What is a building? Documents for the contractual diagramming of design

Extract

The common lawyer's understanding of land still hovers between a purely material conception of the physical stuff of land and a more cerebral image of land as comprising a co-ordinated set of abstract entitlements. This underlying tension between the physical and the conceptual has imparted a multi-dimensional complexity to the term […]. Kevin Gray and Susan Gray

What is a building? To begin to extrapolate our reasons for posing this question, consider the context of ‘Further Reading’, and the supplementary documents this supposes. To those whose profession is dedicated to the design of buildings, and whose professional life is, all too often, beleaguered by impediments threatening the actualisation, the construction, of their design, supplementary documents are not simply footnotes to design but evidence of struggles over design control. Within this trajectory, law is, most frequently, figured as yet another problematic. But consider a rather different trope – one which uses aspects of legal thinking, or rather thinking through law, to re-engage with the idea of ‘a building’ and of ‘design’. Supplementary documents, in this sense, become a ‘supplement’ which we could characterise as an ‘excess’. Documents which before might have been marginalised now become reconstituted as artefacts, evidencing other accounts of the processes of architecture. Legal artefacts related to design and building, which evidence a series of techniques and strategies for diagramming rights and responsibilities, may be deployed to open new perspectives on the question of ‘What is a building?’