Robots and spires

What interests me about buildings such as Brunelleschi's dome in Florence is the amount of effort people were prepared to commit to an idea. Religious conviction gave them a reason to attempt something extraordinary, and the practical difficulty of building it became a problem to dedicate ones entire life towards, without the expectation of arriving at a solution. The alien longitudinal decisions that result in such a structure are non-existent today, by comparison. Centuries later, we're still looking up in awe at the result. I struggle to imagine much of what we build today producing the same attachment in centuries to come. What has changed in the decisions that produce our surroundings, such that a building we admire becomes something we'd consider "unreasonable"?

The ideology of Le Corbusier's machine for living in ^[ 1 ] has brainwashed many a budding architect over the years. A building's function can be specified and its construction cost calculated. The value of an intricate façade to someone walking past it in a hundred years is harder to enter into an .xlsx. Standard components and repeated layouts make costs more predictable, which is obviously useful on a production line. However, once this becomes the basis on which most decisions are made, every slice of non-modular blandness requires a dug-in defence in the language of accounting. Extrapolation of this mindset, and before you know it, you've a street of interchangeable buildings, each suspiciously close to an enlarged IKEA LACK. Most of us like brickwork with a pleasing pattern, carved stone, a curve that does something interesting with the light that bounces off it. These are contributions to a place that undergird an architects existence, yet construction budgets have great difficulty in describing ^[ 2 ].

Robotics might well make the cost of those details worth examining again, and successfully defend itself in the language of accounting. If a machine can reliably carve stone, mill timber or lay intricate brickwork, the hours of skilled labour and coordination required might become much less of a constraint than it is currently. This doesn't assume to say that an elaborate façade would become cheap. The equipment needs paying for, the material still has to be obtained, more of it, and someone has to set up, supervise and install the work. We need to reorient the measure of great work. There is nevertheless a practical question, that is; how much of the price comes from the difficulty of making a thing, and how much of that difficulty can we now remove?

Suppose that constructing previously difficult things does become substantially cheaper. The person commissioning a building still has to decide what to do with the savings. Reducing the budget produces an immediate and measurable benefit in the language of accounting; improving the experience of everyone who lives in or passes the building for centuries is a value judgement that's for obvious reasons harder to account for. This is a question of how our decisions are made and rewarded as much as it is what our machines can currently produce. We devote considerable ingenuity to shaving fractions of a second off financial transactions, I find it difficult to accept that poor surroundings are simply an unavoidable condition of modern life. Modern blandness is a mirror to accounting ideology and the dictatorial control it has over all decision-making. Cheaper production may well enable elaborate work within reach of unborn projects, those who shape the eventual form will still have to bravely sidestep tidy accounting frameworks and a tsunami of reasonable reasoning before shape starts to change.

A lower construction cost would be welcome by all regardless, obviously. I'm interested in whether it also changes what we consider worth attempting. I'm not saying we need to build a cathedral everywhere to build with additional care, and ornament alone doesn't make a building good. But if the difficulty of building difficult shapes becomes less of a constraint, I'd like to think that this capability will be expressed fully. A building outlasts us all when built well, including those that shape it. This seems a good enough reason to spend some of the savings on something people will want to keep.

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