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How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
Presents an innovative illustrated analysis of contemporary buildings and architecture, making a convincing argument for creating structures that are adaptable and allow redefinition of space and design and construction integration. 25,000 first printing. $25,000 ad/promo. Tour.
243 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1994
231 people are currently reading
9923 people want to read
About the author
Stewart Brand
60 books296 followersStewart Brand was a pioneer in the environmental movement in the 60s – his Whole Earth Catalog became the Bible for sustainable living, selling more than 10 million copies worldwide. Brand is President of The Long Now Foundation and chairs the foundation's Seminars About Long-term Thinking.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 194 reviews
October 31, 2012
I was the nerdy little girl that checked out books of floor plans from the library - like 10 books at a time - and just went home and looked at them. Picked out features I liked in a plan, looked at how a person or a family would use a space in terms of both furniture and movement. Thought about elevation and sunlight.
And majored in English in college, mostly because the math required by architecture degrees was intimidating, and architecture students were intimidating. Also, I didn't want to MAKE buildings, I just wanted to TALK about them. Someone heard me talking about all of this and give the math excuse and said, "Frank Lloyd Wright was crappy at math too, you know." I'm sure they said other things, but I didn't hear them, because the thought, the mere mention of Prairie School will derail my brain and take it over.
This book was fabulous and made me regret for brief (but recurring) moments my path in higher ed. However, its very presence was encouraging that I can still be well-read and informed on the topic, that there is a place for everyone in the built environment to foster understanding and look with new eyes on the things we construct and inhabit (for many values of "construct" and "inhabit"). Huh, guess that lit degree wasn't useless after all?
The only reason this isn't 5 stars is because I didn't like the wide layout of the book. It was kind of floppy and hard to get my mitts around, and though it provided space for a LOT of photos and drawings.
And majored in English in college, mostly because the math required by architecture degrees was intimidating, and architecture students were intimidating. Also, I didn't want to MAKE buildings, I just wanted to TALK about them. Someone heard me talking about all of this and give the math excuse and said, "Frank Lloyd Wright was crappy at math too, you know." I'm sure they said other things, but I didn't hear them, because the thought, the mere mention of Prairie School will derail my brain and take it over.
This book was fabulous and made me regret for brief (but recurring) moments my path in higher ed. However, its very presence was encouraging that I can still be well-read and informed on the topic, that there is a place for everyone in the built environment to foster understanding and look with new eyes on the things we construct and inhabit (for many values of "construct" and "inhabit"). Huh, guess that lit degree wasn't useless after all?
The only reason this isn't 5 stars is because I didn't like the wide layout of the book. It was kind of floppy and hard to get my mitts around, and though it provided space for a LOT of photos and drawings.
November 4, 2022
I'd make How Buildings Learn mandatory reading for everybody. It's that good.
We spend a lot of time in buildings, but the fact is many buildings are pretty awful. Expensive yet shoddily constructed, full of hidden decay, boring and monotonous, wasting space, and poorly adapted to the climate. Brand's approach to improving buildings is characteristically counter-intuitively Brand; look at the old buildings that have survived and try and find out why they've survived and why they're loved. He does so with clever insights and a succession of photographs taken from the same place over long periods of time to show how different buildings evolve.
McLoving It is McMandatory
Borrowing from architect Frank Duffy, Brand defines a building at several levels. Site is the location and the property lines, as close to permanent as anything humans can make. Structure is the basic frame, the trusses and pillars, which should be good for centuries. Skin separates the inside from the outside, and should last decades before weather and fashion demand major replacement. Services are the utilities, plumbing, electrical, and all the gadgets that make life livable, which tend to last several years. And finally, there's the interior partitions of the space plan and all the stuff of furniture and décor, which is easily modifiable by the inhabitants.
There are two major paths towards being a successful building. The obvious one is named the High Road, landmark structures like English country houses and the Boston Athenæum, where centuries of money and good taste under careful supervision have aided a grand journey towards beloved classic. The other option is the Low Road, structures so cheap and obviously shoddy that no one cares about what happens to them, so they're quickly suited to the needs of their occupants. Brand has a deep love for the hippie compound growing organically off of an initial trailer through accretion and connection of various sheds, or its commercial counterpart in the early 20th century light industrial space, where ample natural light and a solid yet sparse steel frame provide a useful starting ground for second and third acts as professional offices, high end retail, or trendy loft apartments.
One of the better section is a direct comparison of MIT's beloved Building 20, aka the Rad Lab, a WW2 era "temporary" structure which survived until the 1990s, against the trendy I.M Pei designed Media Lab building. Building 20 was long fingers of heavy wood construction, endlessly modifiable by its occupants, where the crudity of the structure created a convivial sense that this was where real work was done. The Media Lab is a modernist monster centered around an inhuman atrium, full of specialist spaces devoted to experiments ended before the building opened. It's impossible to meet anyone, competition for what useful space there is is fierce, and in a final screw you, the fluorescent lights are angled at 45 degrees to the walls, making it difficult to reshape the space.
Brand is savage towards the forces he believes are killing good buildings. He decries architects who designs buildings that play with form and space to make striking photographs, rather than humane and durable structures for their inhabitants. The failure of architects to make workable buildings has lead to the rise of paraprofessional construction managers and facilities managers, who patch up the bad ideas as best they can. Zoning and codes, which strangles construction in paperwork and a civic masterplan that is a bureaucratic utopia of rules, are a sure way to create buildings which are neither High Road nor Low Road, but simply mediocre.
The book is full of useful adages and asides. There's a mea culpa on domes from the Whole Earth Catalog era. Domes are impossible to seal against rain and waste space in innumerable ways. Buildings are destroyed by water, markets, and money. Keep the first two away, and feed the latter in small amounts. The Mediterranean courtyard house is a classic design, but another useful model is the northern European three corridor house, with a large central nave and smaller private rooms under the eaves. Stick to rectangular forms, because they're easy to modify and extend. Overbuild Structure and make Services accessible, because at some point you'll have to get at the pipes and wires, and later occupants may want to add another story. When in doubt, you can always use more storage. To build for the long term, trust in stone, brick, and stout hardwood. Use local materials, and be suspicious of new plastics. A good material will tell you that it needs attention before it fails. Take photographs of the studs, plumbing, and wiring before putting up drywall, because it'll help you later. And for the love of all that is holy, get a good roof, because water will destroy your house in a single season. Simple angled designs shed rain, where flat roofs cause constant problems.
This book isn't flawless. Brand elides the useful role of codes in having buildings that don't catch routinely fire, or not putting an explosive fertilizer factory next to to an elementary school. He is more favorable to the historic preservation movement than I am after decades of weaponized NIMBYism. But there is a lot of pragmatic advice, and the 1990s "End of History" optimism has aged to become its own charming relic. My only wish is that at 25 years on we could get an updated bibliography, but I'm sure that many of Brand's choices are actual classics, and worthy of their own reads.
We spend a lot of time in buildings, but the fact is many buildings are pretty awful. Expensive yet shoddily constructed, full of hidden decay, boring and monotonous, wasting space, and poorly adapted to the climate. Brand's approach to improving buildings is characteristically counter-intuitively Brand; look at the old buildings that have survived and try and find out why they've survived and why they're loved. He does so with clever insights and a succession of photographs taken from the same place over long periods of time to show how different buildings evolve.
