Buildings are inherently unsafe. They can catch fire, break apart and fall on you, trap you, and trip you. They can be disorienting and inhibit free movement. And therefore, aside perhaps from the health care industry, there is no industry that is more regulated than the planning, design, and construction industry. (We are amused by the growing cacophony of big tech’s whiny protestations against even the mere wisp of a fledgling regulatory regime that might cramp their technocratic Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian enterprise.)
Building codes regulate fire truck access, walkway and ramp slopes, concrete foundation and steel base plate design, the structural performance of primary and secondary steel bolts and welds, light metal framing screws and straps, ceiling support structures, equipment conduit bracing systems, the fireproofing of wall and roof assemblies, stair and railing dimensions, accessibility of door widths, hinge resistance and handle shapes, the heights of counters, sinks hand washing and drying equipment and the clearances around toilets, lighting levels, and floor slipperiness. There is no component of a building’s construction that is not regulated by as many as two or three regulatory agencies.
Regulations follow disasters and in the accumulation of disasters so too do regulations accumulate. Most Americans are familiar with the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906, and New York’s Triangle Waistcoat Factory Fire of 1911. In the aftermath of all three, new safety restrictions and innovations were imposed on building design and construction. Southern California in 1933 experienced a destructive earthquake centered near Long Beach, CA caused not so much by the severity of earth movement as by the inadequacy of building construction. Schools were among the hardest hit.
In the aftermath of the Long Beach earthquake, the California legislature passed the Field Act which established unprecedented seismic stability requirements and the Office (now Division) of the State Architect (DSA) as the agency with which to enforce higher quality and safer school construction. Just the mention of the acronym sends shudders through most architects’ veins as it has evolved into one of the most comprehensive and thoroughly intrusive regulatory agencies in existence in the world –so much so that experience with it has become a priori discriminating stipulation in the architect selection process, high-quality regulatory compliance having replaced high-quality design as the highest priority pre-requisite for consideration.
But why have some buildings lasted hundreds even thousands of years, most of them designed and built in the absence of any regulation, while we seem to find it so difficult? We learned how to build solid, stable, and safe buildings over the centuries through trial and error (and many fatal mistakes). But having learned what we have, why aren’t well designed buildings today safe and accessible as a matter of course and why do regulations continue to accumulate?
The answers are many but the short one would be money. The monetization of land and buildings (the commodification of real estate), meaning in the private sector making buildings to make money or in the public sector making buildings while spending as little money as possible, has set off a race-to-the-bottom in pursuit of efficiency and expediency that inevitably invites regulation by the state whose principal purpose has always been to protect our safety and welfare. (“Monetization” may be a familiar term to anyone who has followed the rise of Silicon Valley’s influence followed by the realization of its deleterious effects on society and commerce followed by calls for its regulation).
Is it also, though, the relatively recent monetization of the practice of architecture--meaning its evolution from a vocation, a way to make a living, to a source of profit, a business, that has yielded a similar kind of race-to-the-bottom? Are regulations so onerous, so complicated, and time-consuming to comply with—even understand-- that they must inevitably inhibit our effort toward high-quality design? Or is the effort required in pursuit of high-quality design so all-consuming of our all-too-limited brain space that we will inevitably create irregular or non-compliant designs that can’t be built? No and no. Under the pressures of both time and money, we embrace the array of regulations as a necessary but insufficient framework within which high-quality design must flourish even as we reject the premise that from regulations alone high-quality design will ever emerge, that relegating design to regulation will inevitably lead to anything other than safe and accessible mediocrity.