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??