McLoving It is McMandatory
Borrowing from architect Frank Duffy, Brand defines a building at several levels. Site is the location and the property lines, as close to permanent as anything humans can make. Structure is the basic frame, the trusses and pillars, which should be good for centuries. Skin separates the inside from the outside, and should last decades before weather and fashion demand major replacement. Services are the utilities, plumbing, electrical, and all the gadgets that make life livable, which tend to last several years. And finally, there's the interior partitions of the space plan and all the stuff of furniture and décor, which is easily modifiable by the inhabitants.
There are two major paths towards being a successful building. The obvious one is named the High Road, landmark structures like English country houses and the Boston Athenæum, where centuries of money and good taste under careful supervision have aided a grand journey towards beloved classic. The other option is the Low Road, structures so cheap and obviously shoddy that no one cares about what happens to them, so they're quickly suited to the needs of their occupants. Brand has a deep love for the hippie compound growing organically off of an initial trailer through accretion and connection of various sheds, or its commercial counterpart in the early 20th century light industrial space, where ample natural light and a solid yet sparse steel frame provide a useful starting ground for second and third acts as professional offices, high end retail, or trendy loft apartments.
One of the better section is a direct comparison of MIT's beloved Building 20, aka the Rad Lab, a WW2 era "temporary" structure which survived until the 1990s, against the trendy I.M Pei designed Media Lab building. Building 20 was long fingers of heavy wood construction, endlessly modifiable by its occupants, where the crudity of the structure created a convivial sense that this was where real work was done. The Media Lab is a modernist monster centered around an inhuman atrium, full of specialist spaces devoted to experiments ended before the building opened. It's impossible to meet anyone, competition for what useful space there is is fierce, and in a final screw you, the fluorescent lights are angled at 45 degrees to the walls, making it difficult to reshape the space.
Brand is savage towards the forces he believes are killing good buildings. He decries architects who designs buildings that play with form and space to make striking photographs, rather than humane and durable structures for their inhabitants. The failure of architects to make workable buildings has lead to the rise of paraprofessional construction managers and facilities managers, who patch up the bad ideas as best they can. Zoning and codes, which strangles construction in paperwork and a civic masterplan that is a bureaucratic utopia of rules, are a sure way to create buildings which are neither High Road nor Low Road, but simply mediocre.
The book is full of useful adages and asides. There's a mea culpa on domes from the Whole Earth Catalog era. Domes are impossible to seal against rain and waste space in innumerable ways. Buildings are destroyed by water, markets, and money. Keep the first two away, and feed the latter in small amounts. The Mediterranean courtyard house is a classic design, but another useful model is the northern European three corridor house, with a large central nave and smaller private rooms under the eaves. Stick to rectangular forms, because they're easy to modify and extend. Overbuild Structure and make Services accessible, because at some point you'll have to get at the pipes and wires, and later occupants may want to add another story. When in doubt, you can always use more storage. To build for the long term, trust in stone, brick, and stout hardwood. Use local materials, and be suspicious of new plastics. A good material will tell you that it needs attention before it fails. Take photographs of the studs, plumbing, and wiring before putting up drywall, because it'll help you later. And for the love of all that is holy, get a good roof, because water will destroy your house in a single season. Simple angled designs shed rain, where flat roofs cause constant problems.
This book isn't flawless. Brand elides the useful role of codes in having buildings that don't catch routinely fire, or not putting an explosive fertilizer factory next to to an elementary school. He is more favorable to the historic preservation movement than I am after decades of weaponized NIMBYism. But there is a lot of pragmatic advice, and the 1990s "End of History" optimism has aged to become its own charming relic. My only wish is that at 25 years on we could get an updated bibliography, but I'm sure that many of Brand's choices are actual classics, and worthy of their own reads.
November 26, 2023
Jane Jacobs is exactly right about this: "A classic and probably a work of genius."
January 30, 2009
You will love this book if, like me, you think that modern and postmodern architecture has gone terribly, terribly wrong. (Conversely, if you worship Frank Gehry, I. M. Pei, and their ilk, you will probably be offended.) Stewart Brand argues convincingly that the buildings that survive are those that can be flexible enough to adapt to the changing needs and tastes successive generations of inhabitants. He is particularly trenchant in his criticism of the overprogrammed, over-designed, sculptural architectural buildings (he calls them "magazine architecture") that are often obsolete before they are completed, and he points out that, Frank Lloyd Wright's opinion notwithstanding, it is not in fact a sign of architectural success if the roof leaks!
Also be sure to check out his very original comments on "low-road" buildings, those whose designs are so throwaway that successive inhabitants can and do feel utterly free to knock down walls, cut through floors, and otherwise jerry-rig them to adapt to current needs. It's a brilliant exploration of an often neglected but probably ubiquitous subset of buildings.
Also be sure to check out his very original comments on "low-road" buildings, those whose designs are so throwaway that successive inhabitants can and do feel utterly free to knock down walls, cut through floors, and otherwise jerry-rig them to adapt to current needs. It's a brilliant exploration of an often neglected but probably ubiquitous subset of buildings.
December 23, 2009
This is my reading reaction I posted to my blog: http://schoolingdotus.blogspot.com
From my last post - this was the only book referred to in the New South Wales matrix that I hadn't yet read. So I set out to grab a copy of How Buildings Learn and discover more about its metaphor for a potential library future.
I think I have always been interested in architecture - take me to any city and I am perfectly happy wandering around to see what I can see in the streetscapes. I knew why I had this interest after a 1997 college guest lecture by James Howard Kunstler. As deeply ashamed as I was at the audience, some of whom booed his talk and belligerently challenged both his ideas and authority in the field, I had a growing sense of excitement and identification. Kunstler was my kind of guy - someone who had figured out that people's relationships with their surroundings profoundly affect their sense of development as a people. "Is this a place worth caring about?" he shouted, showing slides of all-too-familiar suburban landscapes where big box stores held dominion over the horizon and token landscaping replaced once thriving & complex ecosystems. It's no wonder young people feel alienated and isolated, he claimed, pointing to the lack of sidewalks in housing developments and the proliferation of bland "places" that resemble nowhere in particular.
His ideas resonated with me and I was grateful to find the words for things I sensed but was not able to articulate. I found this to be true of Brand's book as well: although one can read this book through the photographs, illustrations, and captions alone, the narrative Brand created is a good one indeed. My favorite reading "moments:"
He quotes from Jane Jacobs on the costs of new construction: "Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old buildings." (p. 28) This quote faces two photos - one of the carriage-style garage where Hewlett-Packard took shape in 1939, and the modest interior of a 1970s garage in Palo Alto where Steves Jobs & Wozniak invented the Apple computer.
In a strange way, libraries are always old buildings because we store the past - we are the metaphoric "old building" that provides a foundation for today's thinkers to build upon.
On p. 188, Brand points out the difference in philosophy of an architect who thinks of a building as a way to manipulate the power structure of those who inhabit it, and the actual inhabitants who will inevitably shape it the way their lives evolve: "A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start."
Libraries are changing organisms just as our users are changing organisms. Our future depends on being flexible, modular, and providing the raw space in which change can flourish.
"Anticipate greater connectivity always."
