Seeking our future in the deep past

Used to be, societies would recycle building materials. In Rome, St. Peter's Basilica was made from the stones of the Colosseum. The Inca reused stones from one project to the next. Today we rarely do that.

As MIT associate professor of architecture Brandon Clifford observes, we barely even admit how often we tear down buildings.

"The architect today designs a building with the false presumption that it's going to last forever," Clifford says. "Unfortunately the reality is, some buildings last the length of our mortgages, 30 years. Then they go to landfills."

He adds: "If an archaeologist looks back at our time, we will be called the mound builders because we're making enormous landfills all around the world. Those are the things that are going to last. Civilizations will ask, "What were people thinking in the early 2000s, when they were just building these colossal mounds?"

Looking back in time imaginatively is Clifford's job: He studies ancient structures and building practices, to generate new ones. Recently Clifford's studio, Matter Design, took discarded concrete chunks - from a dairy barn floor, a Motel 6 wall, and a roadbed - and used digital design and modern cutting tools to assemble them into a new wall. If the ancients could redeploy materials, why can't we?

"Humans have been reassembling random bits of material from previous incarnations of architecture for millennia, but we just don't understand the rules today," says Clifford, who has also designed buildings, written a manifesto about learning from the past, and had his students build a megalithic stone and move it around Killian Court.

Here, we've assembled more bits of material about Clifford himself, fitted them together, and built this profile article to last - for a while, anyway.

Leverage the talent

Virtually all architectural work contains a critique of other building forms. Clifford is upfront about this: Construction today is unsustainable, inefficient, and costly.

"The current mode of designing and subsequent construction is not working," Clifford wrote in 2017.

As a counterpoint, the architectural designs Clifford has produced - like competition entries for the Bamiyan Cultural Center in Afghanistan and the Guggenheim Helsinki - are sensitive to the supply of materials. An award-winning small project of Clifford's, the Five Fields Play Structure in suburban Massachusetts, cleverly maximizes its square footage.

But Clifford's career is not really about one style of architecture. It's about one style of architectural thinking. Today we seem surprised at the architecture of the ancients, but to Clifford, that just means we haven't thought creatively enough about how they solved problems. Ultimately, Clifford wants to leverage the talent around him to rework our building habits.

"In our lab we find work to be successful if it challenges the way you think about the broader discipline," says Clifford, who was granted tenure at MIT this year.

Space odyssey

Clifford's father was an astronaut. Rich Clifford served in the military, joined NASA, and flew on three space shuttle missions in the 1990s.

"I grew up in Houston, surrounded by the space industry," Clifford says. He lived down the street from astronaut John Young - one of the 12 people to walk on the moon and co-pilot of the first space shuttle flight, in 1981.

Rich Clifford was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease before his last shuttle flight. He died in late 2021. Brandon Clifford has been reflecting about his father's trajectory, and its influence on his own.

"I work with prehistoric, gravity-laden, human contributions to Earth, while my dad was exploring space," he says. "But we're both exploring things, in very different ways."

In some ways, NASA reminds Clifford of his current employer.

"NASA is such an interesting cross-pollination of ideas," Clifford observes. "It's balanced between the military and public-facing images of space. The space industry has always been generating challenging ideas about humanity, while also being very scientifically rigorous. I see MIT as being on equal footing with NASA in that respect."

Stones and civilization

Clifford graduated from Georgia Tech in 2006, studying architecture with a focus on digital fabrication. He went to graduate school at Princeton University while the housing market crashed. "Every single one of my classmates was losing their job in architecture," Clifford recalls.

In graduate school, he was studying digital fabrication again. Then one day, MIT architectural historian Mark Jarzombek arrived in Princeton for a lecture.

"He said you can tell a civilization is doing well, if it is carving stone precisely," Clifford says. "That moment shifted my career, and since then I have been studying stone architecture." By the way, we don't do much stone carving today, either.

Clifford started thinking historically and globally. One common narrative is that architecture emerged out of making shelters. Yet, from Egypt to Easter Island, many societies have often advanced their building techniques for other purposes.

"When you look at prehistory, the pyramids, Stonehenge, the moai of Easter Island, the polygonal masonry structure of the Inca, none of them are shelter," Clifford says.

Digging into these structures reveals how societies maximized what they had. When the Inca recycled stone blocks into walls, they would only cut the top side, to fit each block into the new structure. The Greeks would cut the bottom side. But both were optimizing their resources and labor. Ancient practices contain useful ideas.

What you don't know can help you

Still, we don't know everything about ancient buildings. To Clifford, this is a feature, not a bug.

