All built being residue.

02 Feb, 2025

Everything is product of process, and within the accumulated layers of all that exists is the product of every process ever, and within those crusts and a tiny part the entire culture product of human genius, all ever written, built, spoken, imagined or understood. All is residue, and as all calcify in a permanent present will all dissolve & recombine in constant process.

Mere conscious acts of construction, prosaic and earthly, are ultimately all that construction professionals concern themselves with in the practice of their profession, and the agents to such acts limited in their scope to a short length of the single absolute spectrum not far beyond the personal in any direction. Even within that thus narrowed spectrum does most environmental formation occur outside any official act of construction, with such formation in largest part by far extra-human, product of the actions of innumerable other animal, vegetal and mineral actors, and from cosmic to molecular in source, scope and extent. Much of this formation is anthropogenic, but still occurring outside of what could be considered profession or industry.

There is then a distinction between an environment’s formation as pertaining to that within a professional or an industrial scope, and all other formative processes taking place within and around it. Such distinction though will really only ever be semantic, legal or professional, necessarily short-lived, imperceptible and irrelevant to those without semantic, legal or professional interest in it. Most will take their environment as they find it, occasionally and often only half-consciously impacting it to suit as required, doing so incidentally and informally, up to the point at which they might encounter a limit or be moved to seek some professional input.

To those with professional interest in the distinction, the broad imperceptibility of it is in itself important. The work of the building professional must be distinct and apart from its broader context, by definition limited and targeted in its scope; central to the professional role is knowing one's scope and limit. One must also know though, as a matter of fact and of manners, and of a professionalism that should usually be governed by some code of conduct drafted in the public interest, that one's work is but a small and integral part of a greater whole. Once the end of the discrete and distinct professional acts has been achieved through their performance, then is that end, the impacted artefact, subject to the further impacts of the actions of all of the many active agents to the immediate and broader environment.

To undertake with any degree of competence these professional acts in ignorance of this fact is impossible; by example, surely no such conscious act of construction or its design will take place without at least taking some account of the ongoing effects of the weather.

The full value of the fact of the extra-industrial and incidental acts of formation that are the performance of innumerable individual animal, vegetal and mineral actors is realisable in its embrace. Insofar as these acts are the independent acts of individual and unrelated actors though, and they largely are, none can be truly independent of and unrelated to all of the others. They, as with and together with those discrete professional inputs, share time & space and trade mutual impact & influence.

These independent acts are the spend of incidental transformatory energy, the impact of which is in and on their immediate environment, the harness of which is the point here. These acts may be transformatory in intent, though not necessarily. They may be transformatory in intent in one direction and in effect in an unintended other.

In the recognition and harness of such incidental transformatory acts is the opportunity here, and an opportunity at least ecological, social and architectural.

Ecological opportunity is in harness of the distributed and targeted energy behind the change-effective actions of disparate actors, that is inevitable, deliberate and incidental, that can produce chaos without appropriate organisation and the richest residue with. In this harness is no need for change-effective action to be a top-down imposition with which attends an energy spend centralised and wasteful. Ecological opportunity too is in the biological diversity inevitable and incidental when time and space allows, and essential for our continued existence.

Social opportunity is in the empowerment and engagement of all society's individuals in performance of such change-effective action, and the consequent absence of the frustration and alienation attending disempowerment and disengagement.

The architectural opportunity seems infinite, though for here it will suffice to say that central to the best of architecture as to the best of everything is generosity, and in such generosity opportunity exponential.

The recognition and harness of any incidental transformatory energy isn't of course unusual on the professional side, just as above one designs in recognition of weather. Often in recognition is the evolution of measures for the mitigation of impact, so in the professional focus not opportunity but threat. The positive harness as it does exist, and which becomes ever more usual as ecological imperative becomes ever more pressing and present, is usually subset of the ecological opportunity and manifests in some separate but related ways, as in the rediscovery and redeployment of old methods, or in the novel application of old knowledge, or in the application of some new knowledge of what's always been.

While those categories of opportunity above, ecological, social and architectural, are of course interrelated and reciprocal, and often entirely overlapping, the extent to which such harness as currently takes place within the professional scope could be considered subset of either the social or architectural opportunity is limited, with such opportunity as is allowed to take place tending to do so within strict limits, and those limits tending to be techno-bureaucratic in nature.

Such opportunity for the spend of incidental transformatory energy as takes place within the limits imposed by technocracy or bureaucracy is really no great opportunity at all, and is in fact directly opposed to our ideal, with such power as wielded under technocracy or bureaucracy necessarily subject to centralised control and that under our ideal here under the distributed control of all.