Beyond being an excellent example of Strunk & White style, this simple declarative sentence is what we should do for our institution as a whole and for the learners that come through our doors. Brand uses this as an introduction to a paragraph on the Berkeley's Wurster Hall conduits, built into the fabric of the building anticipating lots of lovely coaxial cable for television in every classroom. Instead, it proved to be a great way to network computers as the Internet revolution arose. What else could it have connected? Had this empty, "useless" space not been provided, there would have been no opportunity to help the building keep evolving with its inhabitants.
Architecture turns out to have a lot in common with libraries. We deal on a human scale, and help people create places worth caring about, worth inhabiting, and worth growing.
From my last post - this was the only book referred to in the New South Wales matrix that I hadn't yet read. So I set out to grab a copy of How Buildings Learn and discover more about its metaphor for a potential library future.
I think I have always been interested in architecture - take me to any city and I am perfectly happy wandering around to see what I can see in the streetscapes. I knew why I had this interest after a 1997 college guest lecture by James Howard Kunstler. As deeply ashamed as I was at the audience, some of whom booed his talk and belligerently challenged both his ideas and authority in the field, I had a growing sense of excitement and identification. Kunstler was my kind of guy - someone who had figured out that people's relationships with their surroundings profoundly affect their sense of development as a people. "Is this a place worth caring about?" he shouted, showing slides of all-too-familiar suburban landscapes where big box stores held dominion over the horizon and token landscaping replaced once thriving & complex ecosystems. It's no wonder young people feel alienated and isolated, he claimed, pointing to the lack of sidewalks in housing developments and the proliferation of bland "places" that resemble nowhere in particular.
His ideas resonated with me and I was grateful to find the words for things I sensed but was not able to articulate. I found this to be true of Brand's book as well: although one can read this book through the photographs, illustrations, and captions alone, the narrative Brand created is a good one indeed. My favorite reading "moments:"
He quotes from Jane Jacobs on the costs of new construction: "Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old buildings." (p. 28) This quote faces two photos - one of the carriage-style garage where Hewlett-Packard took shape in 1939, and the modest interior of a 1970s garage in Palo Alto where Steves Jobs & Wozniak invented the Apple computer.
In a strange way, libraries are always old buildings because we store the past - we are the metaphoric "old building" that provides a foundation for today's thinkers to build upon.
On p. 188, Brand points out the difference in philosophy of an architect who thinks of a building as a way to manipulate the power structure of those who inhabit it, and the actual inhabitants who will inevitably shape it the way their lives evolve: "A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start."
Libraries are changing organisms just as our users are changing organisms. Our future depends on being flexible, modular, and providing the raw space in which change can flourish.
"Anticipate greater connectivity always."
Beyond being an excellent example of Strunk & White style, this simple declarative sentence is what we should do for our institution as a whole and for the learners that come through our doors. Brand uses this as an introduction to a paragraph on the Berkeley's Wurster Hall conduits, built into the fabric of the building anticipating lots of lovely coaxial cable for television in every classroom. Instead, it proved to be a great way to network computers as the Internet revolution arose. What else could it have connected? Had this empty, "useless" space not been provided, there would have been no opportunity to help the building keep evolving with its inhabitants.
Architecture turns out to have a lot in common with libraries. We deal on a human scale, and help people create places worth caring about, worth inhabiting, and worth growing.
October 31, 2023
Kind of a slog to get through for me -- I think mostly because
1) it has a coffee table book layout, so a lot of the key info is in captions and footnotes, which makes it hard to read quickly/linearly,
2) it's a little old (published in 1994), and
3) there's a lot of direct quotes (so the tone/diction varies a lot). The silver lining is that this introduced me to a lot of interesting thinkers.
Definitely, definitely worth it though! I took a lot of notes (even more than usual!) and the contrarian perspectives in the book gave me a lot to chew on. This book also had good insights on several topics I've been thinking about or that are a part of my daily life in SF:
-the climate challenge of renovating existing buildings to be zero-emission
-return to office and the conversation around downtown SF ("we're so back," "doom loop," Michael Shvo buying the Transamerica Pyramid, etc.)
-YIMBYism and the historic preservation movement
-the role of (real estate) developers and their lawyers in society. From the book: "Architects are a minor ornament of the culture. Developers build America."
-financialization of infrastructure (which is a broader issue than "Blackrock is buying all the housing," the booms and busts of markets and the quantification of profit through discounting and hurdle rates are also key issues)
-strategic planning and the problem of overfitting
-poorly insulated victorian houses (I live in one!)
Brand is a truly creative, eclectic thinker and it's cool just to see how his brain works. I'm very jealous of his ability to write clearly while combining concepts from finance, art theory, bureaucracy, biology, organizational psychology, and, of course, architecture/urban planning. I also liked his extremely specific mini-histories of the decrease in quality of brick walls over time, the demise of the porch north of the Mason-Dixon line, the rise of the open office, and the invention of the California ranch-style house. What holds all this together is a strong philosophical critique of Modernism!
Specifically, Brand argues that form does not "ever follow function" because the relationship is not unidirectional, neither form nor function are static, and form can be "overfit" to function. As an antidote, he advocates for being attuned locally to place and regionality, for borrowing liberally from conventional solutions, and for a "loose fit," which makes changing in response to feedback easy. I think these arguments locate this book clearly in the literature on complex systems, which probably explains why a lot of computer scientists like it.
I hope you'll forgive the several long lists in this review. Hopefully it gives you a sense of the experience of reading this book though. Let me know if you'd like to see my notes, my selection of the recommended bibliography, or the buildings I pinned on Google Maps to visit. That brings us to 8 lists!
1) it has a coffee table book layout, so a lot of the key info is in captions and footnotes, which makes it hard to read quickly/linearly,
2) it's a little old (published in 1994), and
3) there's a lot of direct quotes (so the tone/diction varies a lot). The silver lining is that this introduced me to a lot of interesting thinkers.
Definitely, definitely worth it though! I took a lot of notes (even more than usual!) and the contrarian perspectives in the book gave me a lot to chew on. This book also had good insights on several topics I've been thinking about or that are a part of my daily life in SF:
-the climate challenge of renovating existing buildings to be zero-emission
-return to office and the conversation around downtown SF ("we're so back," "doom loop," Michael Shvo buying the Transamerica Pyramid, etc.)
-YIMBYism and the historic preservation movement
-the role of (real estate) developers and their lawyers in society. From the book: "Architects are a minor ornament of the culture. Developers build America."
-financialization of infrastructure (which is a broader issue than "Blackrock is buying all the housing," the booms and busts of markets and the quantification of profit through discounting and hurdle rates are also key issues)
-strategic planning and the problem of overfitting
-poorly insulated victorian houses (I live in one!)
Brand is a truly creative, eclectic thinker and it's cool just to see how his brain works. I'm very jealous of his ability to write clearly while combining concepts from finance, art theory, bureaucracy, biology, organizational psychology, and, of course, architecture/urban planning. I also liked his extremely specific mini-histories of the decrease in quality of brick walls over time, the demise of the porch north of the Mason-Dixon line, the rise of the open office, and the invention of the California ranch-style house. What holds all this together is a strong philosophical critique of Modernism!
Specifically, Brand argues that form does not "ever follow function" because the relationship is not unidirectional, neither form nor function are static, and form can be "overfit" to function. As an antidote, he advocates for being attuned locally to place and regionality, for borrowing liberally from conventional solutions, and for a "loose fit," which makes changing in response to feedback easy. I think these arguments locate this book clearly in the literature on complex systems, which probably explains why a lot of computer scientists like it.
