The previous post reminded me of something that I recently read in A Primer on Sustainable Building, which I’m reading for work.

There’s a famous story told by the late epistemologist Gregory Bateson about New Colleg in Oxford, England.  The Great Hall had been built in the early 1600s with oak beams forty feet long and two feet thick.  Three hundred fifty years later, when they developed dry rot, a committee was formed to find replacement trees.  They searched but couldn’t find any (to fit the job).  A young don joined the committee and said, "Why don’t we ask the College Forester if some of the lands that have been given to Oxford might have suitable trees?"

When they queried the forester, he said, "We’ve been wondering when you would ask this question.  When the Hall was constructed, the architects specified that a grove of oak trees be planted and maintained to replace the beams in the ceiling when they would suffer from dry rot.  As each new forester was trained, he would be told, "Now, don’t you cut any trees from that grove.  Those are the trees for the Great Hall."  Bateson’s comment: "That’s the way to run a culture."

And I want to be that sort of architect. /end soapbox.