When Buildings Are Born
As most normal humans do, I often find myself thinking about the identity of buildings. Whether or not we ever taken the time to consciously think about it, we all personally “know” a building. Some buildings just have a certain personality, a reputation, a legacy, and so on. Whatever you want to call it, it goes beyond just walls, paint, bricks, or whatever stuff the building consists of.
In my career of managing buildings and trying to keep the people inside them comfortable and happy, I have tried my best to try and figure out how exactly a building goes from a collection of sticks and rocks into a full fledged “thing”. At what point do these structures transcend inert building materials and emerge as entities all their own? It’s hard to know the exact moment a building is born, but we can agree that these identities exist beyond the physical building themselves.
I think to do that, the first step would be to examine what a building’s identity really is. Really, we see this in all structures. It could be the Taj Mahal or it could be the cardboard box someone sleeps in on the street. Anytime we encounter a human being inhabiting a structure of any kind, the structure moves beyond a shelter and develops at least some kind of identity, even if it only belongs to the inhabitant.
We all have experienced examples of this. We can think of that nasty restaurant in your hometown. You know, the one where the floors were so sticky that you had to tie your shoes extra tight to keep them from getting pulled off when you walked? The same restaurant that was inevitably shut down due to countless health code violations.
This restaurant failed, closed, and was eventually purchased by another company and reopened as another restaurant. The new owners were masters of their craft, classically trained professional chefs who poured their heart and soul into their business. The result? They also failed and closed. Why? Not because their food was bad or because their prices were too high. It’s because everyone in town remembered the old building that had sticky floors and rats and didn’t want to eat there. All because they came to associate that building with being unclean. The building developed the identity of being gross and dirty and ultimately, that was too much for a new business to overcome, regardless of how deserving that new business was.
Although this is a fictional example, we’ve all encountered something similar to this. Some buildings in our towns and cities are just “cursed”, businesses always fail there and no one seems to occupy them more than a few months or years. This “curse” isn’t really a curse, it’s the identity. The building has become something more than itself. Something that exists outside of its physical form.
This is obviously a negative example of a building’s identity, but it remains true in neutral or positive forms as well. Consider when you ask directions in a small Midwest town after getting lost on your summer road trip. The friendly town local tells you to “keep driving and turn right at the old Johnson’s Grocery Store”. You follow his directions only to once again get lost because you can’t seem to find Johnson’s Grocery Store. The truth is. Johnson’s Grocery Store was torn down 30 years ago. A vacant lot sits in its place now. However, everyone in the town still refers to it as Johnson’s Grocery. The building’s local identify remained so strong that it survived, longer than the building itself.
We have cited several examples of a building’s identity, so I think the next rational step would be to explore how these identities come to be. There obviously must be some sort of process or mechanism that takes place for these structures to be endowed with personalities, and there must be certain variables at play that help shape the identities themselves. Afterall, why is it that your house’s identity is so different than say the Sistine Chapel?
After countless minutes of contemplating this in my brain that is neither trained in philosophy nor architecture, I have developed what I believe to be the way to describe the ontology of a building’s identity.
A building’s identity does not exist in its own right. As in, it does not exist naturally. Identity is the emergent meaning that humans apply to a set of facts that exist for a specific building. We can call these facts “Structural Facticity”. These are all the objective traits of a building. The building is two floors. The building is made of wood framing. The building has 10 windows, and so on. All the things that you could indisputably say about a structure. Structural facticity is more than physical attributes as well. You could consider facts such as: This building was built in 1974. It was built by a famous architect. Stone Cold Steve Austin used to live here. This building used to be an infirmary in the Civil War, etc. Structural facticity therefore is also never ending. We can think of a building’s facticity like a ledger. As time moves forward the building ledger continues constantly adding facts, regardless of their significance. You walking through the hallway of the library adds to its ledger. That fact that you walked through it at this specific time is then permanently entered into the ledger of facticity, even if no one was there to witness it. This may be insignificant and may ultimately fail to influence the building’s identity, but it exists as facticity, nonetheless.
You would be forgiven to think that “ah yes, now this is a buildings identity. All its facticity added up into one neat package, surely that is who this building is”. However, that is only half the picture. Structural facticity represents only half of the equation. Identity cannot consist of only structural facticity as this is purely objective. It simply is what it is. If identity was only the “facts” we would not be able to adequately explain why the new restaurants owners failed in their endeavor. The “facts” would be that their restaurant is not dirty, that was the old one. Yet everyone in town still attributed being unclean to the new business.
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That means that we have something to do with this. It’s more than simple facts about a building. It is the experienced meaning of the building’s structural facticity that gives rise to a building’s identity. Therefore, we can say that identity is when a building’s facticity collides with human perception. Human perception nor structural facticity alone result in a building’s identity, yet identity emerges through the interaction of the two.
We as humans apply meaning to the objective facticity of a building and this results in a compilation of experience that melds into one identity. Perception and facticity interact, giving birth to identity.
We could then argue “but wouldn’t that make identity subjective? If the perceived meaning of facticity results in identity, surely that perceived meaning is different for everyone?”. The answer to this would be yes. A building’s identity is inherently unique to every person that ever experiences it. As identity results from the perception of an individual, that output would also be inherently unique. “But how do you explain the restaurant predicament? The restaurant failed because everyone shared the same perception of the building?” That is because some identities are so strong that they persist across society. Enough people perceive these buildings in the same way to develop a similar collective identity. We see this in buildings that have greater social significance. This is why your house has a seemingly different scale of identity compared to the Sistine Chapel. Socially less significant and more personal buildings result in socially less significant and more personal identities.
But this concept brings us yet another level deeper into the rabbit hole. We now must consider the identity feedback loop this creates for buildings in society. The building’s identity begins to fold in on itself. The identity society has mutually accepted becomes a trait in the building’s facticity itself. That is in turn perceived and results in a furthering version of a building’s identity. This creates a feedback loop. Identity compounds upon itself and creates expectation, and then becomes self-perpetuating. This is exactly why the restaurants failed. Because of the social, self-perpetuating identity of the building had enough inertia to overcome the new owner’s structural facticity in the building’s ledger.
Building’s become things larger than themselves. People perceive a building, assign meaning to it, and then develop a collective identity. That identity becomes a socially observable reality, which then influences how future people perceive the building. A building doesn’t merely acquire an identity. Its acquired identity influences the creation of its future identity.
But these concepts aren’t law. Your restaurant isn’t damned to an eternity of being viewed as a roach motel. The building doesn’t carry that cross for the rest of time. These identities are not permanent. Just as everything else, the new restaurant owner’s failure recorded itself in the ledger of structural facticity. Sometimes the accumulated, subsequent ledger additions add enough to the building to where it overcomes the previous identity. Sometimes the events and traits of a building slowly erode over time, and they lose their potency in the recipe of identity. We would be better off to view identity as a constantly morphing and evolving amalgamation than a strict linear path.
So now we land here back at the beginning. We asked at what point do buildings transcend being a pile of organized material into something bigger. Well, I would say it happens the exact moment someone experiences it. The very moment a person’s consciousness lurches forward and apprehends the structure its identity is born. It emerges in infancy but just as we, it grows over time. Identities grow in complexity or completely fade away. They change over time or persist for longer than us. Whether it is your childhood home or the Parthenon, every structure ever erected, no matter how big or small, has its own unique identity.
You just have to take the time to get to know them.
Further Exploration:
Care to explore concepts like this in a little more detail? Particularly by someone much more qualified than myself?
Check out Edward Relph’s keynote The Paradox of Place and the Evolution of Placelessness.