Residue is the left-behind of action by-product of process, and the building a record of all acts as have been performed in its creation, those with formative intent and without.

While the formation of built environment as professional endeavour must be understood as process, there is usually artefact intended as end. While this professional endeavour then is formative in intent, the form of the world as we find it is not and never can be entirely as another intended it. Even the work of the most monomaniacal gesamtkunstwerker is subjected in time to the ravages of it. Even the most diligent designer, in common with the most obsessive, will inevitably find their idealised end succumb to the distortion that contact with the oxygen of reality brings.

The good design will gain from this, and the best will harness it.

The contention here, that all built artefacts are just residue, places the greatest Florentine cathedral on a shared spectrum with a polytunnel, a relative and anthropometric longevity alone to separate them, each simply the left behind product of processes, meet to temporary need and arising from it.

It is true that each is in the above definition residue, and that each alike is a blip on a cosmic timescale. Each too is subject to external whim or chance, natural and human power enough existing to destroy either, and slowly or suddenly. Our timescale though is not that of the cosmos, and our values are neither those of the vast void of space nor those of the destructive. As our entire planetary past and future is indeed residue on a mineral ball spun clean in time, our present personal histories are each whole eternities in themselves. Though temporary in the grandest scheme of things, our most grand of artefacts are in relative intent and effect eternal.

In grandest Duomi are records of the actions of great architects, and perhaps in the popular imagination is it they, the Albertis and Brunelleschis, who have of them conceived and them brought into being. In the true and full records that are the buildings themselves though are the acts of innumerable other actors: those who shaped the immediate context over the centuries before and since, those who made and make conscious and concrete contributions to their continued construction, those who have maintained them so as to stave off time's toll, those even who had hand in the development of the patterns of architecture in those cultures within which they've arisen, countless others in spans of centuries.

Yet it is also true in a general sense, though only to an extent and that diminishing in time, that it is a building's architect (within which role and for the sake of the argument are placed all those with hand in its design) who frames the acts and outcomes that take place in its continuing formation, and so for long after their active role as designer has ended, for in the implementation of a design are the found limits to later actions, and such limits as constraining or enabling as their nature allows.

In the case of the cathedral is the grand overarching vision of its designer, one which will never cease to guide its formation. The acts of other architects though need be neither grand nor overarching nor visionary in intent or effect for their outcomes to guide in some limited way the environmental formation that follows them.

It is true that all built environment can be characterised as an accumulated residue, simply the by-products of processes, those formative in intent and otherwise. Such characterisation, as much as it might appear to demean the value of the artefacts it thus describes, along with the contributions of the designers thereof, is actually to hint at the great value of the characterisation and recognition of environment as this product of accumulation, and of urban character particularly as product of collected endeavour. In the cumulus of this collected endeavour is the particular nature of the found urban environment.

This collected endeavour is, in the best cases as in the worst, the outcome of individual acts of independent agents who share some proximate space and time. Thus is it collected rather than collective endeavour, not a group undertaking with shared end in mind but multiple undertakings by multiple agents towards multiple ends.

These multiple undertakings will though always be guided if not governed by something shared, be that culture, precedent, regulation, the found nature of the thing in question, or design, usually some or all of these in combination and each in each case in particular measure. In the nature of what's shared and its interaction with the acts of all of the independent actors is the quality of the endeavour, thus as above the particular character of the found environment. The objective measure of this quality is of course long subject of debate, and the views of the parties to that debate subject in turn to flows of fashion, preference and prejudice.

Yet should that environment become product of the collected endeavour of all within it, and so their expression, and so product of the genius of its inhabitant population, then could one judge this environment and the character of it as good or bad any more than one could reasonably apply the same judgment to the population itself?

All things then exist somewhere along a temporal spectrum of radical impermanence, and all formative acts and events take place on that same spectrum, interacting with the found nature of whatever found.

In the outcomes of all of these acts, events and interactions are and arise ubiquitous contingencies, the push and pull of circumstance, and to the degree allowed too their negotiation and absorption. In the outcome of these acts, events and interactions is the new found and never settling nature of each and all things.

Thus does the found nature of things impact on the new nature of things, thus does the nature of the acts and events do the same, each mutual residue to the other, all residual layers.

It is mere acts of construction and their design with which we're here concerned, and in the ideal these acts discrete, distinct, integral, limited in scale and scope, temporary and eternal, capable of accommodating the negotiation and absorption of all constant circumstantial force.