I hope you'll forgive the several long lists in this review. Hopefully it gives you a sense of the experience of reading this book though. Let me know if you'd like to see my notes, my selection of the recommended bibliography, or the buildings I pinned on Google Maps to visit. That brings us to 8 lists!
Read
March 18, 2019Very intriguing look at buildings, cities, and how time changes a place. Loved the illustrations.
May 16, 2015
Stewart Brand's thinking about architecture seems to have two basic elements: a strong influence from the design patterns approach of Christopher Alexander, and Brand's own interest in the time dimension. Much of the book is infused with deep contempt for the practice of architecture as it has become in the past century. He reserves special scorn for Frank Lloyd Wright and for contemporary 'magazine architects'. Brand's view, hardly controversial, is that architects should focus on designing buildings that work instead of buildings that merely photograph well. Part of making a building that works is designing it in such a way that it can evolve over time as the occupants' needs change, or the occupants themselves are replaced.
Don't get me wrong: this is not a 'negative' book. It is filled with insight, ideas, and suggestions. And many of the photographs are fascinating, showing buildings at various times in their history, evolving, always growing, sprouting new facades, new floors, new rooflines.
I wish that I had read this book when I was much younger. It might have saved me from a couple major real-estate mistakes. Now that the housing market is in such disarray, reading and understanding this book at a deep level might be very beneficial for those young enough to benefit from buildings that will last a lifetime or more.
Don't get me wrong: this is not a 'negative' book. It is filled with insight, ideas, and suggestions. And many of the photographs are fascinating, showing buildings at various times in their history, evolving, always growing, sprouting new facades, new floors, new rooflines.
I wish that I had read this book when I was much younger. It might have saved me from a couple major real-estate mistakes. Now that the housing market is in such disarray, reading and understanding this book at a deep level might be very beneficial for those young enough to benefit from buildings that will last a lifetime or more.
May 13, 2019
What non-architect can dislike a book that so wittily exposes the follies of Frank Lloyd Wright, I. M. Pei, and Buckminster Fuller? Furthermore, as the owner of an unusually shaped structure myself, I can give personal testimony to the validity of Brand’s thesis that the best buildings are those that incorporate simple designs, easily maintained and easily modified. (Ironically, Brand spends some pages describing his own conversion of a tugboat into a houseboat—the result a charming but screamingly cramped living space with eternal maintenance.) The illustrations and their captions are themselves worth the price of the book; I several times returned fascinated to the many fine photos of buildings as they had been modified through the years. No wonder the BBC was able to make a six-part series from this book.
February 2, 2014
A great book about architecture, construction and (a little) interior design. This book, while not about computing, can serve as a reference for ho to (and not) build software that can evolve. Brand's book is a wonderful companion to Christopher Alexander's classic books on architecture and pattern languages.
October 23, 2011
This book had a lot of potential. I don't know why, but I couldn't enjoy the text. The illustrations and images were great, and the landscape orientation was very useful for review the evolution of structures, but the words on the page were useless. The idea behind the book, the evolution of buildings, is really cool and I would like to read more on the subject. I wonder if I have have read too many books about buildings and how the built environment affects people that this was too basic for me.
Overall, not peeved that I read it, but happy that it was a lazy Sunday in front of the wood stove, and not some overly complex read, that didn't satisfy.
Overall, not peeved that I read it, but happy that it was a lazy Sunday in front of the wood stove, and not some overly complex read, that didn't satisfy.
June 22, 2019
This book gets 4 stars for ideas and 2 stars for actual writing. He could have used a better editor. But also, this book was written in 1995!
As a professional in the buildings industry, I am constantly running into the unique contexts each operator finds herself in whether the building is on day 2 of operations or day 2000. Lots of good things to talk about and to consider both at work and in my home renovation journey. Glad I found this book!
As a professional in the buildings industry, I am constantly running into the unique contexts each operator finds herself in whether the building is on day 2 of operations or day 2000. Lots of good things to talk about and to consider both at work and in my home renovation journey. Glad I found this book!
March 5, 2021
Inhabit early, build forever
July 3, 2023
I’ve quoted this book so much my fianceé, for the first time ever I think, told me to stop quoting it.
April 6, 2020
From time to time I happen to read just the right book, at just the right moment, to really make a mark on my thinking. This was one such time, and book. I got it because of my interest in space and planetary habitats and wanted a different perspective on how to design the structures to be useful over time rather than disposable. But the entire outlook of the book, on how the future is not just unanticipated, but beyond anticipation -- and yet, we are not helpless in the face of that realization -- is something I have struggled time and again to put in to words and communicate to audiences. The beginning of wisdom is in appreciating what cannot be predicted; in leaving room for future inhabitants to make their own decisions, and yet be glad you built what you did, how you did, in a way that the investment endured, but also in a way that allowed that investment to adapt and be adapted. In planning, not a brittle future that breaks when the unanticipated happens, as it always does, but a robust, flexible one which minimizes regret in a range of future scenarios. This is a book I'm bound to recommend to people in fields far from architecture, because of how well it illuminates planning in the face of what you know can't be planned for, but must still be built for.
Read
October 10, 2022The rare book relevant to both my YIMBY work and open community work. MediaWiki is very much a building that has learned; I hope the next generation of Wikipedians can keep that alive. XKCD’s “guy in Nebraska” is also a part of a structure that learns, but precariously and with less provision for systemic, cross-ecosystem learning than Wikipedia. On the flip side, we’re never going to build what Brand calls “low” buildings in SF again; at best we’ll get some ADUs but mostly we’ll get a lot of big buildings. That’s good and needed but they’ll never be great buildings in the way our Edwardians are.
April 24, 2021
Recommended for anyone interested in the built environment; should be required reading for architects and building preservationists.
May 25, 2023
Read excerpts for The Building Envelope.
November 11, 2022
Review title: This Old House
How do buildings age? That is the subject of this unique book by Stewart Brand, the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog which those who came of age in the mid 60s to late 70s will remember as kind of a pre-internet offline community--a paper-based social media, if you will. Here Brand focuses in on the buildings we love and work in and how they "learn"--how they adapt or are adapted to changing uses, tenants, repairs (or lack of), and investment.
Brand starts by defining the six S's of a building, starting from the bottom up and the outside in, and which most importantly age or change at very different rates or time scales (p. 13):
° Stuff
Furniture, appliances, finishes, which change on the scale of months, not years
° Space
Interior layout . House space may last decades, office space a few years.
° Services
Wiring, plumbing, HVAC, with typical lifespan of 7 to 15 years
° Skin
Exterior surfaces which last about 20 years depending on the material
° Structure
Foundation and frame, usually build to last 30 to 300 years
° Site
The geographic setting, which is essentially eternal
How buildings are designed, built, used, and managed and maintained to adapt to those changes--to "learn"--is the topic of the rest of the book. It is the slow-changing longer-lived components that dominate the building. "The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint. Buildings steady us, which we can probably use. But if we let our buildings come to a full stop, they stop us." (p. 17). It is the combination of "Age plus adaptivity [which] makes a building come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants and they learn from it." (p. 23)
Brand uses photographs of the same building over time to show and describe (in tiny-font captions which left me squinting and moving the book very close to read) the changes . The book is heavily illustrated, and is published in 8 1/2 x 11 landscape pages so that the open book has 22 inches across two pages to display a series of photographs or drawings of a site, building, or interior space over time. It is effective for the topic but sometimes awkward to hold for reading. A bibliography of recommended reading and an index are included.
