The romance of maintenance

Sometime in the late nineties we caught bits of a TV documentary series called "How buildings learn". Some snippets stayed with me, and a year or two ago I bought the book that the series was based on: How buildings learn: what happens after they're built by Stewart Brand (Penguin, 1994). While it's ostensibly about the ways buildings change and are changed over time, it also provides a fair bit of metaphor about and commentary on life, control, use of resources and sustainability. I find it provocative in a mostly-interesting way. Here's an excerpt about maintenance that culminates in one of my favorite - although apparently fanciful - building anecdotes.

Maintenance comes in two major flavors, especially around houses - cosmetic and real. Unfortunately the cosmetic is more fun. It's like the weekend sailor who puts loving attention into his sailboat's varnished brightwork and lets the engine rust. Serious sailors paint over the brightwork and lavish their fretful attention on the engine, laying in a spare water pump and extra belts. Maybe the trick for homeowners is to mix serious and frivolous chores: replace the air filter in the furnace, then go putter in the garden. Or be sure that any repair includes the reward of some improvement. The temptation to avoid is concealing the need for real work with a cosmetic touch-up - painting the rot.

Deborah Devonshire accords high status to the keepers of Chatsworth and its lands and celebrates their tasks:

In the house and out of doors vigilance and maintenance, unseen and unsung, are the order of the day's work. Nothing is permanent. Lead on the roof wears thin, and a hole the size of a pinhead lets in the rain which can soon turn into dry rot. Stone, especially when bedded the wrong way of its grain, flakes, and the weather finds the weak places and scoops them out as if with a giant spoon.... Wormwood, death-watch beetle, fire, water, snow, frost, wind and sun (All Ye Works of the Lord, in fact) each does its special harm.

Against the flow of this constant entropy, maintenance people must swim always upstream, progressless against the current like a watchful trout. The only satisfaction they can get in their labors is that the result is invisible, unnoticed. Thanks to them, everything is the same as it ever was.

The romance of maintenance is that it has none. Its joys are quiet ones. There is a certain high calling in the steady tending to a ship, to a garden, to a building. One is participating physically in a deep, long life.

The anthropologist/philosopher Gregory Bateson used to tell a story:

New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top, yes? These might be two feet square, forty-five feet long.

A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because where would they get beams of that caliber nowadays?

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be on College lands some oak. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him about oaks.

And he pulled his forelock and said, "Well sirs, we was wonderin' when you'd be askin'."

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. "You don't cut them oaks. Them's for the College Hall."

A nice story. That's the way to run a culture.

Every time I've retold this story since I first heard it from Gregory in the 1970s, someone always asks, "What about for the next time? Has a new grove of oaks been planted and protected?" I forwarded the question to the authorities at New College - College Archivist and the Clerk of Works. They had no idea.

Stewart Brand, How buildings learn: what happens after they're built (Penguin, 1994) pp.130-131.

While Bateson's story about the beams of New College has done the rounds in the Summer 1976 CoEvolution Quarterly and 1980's The Next Whole Earth Catalog (republished by the same Stewart Brand who wrote How buildings learn), and while variants have been picked up and spread in speeches, sermons and blogs, New College says that's not the way it was.

I like the story a lot, but when I come to think of times I might apply it I find that I don't expect much to survive long enough to need that kind of resource development. It's an interesting line of thought about change and permanence in social institutions as well as in the constructions that house them. And maybe I'm scarred by the fact that I build code, and rather than trying to create lasting edifices I'm concerned with the flexibility to manage each merger/restructure/rebrand by building code that's clean (separates concerns), easy-to-maintain and well-documented. Maybe the documentation is my equivalent of the forester, but I don't really have an equivalent of the oak stand.

EDIT: Thinking about it further, I suspect my equivalent of growing oak trees is supporting professional development of web developers.

SNIPPET: New College is actually the New College of St Mary. In 1324 a college was established in Oxford and dedicated to St Mary (it's now known as Oriel College). In 1379 when William de Wykeham established another college at Oxford dedicated to St Mary it became known as the New College of St Mary, which shortened to New College. The "New" was to distinguish them and not because Oxford's so old that something founded in 1379 is new. (Unlike the New Forest, but that's another story.)