Glass
The building I work in, McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, consists of an old and new half. The different sections, McKeldin East and McKeldin West, each made from different construction techniques and materials built in the mid 1950s and 1990s respectively. The new section is a building in the modern style, a sealed building with full air-handling, and artificial lighting necessary throughout the work day. There is a minor artifact among all this that set me thinking. In the old building the windows are a mixture of oversized sash or casement windows which formerly could be easily opened with a crank. In the new section some modern equivalent of a casement window. They can be opened and pivot outward when they do so, but this is not allowed. They are constructed as a rectangular box, two large panes of glass with a set of micro-venetian blinds installed between them. All of this in a prefabricated sealed rigid aluminum frame. When the building was new these windows were quite nice. They did not accumulate dead bugs, dust, dirt, or wads of chewing gum. For cleaning all they ever needed was a wipe with a dusting cloth, some windex at the most. The problem is that with the building now a only a dozen years old many of these blinds no longer work. They were operated by a fiddly little plastic knob which in turn operated small plastic gears. These are now stripped and the blinds stuck in their last place. It is unlikely they will ever be fixed. Parts would have to be ordered, the windows disassembled and reassembled following sets of unfamiliar instructions. The windows might even need to be sent away for repair or replaced. There will never be a season where there will enough time or money in the facility budget for this to happen. In the end a hundred years from now when this building comes down, those windows and their inoperative blinds will come down with it, just as they are today.
A year ago when a highway bridge collapsed and fell into a river in Milwaukee I had a similar set of thoughts. Not so much for that particular bridge, which was being attended to when it collapsed. The thoughts were provoked more by the articles that appeared in many newspapers at the time that carried data and anecdote that the nations highways and transportation infrastructure were ready to fall apart. This system, all that metal concrete and asphalt, is the nations crowning engineering and technological achievement. In quite real ways one of the central sources of our wealth, with the increasing reliance on just-in-time shipping our most critical and efficient warehouse as well. The articles warned this system is not being funded for the degree of upkeep that will allow it to keep its manufactured potential capacity. It is being allowed, in an era of tight budgets and deliberately diminished government revenue capacity, to degrade in place. It will soon become clear as maintenance bills become more acute and unavoidable, that we have been coasting for decades on the achievements and sacrifice of past generations.
We have a bent for cultural and material complexity. One strongly organized towards processes and economies of scale in initial manufacture. Little is geared towards the efforts of upkeep and sustenance. When I was younger one might hear people speak, disapprovingly, of planned obsolescence or "the throwaway society." This was with consumer goods though, and besides the approach worked so well it seemed plainly to justify itself. With more durable goods and industrial built environment, it went quietly unnoticed how much our material world was being front loaded, with disadvantage and costs down the line. Our reigning belief is in technology. That technology will bring us out of any desert and into the promised land. That within our technological acumen is the solution to any problem that we create or encounter. I don't recall that anyone has come forward to formally claim technology, a mere adaptation of science to corporal need, as a force that halts or even reverses entropy. Just that everyone seems to regard it so. This distinct from, even partially opposed to, similar though broader claims for human ingenuity which however would include poetry. What our modern systems of fabrication do is give us a material world manufactured to exceptional standards of finish. Giving us an illusion of power over the natural world we do not possess so completely. Our world comes to us with it's utility baked in, airless, between two panes of glass largely incapable of reuse repair or adaptation.
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