How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

Art begets fashion; fashion means style; style is made of illusion (granite veneer pretending to be solid; facade columns pretending to hold up something); and illusion is no friend to function. The fashion game is fun for architects to play and diverting for the public to watch, but it’s deadly for building users. When the height of fashion moves on, they’re the ones left behind, stuck in a building that was designed to look good rather than work well, and now it doesn’t even look good. They spend their day trapped in someone else’s taste, which everyone now agrees is bad taste. Here, time becomes a problem for buildings. Fashion can only advance by punishing the no-longer-fashionable. Formerly stylish clothing you can throw or give away; a building goes on looking ever more out-of-it, decade after decade, until a new skin is grafted on at great expense, and the cycle begins again—months of glory, years of shame.