Snapshots

The front entrance of Castle Clinton in 1896:

The front entrance of Castle Clinton in the 1970s:

We’ve been writing a lot of conditions reports lately. Just coincidence, really: as a small firm, the type of work we have at any given moment can vary. Some months are more design intensive, some more construction intensive, and the past two months have been investigation intensive.

Our standard formant for a report is similar to that used by most engineering firms. We describe our sources of information (including document review and field observation), then the building as a theoretical object, then the building’s actual existing condition, then our analysis, and then our recommendations. The three main sections of one of our reports are named “General Building Description,” “Existing Conditions,” and “Conclusions and Recommendations” or something similar.

It occurs to me that those three sections could just as easily be called “Past,” “Present,” and “Future.” The general description is, as I said above, a description of the building as it exists in theory. We talk about the structural framing, foundations, and exterior envelope as the designers and/or builders intended them to be, without mentioning any defects or effects of aging. This timeless view is inherently backward looking, since it describes the building as the people who created it in the past imagined it to be.

The existing conditions section does not look at what the building was supposed to be, what it will be, or what it should be, but rather what it is one the days we looked at it. This view is just as timeless as the general description, but set in the present rather than the past. We do not discuss why conditions are as they are.

Finally, the conclusions and recommendations take the past and present views and use them as input for analysis to predict the future. Predictions can include that a piece of structure is safe, will be safe, has failed, will fail, or may fail. Or they can include the predicted effects of various suggested repairs or remedial measures.

Buildings, like all other physical objects, are constantly changing from the moment they are constructed until they are demolished. The condition of any building is a continuum that may have some sharp turns (damage caused by a catastrophic event like a fire, or improvements during a renovation campaign) but is always relatable to its past and future states. Someone who owns a building experiences that continuum, seeing for example weathering gradually degrade a wall, but we as design professionals only ever see snapshots. Even when we work on a building for long periods of time we experience it as a series of snapshots. There is an apartment house in Brooklyn Heights that I’ve inspected about a dozen times over the last 15 years. I can trace the changes, some good and some bad, over that period of time, but only in discrete chunks of time.