Durability and the Culture of New

I lament our throw away culture. We buy automobiles that last 5 years, computers that last 3, cell phones that last one. Twenty five year warranties on roofs that really only last 15, one year warranties on almost any new home. How many time have you heard this one: “At that price, I can afford to throw it away and buy a brand new one!”

We have traded a long established culture of durability, maintenance and re-use for one of cheap, expendable, single use goods. Do you know where to find a cobbler? Mending shoes is obsolete. We wear them out (or most often the glued-on sole simply breaks away, or a seam bursts), we throw them away, we buy new ones. More often, we give or throw them away as they go out of style. Who in their right mind would mend a pair of socks? Darning is art of mending socks, a term which, like cobbler, is disappearing from our language. We think of these things as antiquated, not modern. This is a mindset that has been created, promoted, and sold relentlessly for decades. It's working.

When we enter the realm of buildings, we experience a great paradox. Buildings last a long time, and it's difficult to throw them away. Individual components fail, but in order to continue to successfully shelter their occupants, they typically get repaired. You've undoubtedly heard of a house having “good bones”, this is used in reference to houses from the early part of the 20th century or earlier, when the culture of durability still existed. Fast forward 75 years, and we enter the age of the great suburban experiment. Houses have become a mass produced commodity. The greatest benefit went to the builders who could build fast, cheap, and in quantity. The entire social experiment of the seventies through today, was bent on delivering houses of the minimum quality permitted by law, bigger and faster than the competition. We use inventions like drywall, chip board, asphalt shingles, fibreglass insulation, particle board, melamine, MDF, plastic vapour barriers. Thin, cheap to manufacture, lightweight, easy to install, petrochemical based, clean and new on day one, tired and worn within 10 years, if you're lucky. These became the assumed materials from which most homes and small buildings were constructed. Suggesting anything otherwise to most builders just gets you lots of head scratching, or guffaws at the naivety of considering such an expense. Brick, stone, timber, slate, copper, steel, cedar, materials that have inherent durability, have become expensive and available only to the well to do. Similarly, you can still buy a high quality, stitched leather pair of boots with repairable soles. The only problem is you'll have to go to an overpriced boutique in a big city, with upper class clientèle and exclusive pricing. And you still haven't found that cobbler to fix them if it ever comes to that.

An entire lifestyle has evolved around this. The typical home owning couple will move an average of 5 times in their adult lives: starter home, family home, larger family home, downsized home, retirement home. “Flip that house” has become a catch phrase, and a plot line for numerous insipid yet oddly entertaining TV shows (misery loves company). This has turned the concept of investment and durability on its ear. Why on earth would we put a 50 year roof on a house we're not going to live there for more than 15? Give me the cheapest shingle you've got, with a 20 year warranty. Let the new owners worry about it.

The foremost strategy for sustainable building is durability. This is also the great paradox of building green. There are serious environmentalists who preach that every human made thing on this planet should spontaneously compost itself. I am not one of those. We humans make pretty lousy animals, and as a result we need fairly sophisticated shelters to make us happy, healthy, and comfy enough to afford the luxury to sit back and type interesting bits into our blogs. There is a fine balance between using materials which are naturally derived, and ending up with a building which is more mushroom food than healthy shelter. But if we look a little deeper, we find that the most durable materials are those which the planet has provided us, used in an intelligent, designed manner. It is a great misconception that plastics “last for thousands of years”. Anyone who has left a children's toy out in the yard for a season or two knows that water and UV are powerful forces of entropy. Plastic may take centuries to break down biochemically, but its functional lifetime as an effective skin against the elements is surprisingly short. Clay, on the other hand, when fired into a brick, literally does last centuries, even millenia (witness ancient Rome – built largely of brick). Leave an un-fired brick directly exposed to rain and it will disappear in years. Fire the brick, creating a hardened skin on it, and protect it with a roof and overhangs, and you've done a great thing. Clay has an incredible capacity to store moisture and dry out again indefinitely. Though if we keep it wet for too long, like through the winter, and ice will form inside it causing it to explode. Materials need to be used intelligently.

Glass is an interesting conundrum as well. Look at any modern city and you will be met with towering walls of seemingly nothing but glass. Derived from sand and silicates, it is naturally sourced, very durable, and magically transparent. It is fragile, but strong enough to withstand the majority of day to day stresses (hurricane-hurled objects being an obvious exception). But I can't help but wonder what will happen to all those glass skinned towers as the price of energy rises, and that great view quickly seems like a silly trade off for maintaining your vital body heat. Glass is a great material, renewable, durable, and used wisely in a well designed passive solar building, a net benefit for a long long time. Used for its aesthetic properties without a long view to the future, it could be an incredible waste. Many civilizations for centuries after the fall of Rome mined its cities for stone, iron and marble, perhaps we will eventually dismantle the glass towers of Toronto and use those panes for sensibly sizes, South facing windows in our own modest shelters. Steel has similar properties; incredibly durable until exposed to continual cycles of wetting and drying in combination with salt. Infinitely recyclable, but only as long as it can be effectively and cleanly removed from an assembly, and isn't coated with toxic paints.

The great suburban experiment is already slowing, albeit imperceptibly in some parts of our world. Let's hope that the last two decades are the last “housing boom”. We need to work towards intensifying our urban cores with sensible, well designed, durable buildings and stop the madness of planting plastic disposable boxes all over our prime food producing land. We should also look to moving out of this culture of disposal on all levels. Try to repair something that you would typically throw away and if you can't, ask yourself why this came to be. My own recent exercise in this was an attempt to replace the battery in an iPod. The realization that most of these pocket electronics are simply battery draining devices, and that the real profit is in the inherent obsolescence of the battery itself, is incredibly frustrating. It was less expensive to throw the whole thing away and buy new. It makes me wonder about electric cars, and if buying a very large, toxic expensive bank of limited life span batteries on wheels is really that much better than fossil fuel use.

If you find that cobbler, send me an email. graham@whitingdesign.ca Now if I could only find a pair of boots worth repairing.