Brand is frequently critical of the architecture profession for its fixation on building unique, monumental, and "perfect" buildings expected to be frozen in time, and without accommodation to the smaller scale changes--the services, space plans, and stuff that make a building usable, and loved. Architecture should be seen as "craft instead of art", because "Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative." (p. 54). He is also often critical of the real estate and banking industries with their fixation on short-term profits. "Real estate turns buildings into money, into fungible units devoid of history and thereof of learning." (p. 87)
Writing in the mid 1990s Brand notes the "new" trend of preservation and home remodeling. Preservation of historic buildings ("High Road" is his term for valuable properties) means "Each property shall be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, and use." (p. 97). Ordinary low-cost "Low Road" buildings can be remodeled, updated, expanded, often by the owner: "They free you by constraining you. Since you don't have to address the appalling vacuum of a blank site, you can put all your effort and ingenuity into the manageable task of rearranging the relatively small part of the building's made that people deal with every day--the Services, Space plan, and Stuff." (p. 105). He writes approvingly and presciently of the explosion in spending for DIY projects versus new construction (p. 159) and would no doubt add a chapter on the boom in real estate shows and channels like HGTV if a new edition were published now.
The insights for the places I've lived and worked are fascinating. In 2021 my wife and I bought a Low Road house that was build in 1952 as a small one-story ranch style house with a combined living-dining area and a detached garage separated from the side door into the kitchen by a breezeway. Sometime later (we think the 1980s) the garage was converted to a wood-paneled living area with a wood-burning fireplace and a peaked roof with skylights to add light and height, connecting to the main part of the house through the now-enclosed breezeway with a new main entry into the house (the original front door remains, a very seldom used cul-de-sac). A new and larger garage was build a little further away across a brick patio. In the 90s the kitchen was remodeled and a bathroom added off the kitchen. Finally about ten years ago a whole new wing was build adding a new large master bedroom off the back of the house, with a new laundry room, large en-suite bathroom and walk-in closet, and a dedicated office with its own outside entrance onto the brick patio and courtyard with an outdoor sink and barbecue area. At some point a storage shed was added to the backyard next to a fenced and lighted basketball court (that we learned from a neighbor was at one time a swimming pool). This is the kind of incremental learning that Brand praises and documents with his photographic spreads, and I wish we had something like that to see document the life and learning of this old house, which at 70+ years and counting has been able to exceed the expected life span of a Low Road building by learning. And the learning continues; we had to replace a broken window in the fireplace room, and after an expensive first winter heating experience had insulation blown into wall cavities that the installer said showed evidence of different past efforts to insulate that left some wall cavities completely uninsulated, others partially insulated with different materials, and a few completely insulated.
Some of Brand's strongest criticism is directed towards commercial properties designed by architects with no input from the expected occupants, managed by landlords with no input from the actual occupants, and maintained by bureaucracies with no plan or funding to help the building learn. The result is solutions that are "inelegant, incomplete, impermanent, inexpensive, just barely good enough to work." (p. 165). Paradoxically, when those solutions are applied by the occupants who live with the building success has a higher chance: "it is those actually using the space who understand best how it can [be] made/altered to have the character of being conducive to the work." (p. 173). Twenty years ago I was one of four infrastructure support staff implementing a state-wide information system, and at the work site we were isolated in a block of four separate tiny cubicles. After having too many conversations over the walls or standing in the narrow entrances, and after learning how the cubicles were built and connected, one weekend on our own time and with our own tools we came in and reconfigured the four into one cubicle with each of us having a small corner desk space and a large round table in the middle that we could pivot and face for those impromptu working sessions. On Monday when the customer manager saw what we had done he said we would need to return the space to its original configuration. But that very day there was a critical system problem that pulled all four of us, and the customer manager, into a day-long series of troubleshooting meetings and calls around our group table. At the end of the day, as the manager walked past he popped in and said we could could keep the arrangement because it had proven its value. Brand would have approved.
He concludes with suggestions and questions to help architects, builders, owners/landlords, and building occupants to proceed and succeed.
° "If you want a building to learn, you have to pay its tuition." (p. 190)--plan and provide money for maintenance.
° Study the building "the way historians study the past--diachronically, in terms of change over time" (p. 210)--and provide pictures, diagrams, and as-built plans of changes to record those changes over time for future owners and occupants (I wish I'd had those for my house!)
° Look at the history of other buildings with similar usages or learning (p. 215) to see how they can be applied to yours.
° Study buildings that haven't changed or learned and ask why, then ask "what are the usages that nourish buildings? And which ones destroy buildings?" (p. 218)
Buildings where we live and work and play are a large part of the places we call home, and Brand has helped me realize they are also large part of the time we call life. Buildings really do learn, like the best of us.
How do buildings age? That is the subject of this unique book by Stewart Brand, the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog which those who came of age in the mid 60s to late 70s will remember as kind of a pre-internet offline community--a paper-based social media, if you will. Here Brand focuses in on the buildings we love and work in and how they "learn"--how they adapt or are adapted to changing uses, tenants, repairs (or lack of), and investment.
Brand starts by defining the six S's of a building, starting from the bottom up and the outside in, and which most importantly age or change at very different rates or time scales (p. 13):
° Stuff
Furniture, appliances, finishes, which change on the scale of months, not years
° Space
Interior layout . House space may last decades, office space a few years.
° Services
Wiring, plumbing, HVAC, with typical lifespan of 7 to 15 years
° Skin
Exterior surfaces which last about 20 years depending on the material
° Structure
Foundation and frame, usually build to last 30 to 300 years
° Site
The geographic setting, which is essentially eternal
How buildings are designed, built, used, and managed and maintained to adapt to those changes--to "learn"--is the topic of the rest of the book. It is the slow-changing longer-lived components that dominate the building. "The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide continuity and constraint. Buildings steady us, which we can probably use. But if we let our buildings come to a full stop, they stop us." (p. 17). It is the combination of "Age plus adaptivity [which] makes a building come to be loved. The building learns from its occupants and they learn from it." (p. 23)
Brand uses photographs of the same building over time to show and describe (in tiny-font captions which left me squinting and moving the book very close to read) the changes . The book is heavily illustrated, and is published in 8 1/2 x 11 landscape pages so that the open book has 22 inches across two pages to display a series of photographs or drawings of a site, building, or interior space over time. It is effective for the topic but sometimes awkward to hold for reading. A bibliography of recommended reading and an index are included.
