Commonsense Denial

Many issues arise in the design, construction and maintenance of buildings because of our firmly rooted habit of Denial. If we don’t see (know about, ask about, wonder about) it, it isn’t really happening. You may not believe some of the obvious mistakes a candid observer can see. As Yogi Berra said, (perhaps, he is also known for saying “most of the things I said, I didn’t say’), “you can observe a lot just by looking”. And another couplet of my own, “If you swim long enough in De Nile, you will get eaten by a crocodile”. Up to our ears in alligators probably had the same origin. So what have we seen?

Water in the basement/crawl. I was called by a homeowner who

had been living in a five year old home in New Hampshire and

was sure that the carpenter who had been re-hanging his basement

doors was incompetent. They would work fine for six months and

then have to be re-trimmed. He never looked beneath the floor.

A quick excursion to the crawl space found a main carrier

that was like moist shredded wheat. You could pull a handful

off wherever you chose. Along a similar vein, my partner, Greg

Trotter of Commercial Building Consultants, walked through an

apartment complex that had just been blessed by an engineering

due diligence firm as A+ with less than $1000 in immediate needs.

One look beneath the floor sheathing (which had been conveniently

removed because it was moldy and rotten, and you saw as much water

as the underground cistern that fed the Topkapi Palace in Iatanbul,

(also forgotten over the years until someone wondered why the

locals were pulling bricks up in the back yards and fishing)!
Whole beer bottles in the sewer line.Impossible. Even when the

last piece of sewer line at a close elbow was removed and the

object discovered, there were those who said it couldn’t be

there. Students on the roof, drinking beer and dropping the

empties down the vent stack to hear the satisfying clatter of

breaking glass managed to drop one during an (un)lucky flush

the bottle floated around a couple of long radius bends until

encountering a close bend.
Reflective cladding on Disney Hall. Who would have thought of

this one:

The building features Gehry’s trademark steel cladding —this time on polished concave surfaces that acted like parabolic mirrors to overheat nearby buildings and streets. Additional expense was incurred in the already expensive project to resolve the problem. (www.inetours.com copyright © 2001–2011 Lee W. Nelson)

Once again reminding us that making things foolproof is difficult because fools are so clever. There are plenty of new mistakes to make, so let’s stop repeating the old ones!

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