem and raises a slightly different question. Eisenman’s office left a number of decisions to the contractor, and House VI was improperly flashed,understructured, uninsulated, and, certainly in its stucco work, poorly executed. (Some would say that this is the architect’s responsibility on this type of job, others the contractor’s, others both.) Foster’s office is known for intense involvement in the selection, development, and installation of building components, yet the Sainsbury panels failed because of a “destructive reaction between the phenolicfoam panels and the superplastic alloy that forms the outer shell,” and not, as might be expected, because of a failure of its high-tech gasketed panel joints.
H A RVA R D D E S I G N M A G A Z I N E

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Durability and Ephemerality
Should we be scandalized that such an expensive retrofit of the Pompidou is necessary after so short a time, or is this the inevitable maintenance that such asophisticated piece of equipment requires after twenty years? Piano argues that the building has been

The Theory and Practice of Impermanence
construction of the original, destroyed in the war. The most conspicuous example of the reconstructed monument is one that recognizes, in fact celebrates, its temporality –– the Ise shrine in Japan, which, according to one’s point of view, is eithertwenty or 1300 years old, since it has been systematically reconstructed in an elaborate ritual roughly every twenty years since the 7th century. The Ise shrine has become for Modern architects a kind of anti-definition of the traditional Western building. For Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, or Kenzo Tange, Ise, along with the Parthenon, symbolized the polar extremities of Eastern and Western thought. Inform, in material, in its attitude toward nature, Ise was the opposite of buildings in the Classical tradition. Noboru Kawazoe wrote:
The faithful adherence throughout the ages to the custom of rebuilding the Ise shrine every twenty years is a sign that the Japanese were not interested in preserving old buildings as such. It was the style, not the actual structures embodying it, that they sought...