Brand is frequently critical of the architecture profession for its fixation on building unique, monumental, and "perfect" buildings expected to be frozen in time, and without accommodation to the smaller scale changes--the services, space plans, and stuff that make a building usable, and loved. Architecture should be seen as "craft instead of art", because "Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative." (p. 54). He is also often critical of the real estate and banking industries with their fixation on short-term profits. "Real estate turns buildings into money, into fungible units devoid of history and thereof of learning." (p. 87)
Writing in the mid 1990s Brand notes the "new" trend of preservation and home remodeling. Preservation of historic buildings ("High Road" is his term for valuable properties) means "Each property shall be recognized as a physical record of its time, place, and use." (p. 97). Ordinary low-cost "Low Road" buildings can be remodeled, updated, expanded, often by the owner: "They free you by constraining you. Since you don't have to address the appalling vacuum of a blank site, you can put all your effort and ingenuity into the manageable task of rearranging the relatively small part of the building's made that people deal with every day--the Services, Space plan, and Stuff." (p. 105). He writes approvingly and presciently of the explosion in spending for DIY projects versus new construction (p. 159) and would no doubt add a chapter on the boom in real estate shows and channels like HGTV if a new edition were published now.
The insights for the places I've lived and worked are fascinating. In 2021 my wife and I bought a Low Road house that was build in 1952 as a small one-story ranch style house with a combined living-dining area and a detached garage separated from the side door into the kitchen by a breezeway. Sometime later (we think the 1980s) the garage was converted to a wood-paneled living area with a wood-burning fireplace and a peaked roof with skylights to add light and height, connecting to the main part of the house through the now-enclosed breezeway with a new main entry into the house (the original front door remains, a very seldom used cul-de-sac). A new and larger garage was build a little further away across a brick patio. In the 90s the kitchen was remodeled and a bathroom added off the kitchen. Finally about ten years ago a whole new wing was build adding a new large master bedroom off the back of the house, with a new laundry room, large en-suite bathroom and walk-in closet, and a dedicated office with its own outside entrance onto the brick patio and courtyard with an outdoor sink and barbecue area. At some point a storage shed was added to the backyard next to a fenced and lighted basketball court (that we learned from a neighbor was at one time a swimming pool). This is the kind of incremental learning that Brand praises and documents with his photographic spreads, and I wish we had something like that to see document the life and learning of this old house, which at 70+ years and counting has been able to exceed the expected life span of a Low Road building by learning. And the learning continues; we had to replace a broken window in the fireplace room, and after an expensive first winter heating experience had insulation blown into wall cavities that the installer said showed evidence of different past efforts to insulate that left some wall cavities completely uninsulated, others partially insulated with different materials, and a few completely insulated.
Some of Brand's strongest criticism is directed towards commercial properties designed by architects with no input from the expected occupants, managed by landlords with no input from the actual occupants, and maintained by bureaucracies with no plan or funding to help the building learn. The result is solutions that are "inelegant, incomplete, impermanent, inexpensive, just barely good enough to work." (p. 165). Paradoxically, when those solutions are applied by the occupants who live with the building success has a higher chance: "it is those actually using the space who understand best how it can [be] made/altered to have the character of being conducive to the work." (p. 173). Twenty years ago I was one of four infrastructure support staff implementing a state-wide information system, and at the work site we were isolated in a block of four separate tiny cubicles. After having too many conversations over the walls or standing in the narrow entrances, and after learning how the cubicles were built and connected, one weekend on our own time and with our own tools we came in and reconfigured the four into one cubicle with each of us having a small corner desk space and a large round table in the middle that we could pivot and face for those impromptu working sessions. On Monday when the customer manager saw what we had done he said we would need to return the space to its original configuration. But that very day there was a critical system problem that pulled all four of us, and the customer manager, into a day-long series of troubleshooting meetings and calls around our group table. At the end of the day, as the manager walked past he popped in and said we could could keep the arrangement because it had proven its value. Brand would have approved.
He concludes with suggestions and questions to help architects, builders, owners/landlords, and building occupants to proceed and succeed.
° "If you want a building to learn, you have to pay its tuition." (p. 190)--plan and provide money for maintenance.
° Study the building "the way historians study the past--diachronically, in terms of change over time" (p. 210)--and provide pictures, diagrams, and as-built plans of changes to record those changes over time for future owners and occupants (I wish I'd had those for my house!)
° Look at the history of other buildings with similar usages or learning (p. 215) to see how they can be applied to yours.
° Study buildings that haven't changed or learned and ask why, then ask "what are the usages that nourish buildings? And which ones destroy buildings?" (p. 218)
Buildings where we live and work and play are a large part of the places we call home, and Brand has helped me realize they are also large part of the time we call life. Buildings really do learn, like the best of us.
December 23, 2024
wtf that was brilliant
July 24, 2008
If you are an architect you should lose your license for not having read this book. Anyone interested in building, architects, contractors, home-renovators, property managers, real-estate agents, DIY weekend warriors, all of you need to read this and better both yours, your clients, your renters, and your buildings lives... This book puts into wonderfully written word why european cities have evolved the way they have, and why nearly every new construction area in America seems like a joke. Old buildings will set you free. Brand also outlines several concepts and ideas that are currently being touted by current green and sustainable progressives, yet this book is over a decade old, and doesn't just use buzzwords to get his ideas across. There are complete and excellent examples, points and counterpoints to all the arguments and ideas he presents. Seriously, this is a great book for anyone to read, but especially those directly in contact with any part of the building or remodeling industries.
October 24, 2020
I loved the quiet, contemplative nature of the book. The author picks up case studies of 'style's of how buildings learn: 'low buildings' which by their very lowness, allow their occupants to freely transform them. Of 'high' buildings, and how these deserve a caring warden to allow their graceful aging and depature. On his own house boat, and the various adaptations he has made within it.
It's quite a meditative read, and it /sits/ with you, leaving you with a new vantage point that dwells, examining every space you've inhabited and will inhabit.
My only complaint is that the pacing felt mildly inconsistent. It switches from theory to practice to bureaucracy with a chapter, which was sometimes jarring.
It's quite a meditative read, and it /sits/ with you, leaving you with a new vantage point that dwells, examining every space you've inhabited and will inhabit.
My only complaint is that the pacing felt mildly inconsistent. It switches from theory to practice to bureaucracy with a chapter, which was sometimes jarring.
February 11, 2015
Just as awesome as I hoped when I put it on a 'to read' list years ago.
Has changed the way I'm able to pick apart many houses I drive by in NH, and think about houses that I'm very familiar with.
The suggested reading in the back put half a dozen new books on Amazon wish-lists for me.
It would be interesting to see updated info/ideas, particularly covering green/sustainable building practices.
A lot of the ideas are applicable to many areas of interest, including programming, enterprise IT, and organizations of all sorts.
Has changed the way I'm able to pick apart many houses I drive by in NH, and think about houses that I'm very familiar with.
The suggested reading in the back put half a dozen new books on Amazon wish-lists for me.
It would be interesting to see updated info/ideas, particularly covering green/sustainable building practices.
A lot of the ideas are applicable to many areas of interest, including programming, enterprise IT, and organizations of all sorts.
January 25, 2017
Took me months to slowly absorb this but in the process it has completely changed the way I think about houses, buildings, commercial space, urban space, architecture, and construction, probably forever. As a rank amateur in that field, I needed the best kind of introduction, and this certainly feels like this was it.
November 7, 2012
Random twitter title
Kind of applies to UX.
Kind of applies to UX.
May 12, 2022
This sounded way more interesting than it was to me. Not my niche.
June 25, 2022
"How did it come to pass that garages have everything but cars in them?" (162). I know almost nothing about building and architecture, but I'm happy to recommend Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built. I might be able to summarize a lot of Brand's message by juxtaposing my dad's shop against my parents' house.
