How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

Front Cover
Penguin, Oct 1, 1995 - Architecture - 252 pages
11 Reviews
Buildings have often been studies whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time. How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time.

From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from "satisficing" to "form follows funding," from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.

More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.

 

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LibraryThing Review

User Review  - elenchus - LibraryThing

My approach is to examine buildings as a whole -- not just whole in space, but whole in time. Some buildings are designed and managed as a spatial whole, none as a temporal whole. In the absence of ... Read full review

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - jasonli - LibraryThing

"How Buildings Learn" is a seminal work on the life of buildings after they've been built and is then subject to the whims of its inhabitants, the weather, changes in technology and changes in ... Read full review

Selected pages

Contents

Acknowledgments
Cover Story
Flow
Shearing Layers
The Low Road
The High Road
No Road
Unreal Estate
The Romance of Maintenance
How Buildings Learn From Each Other
Satisficing Home and Office
The Scenariobuffered Building
Built for Change
The Study of Buildings in Time
Books for Timekindly Buildings
Index

A Quiet Populist Conservative Victorious Revolution
Copyright

Other editions - View all

How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
Stewart Brand
Snippet view - 1994
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
Stewart Brand
Snippet view - 1995

Common terms and phrases

adaptive adobe aesthetic American architects architecture became become brick builders building historians building’s Buildings Learn built bungalows California Cape Cod house ceiling century Chris Alexander Christopher Alexander Clem Labine client commercial completely construction contractor cost developers door Edge City exterior facade facilities managers feet fireplace floor Frank Duffy garage Global Business Network growing High Road buildings idea interior Jane Jacobs Jefferson Joel Garreau kitchen later layers leaks Leon Krier living long­term look maintenance materials MIT’s mobile homes Moudon move old buildings organization original owners percent photographs planners porch preservationists problem real estate real­estate Recommended Bibliography remodeling repair replaced roof San Francisco Santa Fe style scenario planning scenarios shape shingles Space plan stone Street structure tenants there’s things traditional urban users Vernacular Architecture vernacular building walls Washington whole wood York

About the author (1995)

Though honored as a writer—with the National Book Award for the Whole Earth Catalog, Eliot Montroll Award for The Media Lab, Golden Gadfly Award for his years as editor of CoEvolution Quarterly—Steward Brand is primarily an inventor/designer. Trained as a biologist and army officer, he was an early multimedia artist. He has created a number of lasting institutions, including New Games Tournaments, the Hackers Conference, and The WELL, a bellwether computer conference system. He is co-founder of Global Business Network, a futurist research organization fostering "the art of the long view."

Bibliographic information

QR code for How Buildings Learn
TitleHow Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
AuthorStewart Brand
PublisherPenguin, 1995
ISBN1101562641, 9781101562642
Length252 pages
Subjects ›  › 

Architecture / Criticism
Architecture / Historic Preservation / General
Architecture / History / General
  
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