In the outcome of these particular mere acts, those within the professional scope, partly lies the above something shared wherein is guidance or governance of all other acts, 'partly' because the professional acts are simply few among many making formative contribution and none of that many to be privileged in either ideal or reality. The professional acts too partake of the something shared, are too subject to culture, precedent, regulation and found limits.

Yet relative scale and scope can sometimes be such that within the outcome of the professional acts is as good as the absolutely governant, even if only to begin with. Independent unplanned acts immediately intercede, but they do so within this initial governant frame.

Such scale and scope, relative as it is, could be at the level of the personal or outwards in either direction. The site of such intervention may be an effective tabula rasa (though none such truly exists) or a found field (which is truly all).

The point is that those acts taking place within the professional scope are such as to provide the frame within which later formative acts take place, within which the transformatory energy that's everywhere and always incidental to all life is spent.

Such frame may readily absorb change and benefit from it, or repel such change and forego the benefit, may be easily changed or otherwise, may allow the energy effecting the change be distributed and cheap or require it to be concentrated and costly.

Change, that owing to the ceaseless force of countless actors, or that owing to demographic pressures by turns high or low and to economic pressures likewise, or to external events slow or sudden, or to whim, fashion or expression, or to simple preference, is an absolute inevitability in urban environments. Its avoidance is neither desirable nor tenable, its embrace is both. Its nature though is a choice.

There is a type of convulsive change, that by demolition, which is abrupt, destructive and wasteful.

There is a type of gradual change, that by increment, which is local, targeted and efficient.

There is no type of form which can forestall without fail convulsive change should an effective agent so act, and as noted above destructive power enough exists to destroy any structure, and slowly or suddenly. The achievement of change via convulsion, being a wield of dumb and unfocused power, is temptingly easy for the agent for whom the change is the point. The type of power consciously employed to this end will not though be physical force alone save in the rarest case; economic and political power must too be brought to bear.

There are circumstances wherein the combined spend of economic & political power and physical force is beyond any effective agent, or short of the benefit justifiable by the cost.

All types of form will in some degree facilitate incremental change, from a very little to a great deal, and in design can be some degree of that degree. The type of that form allowing for the greatest degree would be capable of a differential absorption of that change, that change occurring at different and unrelated points temporal and spatial, and that change programmatic, organisational and material. It would be radically generic, composed of such type as would unduly constrain no future instance. It would allow for the greatest distribution of individual agency, and for the greatest distribution of the spend of incidental energy, and in the most efficient way.

We build now in an age of pervasive regulation, under a regulatory regime at once prescriptive and proscriptive, dictating what must and must not be done, seeming to forfend all freedoms and to forestall all incidental acts, with increasingly stringent regulation in respect of life safety and energy efficiency seeming to demand further and further standardisation of building design, to allow for less and less formal particularity.

It’s not necessarily, though it is often, a failure of imagination when such regulation produces no more than a very narrow band of types. Neither is that necessarily a problem in our context, though if not a problem that will tend to be by a happy accident rather than through design or method. Generally, in the absence of appropriate countervailing intent such a regulatory regime as we build under will have the effect of rendering the professional sphere of environmental formation the uncontested domain of technocrat and profiteer, with the resultant residue, our inevitable residue outcome of all things, expressive only of the will of a self-selected and exclusive committee, never destined to become representative of anything more than the least best practice that some one can get away with, a frozen concretisation of the momentarily compliant and adequate.

As onerous a load as building regulation imposes on designers, and onerous indeed, impacting all elements and aspects of construction and carrying significant moral and legal penalty for contravention, it is amenable to satisfaction through the adoption of broad and general principles. Tautology but we must, this regulation is rules-based, based on directions applicable as appropriate, just as is a design based on a principle of radical genericity towards our aim. The regulatory system is one wherein general prescriptions and proscriptions apply to processes and elements sharing common features, thus to types. Thus are the objects governed by these systems radically generic in nature, and this do they share with our ideal. They would in fact be the very same things as those within our ideal, for central to that ideal is reality, and central to present reality is regulation.

So our ideal invites change effective action and absorbs it, but such action as will not invalidate regulatory compliance, which is easier done than said when a very specific set of circumstances co-exist, and they very rarely will.

But there'll always be residue, and some of it good and some of it bad and some of it not amenable to such simple qualitative analysis and some of it in the form of an essay, because pixel never yet refused organisation, nor paper ink.