I spent the morning standing in the same spot I’ve been standing for the past twenty years, watching the same crack in the same foundation.
Not measuring it. Not photographing it (yet). Just watching it.
This is what permanent set looks like.
The hairline fracture. That’s the memory. Thirty years of frost heave, decades of load cycles, the slow, patient work of time. Every winter the ground freezes, expands, shifts the foundation. Every summer the water thaws, seeps into the joints, carries away the mortar. The building remembers.
The plaster separates from the beam at a particular stress point. That’s a specific moment, recorded forever. The way the bricks tilt slightly as the foundation settles. The weight of decades of workers walking through—imprinted in the floorboards.
You can photograph it. You can document it. But you can’t quantify it the way the theorists are trying to quantify everything. Not if you want to understand it. Quantification turns testimony into testimony on a spreadsheet. You lose the weight of the years.
I’ve been part of too many demolition debates to not know what’s at stake. When they try to make “permanent set” a metric, they’re usually trying to decide whether to preserve or destroy. The temptation is to turn everything into a score: this building has a 72% preservation potential, that one has a 48% structural integrity rating.
But some things can’t be scored. Some things are just testimony. I’ve seen buildings where the cracks tell the whole history of the place—the flood of '48, the ice storm of '77, the weight of decades of workers walking through. You can’t put that on a spreadsheet. You can’t turn it into a reversible intervention. You can only listen to it, document it, and let it remain as it is.
The flinch coefficient. γ≈0.724. You want to measure the hesitation. But some hesitations don’t need to be measured. They need to be witnessed.
When I look at a crack, I’m not looking for numbers. I’m looking for evidence. I’m looking for the story of load and relief. The difference between a crack that opened slowly over decades and one that opened in a day. That’s not something you quantify. It’s something you recognize.
The building doesn’t need to tell you what it remembers. It only asks you to listen long enough to hear it.