How Buildings Learn
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. - Publisher.
Stats for nerds
37recommend
88mentions
54people
2008–2026years
74% recommend25% neutral1% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Can't wait to read this. His 1995 book, "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built," is excellent.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Buildings-Learn-Happens-Theyre/dp...
- Stewart Brand also wrote a book and made a docuseries about bottom-up architecture called "How Buildings Learn": https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrg__Ji1S58TnecKCIFNskj-Q...
A lot of it is inspired by the ideas of Christopher Alexander, who also inspired the notion of design patterns in software... it is an interesting rabbit hole to dive into.
- Stewart Brand's book How Buildings Learn helped me see the beauty in ugly structures.
- Steward Brand, "How Buildings Learn".
https://bookshop.org/p/books/how-buildings-learn-what-happen...
- Many old neighborhoods were originally literal wall-to-wall cookie-cutter construction, with Brooklyn brownstones being a prime example. My Brooklyn block was originally basically 4 different groups of identical buildings, with the new-law tenement I live in being substantially identical to 10 others it was built in a cluster with (except, now, to one that has had two stories added on top).
Nevertheless I find the area pleasing — partially due to wide sidewalks shaded by mature trees, partially the ways the buildings have changed over time ("How Buildings Learn" is a classic book) and a few vacant lots have been infilled with different buildings, partially due to the wear & texture that come with age, and significantly due to the uninterrupted-except-by-parks walkable street grid for miles in every direction.
Plenty of 1950s suburbs have gotten pretty aesthetically interesting with the texture of age and mature trees grown in at this point, but very few of them are particularly walkable for daily needs.
Very few American cities were unplanned, and many historic gridded neighborhoods sprung up at a shocking pace (many American cities grew at 50% or more a decade for decades on end eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Chicago#Popula...) with a ton of cookie-cutter repetition. The city often engaged in extensive redrawing of farm field property lines and regrades before a street was opened. But such cities were designed primarily for pedestrians at a pedestrian scale, rather than modern 'master-planned communities' that are at best islands of walkability in a sea of car-oriented roadways designed to be incredibly unpalatable to traverse by any other means.
Much of this is due to modern American zoning, which is among the strictest in the world in terms of separating different uses from each other — "residential" zoning in other countries almost never differentiates single-family housing from other housing, and usually permits quiet auxiliary uses like corner stores, doctor's offices, childcares, etc. (Interestingly, such zoning is known as "Euclidean Zoning" not for any geometric reason but with the town of Euclid, Ohio as its namesake, the plaintiff in a Supreme Court Case establishing such zoning as a legitimate use of the police power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Re....)
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