Review: The Art of Understanding Your Building’s Personality by Wayne P. Saya

Based on his career in the field of building engineering, author Wayne P. Saya leads us through the inner workings of the commercial real estate industry and the buildings that characterize that industry, introducing his personal philosophy of such structures as comparable to human bodies, in The Art of Understanding Your Building’s Personality: Discover How Buildings Are People Too!

Early in his facilities engineering career, Saya was called on to oversee work on an air-handling unit, and realized that the building in question “was having difficulty breathing.” He soon coined the term “Building Personality Profiling.” In 1992, the author had a remarkable – and life changing – meeting with Siegfried H. Brauer, whom he refers to as Sigi, a German hotel magnate and one of the founding partners of the Ritz-Carlton chain. He and the executive exchanged challenges that both found engaging, and immediately bonded.

By that time, Saya had developed a concept about the living qualities of buildings, drawing on ideas from the radical French philosopher René Descartes, who rejected the notion of a separation of body and spirit, and believed that the human body is infused with animating influences that generate physical reactions. In the same vein, Saya, seeing structures as masses of living atoms, believes that they too are living, breathing, sensate entities. He was able to utilize this thinking in his nearly nine-year, dynamic relationship with Sigi, a tough taskmaster who came to believe that the author would always, reliably, have answers and solutions for questions and problems that arose in the hotel business.

Throughout the book, Saya makes many graphic comparisons between a building’s deficits and ailments of the human body, once likening a blackout to a mini-stroke. He compares air-conditioning systems, for example, to sweat glands that throw off heat as a person runs a marathon, illustrating how the components of a simple room air conditioner equate with a body’s environmental system of cooling. Energy consumption is expensive, he warns, and managing it properly is essential for good building maintenance, just as we humans have to monitor and control our personal energy systems to avoid costly overloads.

Acknowledging that his perceptions may be difficult for a layman to grasp at first, Saya targets his saga – a technical treatise intermingled with intimate anecdotes and personal and professional revelations – to building owners, for whom the understanding of “building persona” is, he asserts, a key component of management of the property. Sigi understood it, although in contrast to Descartes who rejected aesthetic considerations, the magnate “truly enjoyed rearranging a building’s budget to maintain that Building’s Persona, its beauty, its aura…its ‘original personality.’”

Readers will quickly perceive that Saya is a brilliant thinker. He draws together the output of such great minds as Einstein, Newton, and Descartes, postulates the construction of a massively tall, futuristic “sky-tower” while also providing simple drawings and explanations to address realistic problems that might be faced by a real estate manager or site engineer. And his treatise is not without humor and intimate, family touches, combining lecture and legacy in a single, intellectually stimulating format.

Though the book is aimed at architects and engineers, it is certainly a fascinating idea for the layman, and will make one think differently about every building – especially home and work. While the book does get necessarily technical at certain times, it is clearly written, and exceptionally well-organized. It does tend to make its point quite early and then build on that with somewhat repetitive information, but overall the book is eye-opening for expert and novice alike.

A highly original work of architectural history, as well as a treatise on the future of engineering, The Art of Understanding Your Building’s Personality is both sensible and visionary.