After all, if there are mysteries about the architecture of the past, there is room for us to think creatively about it. Given 12 hypotheses about how Stonehenge was constructed, 11 may be historically inaccurate - but several of those might contain interesting ideas.

"My work is often misunderstood as experimental archaeology," Clifford says. "But as an architect I'm interested in the future. I'm not trying to prove anything about the past. I'm just trying to extract bits of knowledge or find alternative ways of thinking about past construction that can change the way we think about the future. If any theory changes the way we do something, it's still useful."

Make a megalith move

When outsiders reached Easter Island in 1722, an obvious mystery was how the island's gigantic statues were transported around. The islanders claimed the moaihad "walked" to their locations, which sounded like a fanciful myth.

But in 2011, archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo proposed that the Easter Island statues had been transported upright, with people using ropes to sway the statues side to side while pivoting them forward. Thus the statues could have "walked," although not everyone immediately accepted the hypothesis.

Clifford, who landed at MIT in 2012, co-taught a class with Jarzombek in 2015 that featured a group project: The students built a 16-foot megalith out of glass fiber reinforced concrete, then figured out how to transport it around Killian Court with ropes. They named it the McKnelly Megalith. The course had a teaching assistant, Carrie Lee McKnelly, whose parents had just tragically passed away, so the name was in their honor.

A key to the McKnelly Megalith's mobility was its curving shape. Because the center of gravity is not in the middle of the structure's form, it is easier to pivot and swivel around. The Easter Island moai use this design principle too. The MIT class was not the first test of moving a megalith with rope - Hunt and Lipo did that in Hawaii - but it did reinforce the method's viability.

"That's the kind of thing that's celebrated in MIT culture, honestly," Clifford says. "Let's make a big megalith move."

And float

In 2016, Clifford and his students doubled down on megaliths, with the Buoy Stone, a huge, pear-shaped, fiber-reinforced piece of concrete they moored in the Charles River outside of Killian Court for a couple of months.

The Buoy Stone was built for MIT's "Moving Day," a celebration of its 100th anniversary of relocating from Boston across the rover to Cambridge. The stone was an exploration of transporting megaliths on water - as many of Stonehenge's pieces were. In this case, the Buoy Stone was towed on water horizontally, and then when stationary, it partially filled with water and tipped upright. The object also caused a lot of local head-scratching.

Clifford again: "We had no title saying what the Buoy Stone was. With megaliths, that's part of the mystery: Why is that thing here? A giant stone miles from the nearest quarry is an intriguing artifact. People in Cambridge still tell me, 'I run along the Charles River and I used to wonder what that weird thing was.' It was a fun project because it was a celebration of MIT."

The Buoy Stone didn't address a historical debate as directly as the McKnelly Megalith had, but it may have contemporary applications, perhaps in barrier-type structures, and was an exercise in creative design.

"At MIT, the students are very open and accepting of challenging ideas," Clifford says. "They want to think differently."

Colossus and the cosmos

Clifford is hardly the only MIT faculty member who studies ancient building techniques; others include Jarzombek, John Ochsendorf, Admir Masic, and more. But he has settled into his own niche in the area, and is currently working on a new book project about his explorations, tentatively titled "Colossus and the Cosmos." He has given a TED Talk and won the American Academy in Rome Prize, among other honors.

This will be Clifford's second book. His first was his quirky 2017 volume, "The Cannibal's Cookbook," with the "Cannibal" term alluding to recycling building materials, while the "Cookbook" part refers to the idea that there are recipes for doing this.

And while there already exist advocates for "circular construction," the greater reuse of building materials, Clifford thinks the concept needs greater circulation.

"The way architecture is set up now doesn't allow for that," Clifford says. "We don't have a way of reincorporating materials. Much of the reception to the first book has been from students of architecture, exploring design. I'm hoping the next layer of impact will be with the building industry, finding ways of automating this process."

Creative company

Tenure can free up professors to pursue independent-minded projects, although Clifford, for one, has never needed much encouragement in that regard. One nuance of Clifford's career, though, is that while he has pursued his own path, it has involved a lot of collaboration.

"I have the best colleagues I could imagine, and I think of my MIT graduate students as colleagues as well," Clifford says.

He adds: "I've never done a project on my own. I had this idea, before I started studying architecture, that an architect just sat at a drafting table and conceived of buildings, the solitary genius thing. But every project I've done is a collaboration with someone that knows something different. I realize there's so much I don't know."

There's that notion again, that the gaps in our knowledge are an opportunity. We will never know it all about old buildings, but even so, as Clifford notes: "The question is, 'How much do you need to know about something to change the way you think about the future?' That's where the value is."

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