When my parents retired and moved into a town, my folks bought a house and my dad bought the adjacent property and built a shop on it. I always thought this signified that he was somehow unable to leave the farm behind, and it probably does. But Brand might suggest that this shop differs fundamentally from the house they moved into. It satisfies an important need many people have to muck around.
My parents' house is totally nice. It has a geothermal heating, a nice porch, and a fairly open living space. It's not very big, which is convenient, but it doesn't have an attic or basement. So it's not very changeable and in some ways not usable. The way things are laid out is the way they're likely always going to be laid out. If someone else moves into that house, I expect that they'll put the TV and kitchen table in exactly same places. If these people build anything, they will likely replace the deck rather than an addition. For Brand, my folks live in more of a "High Road" building as it's well built in many ways but it's poorly build as it's difficult to change. We are lucky when we enter high road buildings and find that they are usable because ultimately they're so expensive that we're stuck with them whether they're usable or not.
My dad's shop is a "Low Road" building. The floor is cement, though it has tubes of water that run through it to provide heat as well as plumbing, which are very nice features for a farmer's shop. Since he built it, my dad has built two small additions. In both cases, he was happy to cut through the frame to make room. The shop is not fancy. Not coincidentally, it doesn't need to be tidy, and in fact it isn't. It has a variety of flexible work spaces, benches, sitting and visiting spaces, heated areas, and shelves. In many ways, it's a more comfortable place than my parents' home.
Brand suggests that architects, and the culture more broadly, undervalue low road buildings and too often build buildings that cannot be updated and changed as people's needs evolve. At one point, Brand describes the elation an artist feels when entering an empty studio apartment--no matter what they do, it will add to the space. Brand's building ethos leads him to boost mobile homes because of how easy it is to build on to them. I enjoyed every anecdote he told about how he turned a dilapidated boat into his office. He also shares some anecdotes from his house boat. These moments, as well as the excellent pictures that show how buildings evolve, are excellent. Recommended.
*
I will also note this observation from Brian Eno for future reference:
When my parents retired and moved into a town, my folks bought a house and my dad bought the adjacent property and built a shop on it. I always thought this signified that he was somehow unable to leave the farm behind, and it probably does. But Brand might suggest that this shop differs fundamentally from the house they moved into. It satisfies an important need many people have to muck around.
My parents' house is totally nice. It has a geothermal heating, a nice porch, and a fairly open living space. It's not very big, which is convenient, but it doesn't have an attic or basement. So it's not very changeable and in some ways not usable. The way things are laid out is the way they're likely always going to be laid out. If someone else moves into that house, I expect that they'll put the TV and kitchen table in exactly same places. If these people build anything, they will likely replace the deck rather than an addition. For Brand, my folks live in more of a "High Road" building as it's well built in many ways but it's poorly build as it's difficult to change. We are lucky when we enter high road buildings and find that they are usable because ultimately they're so expensive that we're stuck with them whether they're usable or not.
My dad's shop is a "Low Road" building. The floor is cement, though it has tubes of water that run through it to provide heat as well as plumbing, which are very nice features for a farmer's shop. Since he built it, my dad has built two small additions. In both cases, he was happy to cut through the frame to make room. The shop is not fancy. Not coincidentally, it doesn't need to be tidy, and in fact it isn't. It has a variety of flexible work spaces, benches, sitting and visiting spaces, heated areas, and shelves. In many ways, it's a more comfortable place than my parents' home.
Brand suggests that architects, and the culture more broadly, undervalue low road buildings and too often build buildings that cannot be updated and changed as people's needs evolve. At one point, Brand describes the elation an artist feels when entering an empty studio apartment--no matter what they do, it will add to the space. Brand's building ethos leads him to boost mobile homes because of how easy it is to build on to them. I enjoyed every anecdote he told about how he turned a dilapidated boat into his office. He also shares some anecdotes from his house boat. These moments, as well as the excellent pictures that show how buildings evolve, are excellent. Recommended.
*
I will also note this observation from Brian Eno for future reference:
We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution. Those signs tell us that we might be rewarded if we accord it our trust. An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface.This is what makes old buildings interesting to me. I think that humans have a taste for thing that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of one. They are not dead yet. (11)
December 31, 2020
This book is, nominally, a book about architecture and buildings, but it is actually a book about modernity and the products of modernity. It is a book about most, if not all, of today's professions; architecture is analyzed because its fruits are particularly visible and familiar. Stewart Brand lovingly describes two varieties of production that improve with time: Low Road and High Road; and one variety of production that worsens with time: No Road. Low Road production is carried out by laymen, it is impromptu and flexible, sometimes crude and always improvisational. High Road production is carried out by artisans, it is passion-driven and well-funded, it spans generations. No Road production shares none of the Low Road or High Road virtues, it is carried out by consultants without skin in the game and it is over-prescribed and inflexible, it is bureaucracy-driven with tight timelines and tighter budgets.
This book could just as easily be about medicine, engineering, tech, or agriculture. No Road exists across all of these disciplines, and, sadly, is often the norm. No Road medicine materializes as declining life expectancy in the 21st century. No Road engineering is an innovative and high-tech hydrocarbon sector that is making the earth uninhabitable. No Road tech is social networks (goodreads included, of course) that are driving monopoly and surveillance capitalism. No Road agriculture is intensive farming practices that increase short-term production at the expense of sustainable land use. These sectors produce impressive and useless products: pills to mask symptoms of diseases that are easily prevented; cars capable of achieving impressive speeds that spend their days crawling in traffic; smartphones that distract and track their owners; flavourless tomatoes and textureless "instant" food. Stewart Brand's advice regarding reform is universally true (replace "architecture" as necessary):
This book is a five-star read because, unlike many in the genre, it does not stop at diagnosing the problem (to do so would make him guilty of his own critiques, I suspect). More than half of How Buildings Learn is dedicated to presenting strategies for reform that span scale from the micro to the macro. The reader is left feeling inspired and empowered to make micro changes to their own home, and they are left optimistic about the potential futures of architecture and urban planning at large. Brand presents a loose but instructive framework for a utopian cure for the often dystopian present. His utopia includes renovations and retrofittings that conserve the embodied energy in our present fleet of buildings and new construction that will be well-suited for the future, regardless of which outcomes are realized out of these turbulent times.
How Buildings Learn has been in print for a quarter of a century. It reads as if it was published yesterday. Brand's conclusion needs to be read and interpreted and reinterpreted across disciplines and across time: "What is called for is the slow moral plastic of the "many ways" diverging, exploring, insidiously improving. Instead of discounting time, we can embrace and exploit time's depth. Evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design."
This book could just as easily be about medicine, engineering, tech, or agriculture. No Road exists across all of these disciplines, and, sadly, is often the norm. No Road medicine materializes as declining life expectancy in the 21st century. No Road engineering is an innovative and high-tech hydrocarbon sector that is making the earth uninhabitable. No Road tech is social networks (goodreads included, of course) that are driving monopoly and surveillance capitalism. No Road agriculture is intensive farming practices that increase short-term production at the expense of sustainable land use. These sectors produce impressive and useless products: pills to mask symptoms of diseases that are easily prevented; cars capable of achieving impressive speeds that spend their days crawling in traffic; smartphones that distract and track their owners; flavourless tomatoes and textureless "instant" food. Stewart Brand's advice regarding reform is universally true (replace "architecture" as necessary):
The conversion will be difficult because it is fundamental. The transition from image architecture to process architecture is a leap from the certainties of controllable things in space to the self-organizing complexities of an endlessly raveling and unraveling skein of relationships over time.
