architecture

"Frank Duffy's layering of buildings into Site-Structure-Skin-Services-Space-plan-and-Stuff"


"What are we to make of all this apparent fraudulence? As a boat lover I remember when fiberglass boats first came along in the 1950s, and everyone said they would never work, never sell, never last. Wrong on every count. Fiberglass boats are lighter and stronger than wood, more intricately shaped, and they endure negligent owners, which wood cannot, because they are immune to teredo worms, dry rot, and baking sun. Fiberglass never leaks; wood always does, top and bottom. And yet a magazine called Woodenboat, founded in 1969, became one of the all-time publishing successes through worshipping the virtues of wood in boats. Those virtues consist entirely of the aesthetics of tradition and the discipline of managing a short-lived material. I have owned and sold an excellent plastic boat and owned and kept a troublesome wooden boat. Why? The Wood feels better, and I can fiddle with it. But if I really had to sail somewhere, I'd get fiberglass or steel."


from Stewart Brand in his 1994 'How Buildings Learn'