Now that's delayed gratification!

Here's one of my favorite stories about long term thinking. I first read it in Stewart Brand’s The Next Whole Earth Catalog. It was told to him by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson.

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New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top. These might be two feet square and forty-five feet long.

A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because they had no idea where they would get beams of that calibre nowadays.

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some oak on College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked about oaks. And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks has been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

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Google The Beams of New Oxford Hall for commentary.
Some commentary says the story may not be literally true.

[quote]The story, unfortunately, is probably a myth. But the power of myth is not that it actually happened. It is true in other senses. Good myth teaches us powerful life lessons. Good myth is suitable, in the word of the Apostle Paul, for “teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in right living.” i don’t have to believe in a historical Icarus to learn that flying too close to the sun is dangerous.[/quote]

P.S. Steward Brand, who gets credit for popularizing that story via The Whole Earth Catalog, is one of the founders of The Long Now foundation. In the 1990s he published a book I treasure called How Buildings Learn.

Brand says that 95% of what is published about architecture is written about new buildings. He also says only 10% of the spending on buildings is new construction; 90% is repairs, renovations, upgrades, additions, etc. The birth of a building gets all the fuss; the use of and long life of the building are practically ignored.

So he wrote a book about that aspect of buildings. What makes a building get torn down and replaced? Surprisingly, it's often a booming economy that dooms buildings; pedestrian buildings get replaced with taller or fancier buildings. The right level weak economy causes thrifty behavior and buildings get repaired and reused. Too much terrible economy causes neglect, abandonment, and collapse.

Here's a two minute video on how different "layers" of a building need to be tended to on different timescales.
[media=http://vimeo.com/758168002]

As an illustration of how "site" is eternal, Brand presents this piazza in Lucca Italy. Once there was a Roman amphitheater at that site (our family once visited Lucca and had a snack in a cafe in that piazza). Over the centuries all the stone was carted away and used in other buildings, but the roads and property lines and public space still conform to the phantom amphitheater. Can you tell I'm enthusiastic about the book??

Not many today and not many then either. But Antoni Gaudi did not so very long ago with the Sagrada Familia basilica. I've been to the top of one of the towers and looked out on the unfinished, unroofed, body of the church; If I'm lucky it might be finished in my lifetime.

The cathedral at Salisbury (the subject of Pillars of the Earth) took about a hundred years, from the start to the completion of the spire, the one in Cologne was something like eight hundred years old by the time the last piece had been added but these are very rare objects now and were also rare at the time that construction started.

But the balance of power has shifted and so also has the means of wealth creation so ordinary people are no longer so dependent on patronage. I don't think that powerful people would have any qualms about committing the human and financial resources to large projects even now, but they would find it difficult to impose their will on the mass of the public which means that the kind of project that get done is different, for instance the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and numerous other worthy cause large and small. I don't suppose many people in charities supporting cancer research expect a cure in their lifetime.

Buildings like those took decades to make because all labour was by hand, and all material transport was by horse and cart on poor roads.

Their safety record was poor because no-one thought much about buidling-site safety generally then. Also, because structural engineering was purely empirical and the nature of materials not really understood, collapses of buildings under construction were not unknown.

Sometimes failures during building were due to builders skimping on the foundations or other parts - this still happens in some parts of the world today. I think that was more common with private projects like the huge fortified homes of Mediaeval times, than with churches.

Modern equivalents in scale, though in very different styles and materials, would take a tenth of the time to build. The new Coventry Cathedral in modern style took only a few years in the 1950s to build, alongside the stabilised ruins of the Mediaeval one that had been destroyed in a WW2 air-raid.

The safety rules and equipment are far tighter now, too, though the regulations vary from country to country. For example, scaffolding has to be erected to proper standards including with hand-rails and toe-boards, and on major works at least, subject to passing independent inspection before being signed off for use.

Some cathedrals still show signs of the building methods. At Salisbury there are some small, square holes in the external wall. These were "put-logs" to support the cross-members of the Mediaeval, timber scaffolding made from rough-hewn wood: the word survives as "putlog" for the spar itself. The builders had forgotten to plug the holes afterwards. While the cathedral's famous spire still contains the timber framework that was its temporary support during construction!

!!! Cool question !!!

I've been fascinated by institutions that manage to persist over very long timescales. The two biggest I know of are churches and universities. Harvard, oldest in the US has been around since 1636. Many European schools are much older. I was recently in Sevilla, and their U dates to 1505. There has been teaching at Oxford since about 1096; Bologna since 1088 (Cambridge was started in 1209 by disaffected Oxford scholars).

Businesses get bought and sold and split up for parts; foundations slowly give their money away and fade; governments change radically such as - from monarchy to democracy - and constitutions get scrapped and rewritten. But something about the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge and understanding has a power to hold things together. I have no idea why.

Some aspects of modern technology demand that we think on millenial time scales: radioactive waste such as spent fuel rods may need to be stored for thousands of years. CO2 needs to be managed on century long timescales.

Side note: there is an organization called "The Long Now Foundation" that aims to foster thinking on much longer time scales. As a sort of showpiece, they are designing and building a clock that will last and operate for 10,000 years
[b]https://longnow.org/10klibrary/library.htm[/b]

I think some took centuries.

And I think the willingness to work on something that you will never see completed comes from the belief that you are dedicating yourself to something that is, to use a cliché, far greater than yourself.

Nope, couldn't do it...

Of course, I also couldn't bring myself to force everyone to pay taxes for it, and punish them if they didn't or couldn't as some of them could only do it by abusing others or taking advantage by force, and calling themselves king or lord and abusing those under them.

Its a completely different world these days

I just started that book! 😄