Recently, I touched on the social cause embodied in the Baha'i temple of south America by Siamak Hariri.
When his firm was commissioned, he was given the mandate to build a structure that would last 400 years. While it is very likely that we will all be long dead 400 years hence, it is incredible to come across an institution that is so forward-thinking.
Building for this long a life span is nowadays incredibly complex and expensive, as buildings have become so complex and regulations so stringent, that there is a not-insignificant cost to this. It begs the question: cathedral builders did it over a thousand years ago and with great expense of human capital (a single cathedral would take hundreds of years to complete), but they built structures that were quite simple in their construction methods, albeit very innovative for the time.
These are buildings that were extremely robust because composed of simple materials assembled in straightforward ways, which explain why they very often still stand today, 1000+ years after completion.
Some are calling for a de-complexification of architecture and a return to simpler (but not simplistic), more robust construction methods.
Have we strayed so far from the path that we don't even see that the complexity we deal with is the cause of many problems? Taleb seems to think so. What do you think?
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