A Thought - Awards in Architecture

It seems to me that architectural designs should not be given awards until they've been up for at least fifty years.

1. Buildings are meant to be used, meaning people must live and work in them. If they cannot be used comfortably, they cannot be called good, no matter how pretty they look. What good is a kitchen with countertops only three inches deep? You can't do much with it. What is the point of staircases three inches wide? Ferrets could use it, but who's designing building for ferrets? Buildings are designed around human actions, so they have to be designed in human proportions.

2. Corollary of #1: buildings are not meant to be repaired more than necessary. Fixing a building costs time and money, and it cuts into the everyday workings of the people using the building. Water needs to be shut off sometimes, areas are blocked off, and so on. For regular maintenance this can't be helped, and should be tolerated in the interest of preserving the building. Structural defects are not necessary, they are errors in the design itself and are therefore avoidable. (I'm thinking about the Portland Building fiasco, an avoidable architectural flower of evil. I don't include Portlandia, a sculptural gem.)

3. Neither the use nor the soundness of a building really can be seen right away. This is because we don't always know how people will respond to the building, and an architectural blueprint is extremely complex - flaws won't announce themselves. What looks good on paper, then, might not actually work in practice. But that wouldn't be due to a disconnect between theory and practice; rather, it would evidence an error in knowledge of principles. (See Immanuel Kant, On the Old Saw: That Might Be True in Theory, But It Won't Work in Practice. For the full text, listen here. Kant's talking about human affairs in general, so it applies to my argument too.)

4. Therefore we should hold off on any special awards for architectural designs for a sufficient length of time - fifty years, I'd say. Candidates could be chosen after half a century, or slated for monitoring that long. Costs for utilities, repairs, and maintenance would be logged up; those costs would yield post-construction rate by which to gauge the building. Detailed surveys could be taken every five years, finding the opinion of tenants of the building concerning its user-friendliness, adaptivity, visual appeal, etc. All this information would be brought to the table along with the blueprints for judging. This would do architecture more justice as a field by evaluating cases on the merits which fit the intent of the field, thus reducing the total amount of crow that needs to be eaten.

Discuss.
(Images haplessly horked from Design Language Etc. and Great Buildings.com *har*.)