It's been a while since I read the book. Like most of my books I have no idea in which part of the world they are right now. I used to have it at the Opera office, to bolster the point that software architecture is like building architecture. Likewise I haven't seen the series for a while, but now that it is up on YouTube by Steward Brand, the author, it should be accessible everywhere except in China without VPN. All this as a long disclaimer that it is by memory, but I believe re-purposing is a major part later on (around episode 5) and mentioned regularly throughout. Eventually a building is going to be used for a very different purpose than the one the architect imagined, and were paid for.
The series early on (in the above first episode) mentions your point about non-standard components. It uses the late 20th century Dancing House (above) here in Prague as an example of a building that is hard to clean, and hard to maintain as every component is custom-made. I like it because it fits in beautifully with the existing architecture in Prague (right), but it makes it no less expensive to maintain.
What above all has changed 21st century architecture from all the preceding centuries is the computer, just like concrete, steel frames, plate glass, and the car formed 20th century architecture. Dancing house is a fairly early example of that, as is the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, but elements that were custom-made in numbers of one the first time would be no cheaper to replace. Technology will keep up though. While not competing with mass production prices, future foundries should be able to reproduce elements as they break. All these components existed in computers originally, and can be reproduced from computers later, only undocumented on-site fittings would cause future problems.
However I am not sure all these intricate 3D compositions in this thread have the necessary redundancies to allow easy (cheap) and flexible repurposing. |
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