Cheap How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built (Book) (Stewart Brand, Penguin USA Paper) Price

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Customer Reviews of How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

Buildings Come Alive!
'Buildings That Learn' covers the adaptation over time of buildings to tenant needs, often hindered by all of: the 'fixed solution in year xyza' aesthetic architects; the vagaries of the real-estate market; and the short-lifetime of modern buildings (quality not increased at same or better rate of increase in human life over centuries). Interestingly, software 'guru' Ed Yourdon flagged up similar problems hindering software productivity and quality in his 'Rise & Fall of the American Programmer' (e.g. non-customer focus, markets prices & labor costs, poor quality development etc..).

Addressing the building layers (site, structure, skin, services, space plan and "stuff") through a logical sequence of chapters, to get the most out of this book deserves a thorough read rather than a surface glance. The deeply referenced & illustrated, entertaining chapters span:

Flow- introduction and the time dimension; Shearing Layers- of the different rates of change in buildings; "Nobody Cares What You Do In There": The Low Road- easy adaptation in cheap buildings; Houseproud: The High Road- refined adaptation in long-lasting sustained-purpose buildings; Magazine Architecture: No Road- where tenants needs ignored for photo-aesthetics; Unreal estate- and markets sever continuity in buildings; Preservation: A Quiet, Popularist, Conservative, Victorious Revolution- to address incontinuity and frustrate innovators; The Romance of Maintenance- and preservation; Vernacular: How Buildings Learn from Each Other- and respect for design wisdom of older buildings; Function Melts Form: Satisficing Home and Office; The Scenario-buffered Building; and Built for Change- imagining buildings inviting adaption.

Strengths include: the great depth of reference material, illustrations and evidence; easy-readability; an insiders' window on the international world of architects and civil engineers; and suitability for wide audience including lay-people interested in the built-environment and society, as well as complex systems architects (hard engineering or software development).

Rarely the text becomes a bit rambling (more sidebars or bulleted lists?) and repetitive with unsupported assertions- but that is the only negative. Improvements could include an additional chapter cross-referencing (learning from?) 'adaptive systems', 'scenario planning' etc.. from the other professions that explicitly use these approaches to develop longer-term customer-centric complex adaptive systems.

Overall a great read, that encourages re-evaluation of living and working space (don't accept those dis-functional anonymous boxes behind the trendy outer skin!). 'How Buildings Learn' is best read with both something like 'E-topia' by Mitchell (Architect and Computer Scientist at MIT) for a visionary (and sometimes contradictory) view of the future of the built environment; and Schumacher's 'Small is Beautiful' for a sustainable economic-development viewpoint.

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lots of flash but not much substance
When I started reading the book I felt myself in agreement with much of what Brand has to say. Eventually I began to have nagging doubts which eventually crystallized. The title is a poor match for the content and part of the problem is one of the things Brand talks about: no one really knows how buildings learn or what happens after they've been built because the architecture profession hasn't been interested in those things. Brand makes a lot of suggestions but by the end of the book you realize he hasn't synthesized a whole from the many conflicting parts.

Is exposing services good or bad? When he talks about MIT's Building 20 he likes exposed services. When he talks about the Pompidou Centre in Paris he doesn't. We should build of masonry because it lasts forever. No, masonry is hard to change and we should use wood. Wood requires too much upkeep so we should use metal roofs. But metal buildings are ugly. But anything more than 100 years old is beautiful. We should build for the ages but it should be affordable so we don't have to take out a mortgage to do so. Flat roofs are bad (even though they promote vertical growth) but rectagular walls are best (because they make additions easy). Overly specified buildings are bad but then he goes on for pages about how he turned a barge into a house. It should be somewhat specific because open architecture overwhelms us with the possibilities, but it shouldn't be TOO specific.

It isn't until the final two chapters that he actually has some concrete suggestions and then you realize most of the book he has been arguing against a strawman.

The best part of the book are the photos, often showing the same building or neighboor over the spans of a few decades, really driving home how buildings can and do change.

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Morality in building
The best part of this book is its historical photos, a history of our society told by its buildings. Worst part is its premise: that once we understand the importance of adaptability in buildings, we will build differently.

The fact remains building owners will never pay more than is necessary to meet their forseeable needs. (And if it weren't for building codes, even health and safety would be compromised.)

Another point: Although he values ordinary buildings, and wants an architecture free of pretense, pretense of some sort is the essence of architecture, which, as Frank Lloyd Wright said, begins where function ends. Do we really want a world of plain utilitarian structures?

So the book ends up being more of a criticism of our short-sighted culture, using buildings as examples. The arguments may not hold water, but the vast amount of research that obviously went into this book to document how buildings change over the decades still makes it interesting.