Maintain an investment in local industrial processes and plan for failures.
For a long time, vernacular architecture has been respected as a sustainable strategy because of the ingenious use of local materials. This resourcefulness is based on the expectation that future failure will occur and repair is best corrected with materials immediately at hand. For example, the pristine quality of the structure in the Japanese garden of Kairaku-en has been sustained due to the adaptation of nearby resources and consequently it still looks like the original building.
Inventiveness used to be tied to survival but now globalization has made us dependent on distant resources and this weakens our ability to correct future failures as material access is constrained. In order to ensure architectural projects can last beyond our lifetime, we need to maintain an investment in local industrial processes and plan for failures.