content and form : ship of theseus

The Margaret Fuller House was built on the edge of Pelham's Island in 1807, midway between Boston and Harvard. This was a little more than a decade after the first Longfellow Bridge and causeway were built to halve the distance from Beacon Hill to Harvard. The house is within the orbit of Central and Kendall Squares now, but then it was isolated and marginal, on the edge of a marsh.

This house exhibits extraordinary external fidelity to original design even though features have been added and removed, the landscape and surroundings have changed, and many original materials have been replaced. To those who built it two hundred years ago it would be very recognizable, at least from the outside, were they to see it now.

This exemplifies a seminal but seemingly paradoxical design principle: content is subordinate to form.

In architecture like biology, like computer science, like, well, everything, pattern persists throughout many deaths of constituent materials. If historic houses are incrementally maintained or restored to their original appearance and proportions, but with modern materials, their essence is hardly compromised. Centuries after its construction, wood in the beams of the house may be of trees planted long after the original structure was built, fitted into place by small corrections fixing rot or wear, year by year. This is unimportant to the building's architectural integrity. The design persists. Content perishes.

In fact, preservation of content is often overly precious, a type of perversion, and indicates a failure of the preservationist to adequately understand the form he serves. And this applies to culture in a more universal sense. How does one most accurately pass an idea forward for two hundred or two thousand years? Or for vastly longer periods than that?

Go ahead and build with granite - make a pyramid, carve a sphinx. You're doomed to dust if you favor the concrete over the abstract. The answer to eternity is in your form, your pattern, your proportions. The design is everything.