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 solve. Centuries later, we're still looking up at the result. I struggle to imagine much of what we build today producing the same attachment. What has changed in the decisions that produce our surroundings, such that a building we admire becomes something we'd consider unreasonable to attempt ourselves?

Le Corbusier's machine for living in ^[ 1 ] provides a useful way into the question. 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 file. Standard components and repeated layouts make costs more predictable, which is obviously useful. But once that becomes the basis on which decisions are made, every bit of ornament requires someone to defend its existence. Individually sensible savings can produce a street of interchangeable buildings, each suspiciously close to an enlarged IKEA LACK. I like brickwork with a pattern, carved stone, a curve that does something interesting with the light. These are contributions to a place that a construction budget has difficulty describing ^[ 2 ].

Robotics makes the cost of those details worth examining again. If a machine can reliably carve stone, mill timber or lay intricate brickwork, the hours of skilled labour required might become much less of a constraint. This doesn't establish that an elaborate façade would become cheap. The equipment needs paying for, the material still has to be obtained, and someone has to set up, supervise and install the work. There is nevertheless a practical question here: how much of the price comes from the difficulty of making a thing, and how much of that difficulty can we now remove? We should be able to test whether the judgement that ornament is unaffordable still holds.

Suppose that work does become substantially cheaper. The person commissioning a building still has to decide what to do with the saving. Reducing the budget produces an immediate and measurable benefit; improving the experience of everyone who lives in or passes the building is harder to account for, particularly over generations. This is a question of what our decisions reward as much as what our machines can make. We devote considerable ingenuity to shaving fractions of a second off financial transactions, so I find it difficult to accept that poor surroundings are simply an unavoidable condition of modern life. Cheaper production could put elaborate work within reach of ordinary homes, provided someone has a reason to commission it and care about the result.

I would like to see architects and craftspeople given the means to examine this properly. A carved doorway or a section of intricate brickwork would be enough to begin with. Let machines carry out the demanding, repetitive work they can do reliably, then account for the finishing, supervision and installation required to produce something we'd actually want to live with. How does that compare with the standard component? Which parts remain expensive, and why? The answer might give us a good reason to change the design or improve the process. It might also show that a detail routinely dismissed on cost is now quite reasonable to build.

A lower construction cost would be welcome, of course. I'm interested in whether it also changes what we consider worth attempting. We needn't reproduce a cathedral to build with some of that care, and ornament alone doesn't make a building good. But if the difficulty of making these things becomes less of a constraint, I'd like that to become visible in the places we inhabit. A building may outlast everyone involved in commissioning it. That seems a good reason to spend some of the saving on something people will want to keep.

Footnotes