COMMON CIRCLE LEXICON
TERM: STAINABILITY
Faculty Contributor: Jorge Otero-Pailos
The material qualities of buildings make them susceptible to stains caused by airborne pollution. These stains are registers of environmental information recorded on buildings. Properly decoded, stains have the ability to demonstrate that buildings are long-term environmental sensors accumulating material data that informs and challenges notions of sustainability …
The “stainability” of the Cathedral of Learning is evident on its outer surfaces, which have collected the environmental pollution of Pittsburgh’s famously dusty atmosphere. The “stainability” is a function of the materiality of the building—in this case, limestone—the amount of rain, acidity of the rain, wind patterns, and airborne particulate matter, among others. The amount of particulate matter in the air of any particular place depends on many factors responding to design decisions about where to place sources of pollution. Often the “stainability” of buildings can also denote sociospatial biases in design about what communities bear the greater burden of airborne pollution.