Design for upgrade: Where are the debates or standards? 100 year buildings.
The timber is old growth and thick, the structure sound, the outside and inside is beautiful. The building is 87 years old and nothing is wrong with it… except it’s been hacked to bits through upgrades to plumbing, electrical, telephone and (now) wireless internet.
The blast doors on the boiler room won’t close, because someone propped open a door and ran a 4″ sewer pipe through. It was hardly a hack job, they used copper and even soldered it correctly. Windows were ruined by phone wiring, uncaulked, run through the frame. Electrical wiring was run, in Romex, on the surface of interior walls. A slightly better electrical upgrade ran wires out the wall, in conduit up the wall (did I mention this is a National Landmark?) and back in the 2nd floor. To get wires out of the attic someone lifted a shingle, drilled a hole, and ran the wire out. At least they used caulk… and I’m sure it lasted for the first decade.
The windows were painted once in 1925. Lead paint, of course, good stuff. Looking a bit ragged now, but it went the distance.
The faucets trickle because of scale in the pipes, but replacing them will be a huge job and involve much more slicing of historic plaster. Those pipes in the slabs that are 87 years old? Let’s just not think about it.
In short, the building was fine, but the builders did not consider the issue of leaving wiring channels and pipe chases. Nothing was documented in a way that survived, so each generation of worker bypassed the systems of the prior generation. The lack of design for upgrade has lead to visual blight, rot, and expense that (quite nearly) resulted in the destruction of the building because of excessive cost to maintain. The building sat for 30 years all but empty, with the wounds festering. Now it falls to me, in part, to try and reverse all the above on a budget.
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Is there a home in sustainability standards (LEED, etc) for designing buildings today, that won’t meet the same fate 50 years from now? -Bryce http://obviously.com/
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Replies
Bryce,
Thanks for sharing your lament. I don't see any questions -- but I appreciate your essay.
Durability is a double-edged sword. We all admire older buildings, especially those that are graceful and elegant in appearance. Most older buildings that have survived are solidly built with high quality materials.
But, as you point out, 87 years ago, standards for plumbing and electrical service were quite different. So were standards for air tightness and insulation.
It's often cheaper to demolish an older building (especially one that sat vacant for 30 years, like yours did) and build a new one than to perform a deep-energy retrofit that includes new plumbing and wiring work.
Anyone who is designing a new building intended to last 100 years faces a daunting challenge, because it's very hard to imagine what type of building people will want to live in 100 years from now. There is no single answer to this quandary. Some older buildings should be demolished; others are worth saving.
Good luck on your retrofit project.
It isn't a standard, but the open building concept has a lot of appeal to me and should improve the probability that elements of a building will be able to be updated at points in the future without disturbing the other building elements.
I've seen a website (open-building dot org) that has some information about open building, and there was a Fine Homebuilding article on open building published in Nov 2006 that stuck in my mind. Bensonwood incorporates several open building concepts in their work and philosophy of building, and I hope Bensonwood's approach is studied by others.
Bryce, I think it is a useful exercise, especially today when many of the components that go into a building have relatively short lifespans, to divide the elements up into those that will endure and to make sure that the ones which require periodic replacement can be accessed without compromising the rest of the building. Similarly, taking into account future technological change by for instance providing conduits rather than wiring with current state of the art technology is a smart move.
The question, if there is one, is why or where is the debate about design for upgrade happening? Again if this building had pipe and wiring chases in 1925, it would be in dramatically better condition now. If you want an energy question I'll post something about digital steam heat (one switch for the entire building: on or off). But this problem really has the same root cause. Upgrade of the steam heat now faces huge challenges due to piping location. And, um, that energy saving miracle material that's white and powdery.