This book is a five-star read because, unlike many in the genre, it does not stop at diagnosing the problem (to do so would make him guilty of his own critiques, I suspect). More than half of How Buildings Learn is dedicated to presenting strategies for reform that span scale from the micro to the macro. The reader is left feeling inspired and empowered to make micro changes to their own home, and they are left optimistic about the potential futures of architecture and urban planning at large. Brand presents a loose but instructive framework for a utopian cure for the often dystopian present. His utopia includes renovations and retrofittings that conserve the embodied energy in our present fleet of buildings and new construction that will be well-suited for the future, regardless of which outcomes are realized out of these turbulent times.
How Buildings Learn has been in print for a quarter of a century. It reads as if it was published yesterday. Brand's conclusion needs to be read and interpreted and reinterpreted across disciplines and across time: "What is called for is the slow moral plastic of the "many ways" diverging, exploring, insidiously improving. Instead of discounting time, we can embrace and exploit time's depth. Evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design."
January 12, 2020
I've been pecking away at this book for about 4 years now. I think I've struggled to get started with it because it's a funny shaped book. It's landscape and in two columns, which sounds like a good idea, but means that it's hard to read without a table. Anyway, I had a good run up at it over the last 3 weeks so I gave it a red hot go, and was rewarded richly!
To a casual reader, it might come across as a catalogue of the ways that Steward Brand hates architects, but it's richer than a simple hatchet job. He cares deeply about the environment, in comprehensive way that feels unusual in today's reactive and noisy response to the climate crisis. He's a conservative—in the smallest c way possible—he's interested in conserving the world, and the best way to do that is focus on learning rather than revolution.
The book is interested in how buildings learn. This is a complex idea because learning happens through time, and also through time the thing that is being learned about changes too. The book describes the attributes of buildings that enable them to learn, and also the mechanisms that allow them to do it. It's some combination of inertia, motivation, and capability.
He describes three classes of building:
* Low road buildings that don't have any societal heft to them, so nobody cares when the occupants modify them to fit their needs. The Actual building is modified whenever it's needed.
* High road buildings are classy, weighty, often institutional. People care a lot about them, and are forced through that inertia to think carefully about making permanent changes. The small changes that happen often don't touch the fabric of the building.
* Magazine architecture is what happens when there's a desire to make something fancy. That desire leads to something that photographs well, but isn't able to keep up with it's users as they change, if it was ever right for them! (He takes pains to point out that no building is ever actually right, and the ability to change is what makes buildings feel right.)
He's incredibly scathing of the whole process that allows magazine architecture to be built. As a grumpy person it was an odd feeling, someone else's words, expressing my feelings so closely. I anticipate quoting from it so much that [I copied that chapter out on my website](https://notionparallax.co.uk/2019/mag...)! He wrote this over 25 years ago, and I'm only just coming to the same conclusions on my own.
There are some bits that feel uncomfortable, mainly caused by things that the last decade and a half have brought up that would have been difficult to predict. But the book has ages remarkably well—perhaps unsurprisingly given the topic.
The rest of the book is good, but if you can only spare enough time to read the first four chapters, you'll still get a lot out of it!
To a casual reader, it might come across as a catalogue of the ways that Steward Brand hates architects, but it's richer than a simple hatchet job. He cares deeply about the environment, in comprehensive way that feels unusual in today's reactive and noisy response to the climate crisis. He's a conservative—in the smallest c way possible—he's interested in conserving the world, and the best way to do that is focus on learning rather than revolution.
The book is interested in how buildings learn. This is a complex idea because learning happens through time, and also through time the thing that is being learned about changes too. The book describes the attributes of buildings that enable them to learn, and also the mechanisms that allow them to do it. It's some combination of inertia, motivation, and capability.
He describes three classes of building:
* Low road buildings that don't have any societal heft to them, so nobody cares when the occupants modify them to fit their needs. The Actual building is modified whenever it's needed.
* High road buildings are classy, weighty, often institutional. People care a lot about them, and are forced through that inertia to think carefully about making permanent changes. The small changes that happen often don't touch the fabric of the building.
* Magazine architecture is what happens when there's a desire to make something fancy. That desire leads to something that photographs well, but isn't able to keep up with it's users as they change, if it was ever right for them! (He takes pains to point out that no building is ever actually right, and the ability to change is what makes buildings feel right.)
He's incredibly scathing of the whole process that allows magazine architecture to be built. As a grumpy person it was an odd feeling, someone else's words, expressing my feelings so closely. I anticipate quoting from it so much that [I copied that chapter out on my website](https://notionparallax.co.uk/2019/mag...)! He wrote this over 25 years ago, and I'm only just coming to the same conclusions on my own.
There are some bits that feel uncomfortable, mainly caused by things that the last decade and a half have brought up that would have been difficult to predict. But the book has ages remarkably well—perhaps unsurprisingly given the topic.
The rest of the book is good, but if you can only spare enough time to read the first four chapters, you'll still get a lot out of it!
December 29, 2025
This is an inspired work. It has totally changed the way I look at buildings, and I already paid closer attention to them than the average person. The attention I had paid was primarily to the "skin" of the building. I had looked at it as a still object that is more or less beautiful, usually from the outside. This, I have come to realize, is completely the wrong way of understanding a building. First, a building's main purpose is to please those who use it, not third parties who judge it casually. Secondly, buildings are not static; they change in time. It follows that those who are most qualified to change them are those whose judgment of them matters most - the users. "We need to honor buildings that are loved rather than merely admired. Admiration is from a distance and brief, while love is up close and cumulative." Therefore, the architect's role is to translate the user's desires into a workable plan as humbly as possible, in a way that facilitates change over time, in a way that defers decisions until more practical data about usage has been accrued. Durability is crucial, because things have to last in order to change (demolition ends the life/learning cycle). In the same way that Jane Jacobs argues that cities should be planned minimally and foster organic activity within them to shape them, Brand argues the same for buildings. He argues convincingly for conservatism - do what time has proven to work and experiment on the margins, allowing for innovation to emerge after the founding date of the building. The book's argument is Hayekian in the sense that it encourages decentralization of decision-making towards those with the most first order knowledge of its consequences. Any book that changes the way you see the world, think about its infrastructure, and process progress is worth five stars. Chapters 1-4 are all-time classics, works of genius theory, observation, and pattern recognition.
I do have a few criticisms. The value per page of this book decreased throughout the book, especially after Chapter 4. Second, and most ironically, the shape of this book is ridiculous and counters the entire philosophy of the book. The content of the book argues for conservatism in design and reliance on structural vernacular because time has proven its functional value. This book's structure follows no vernacular, and its experiment in wide pages is a failure. It's hard for me to imagine that its author did not track that irony.
I do have a few criticisms. The value per page of this book decreased throughout the book, especially after Chapter 4. Second, and most ironically, the shape of this book is ridiculous and counters the entire philosophy of the book. The content of the book argues for conservatism in design and reliance on structural vernacular because time has proven its functional value. This book's structure follows no vernacular, and its experiment in wide pages is a failure. It's hard for me to imagine that its author did not track that irony.
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