How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

Occupants in a lean time can be crushed by trying to maintain what was built in fat times.

The High Road is high-visibility, often high-style, nearly always high-cost.

Low Road buildings are successively gutted and begun anew, High Road buildings are successively refined.

“r-strategy” versus “K-strategy”

Would Washington have known how to make the piazza so amenable if he hadn’t lived in the house for fourteen years first?

Not a lot of software has this contributor history.

Most owner-builders take inordinate lengths of time to complete their projects; Jefferson took fifty-four years. Many owner-builders construct dwellings larger than necessary; Jefferson, a widower, built a thirty-five-room mansion. Owner-builders invariably extemporize as they build, adding to and modifying their original design as the house grows. Jefferson built one house, tore much of it down, doubled its size, and continued to alter, remodel, improve, and add to it for decades. It is a wonder that the house was ever finally completed; many thought it never would be.

This feels familiar.

The building tries to stand for the function instead of serving it.

Military buildings are rich, not in money, but in people with time to work on them.

A frozen bureaucracy and a frozen building reinforce each other’s resistance to change. Change is obligatory, since bureaucracies always grow, but responsibility is dispersed and delayed in a maze of anxious responsibility-avoidance, and the building sits heavy and inert. Near any institutional building more than a decade old, you are likely to find a host of clumsy Low Road expediencies—trailers, temporary add-ons, people working in windowless storage rooms, space rented in nearby commercial buildings.

“There’s a huge lag time between when you need something and when you actually get it.

Because it is not allowed to anticipate its growth realistically, this superb institution barely functions.

compact shelving

So that’s what it’s called!

MOST BUILDINGS have neither High Road nor Low Road virtues. Instead they strenuously avoid any relationship whatever with time and what is considered its depredation.

How did architects come to be such an obstacle to adaptivity in buildings?

“The problem with architects,” he rasped, “is they think they’re artists, and they’re not very competent.”

The problems of “art” as architectural aspiration come down to these: • Art is proudly non-functional and impractical. • Art reveres the new and despises the conventional. • Architectural art sells at a distance.

Architect Peter Calthorpe maintains that many of the follies of his profession would vanish if architects simply decided that what they do is craft instead of art.

“If a pleasure-giving function predominates, the artifact is called art; if a practical function pred...

Craft is something useful made with artfulness, with close a...

Convention became conventional because it works.

Tales were told of ambitious architects specifically designing their buildings to photograph well at the expense of performing well.

Teachers began to talk of the need for “loose fit” in designing buildings, so that unexpected uses of the building could be accommodated.

Chris Alexander and colleagues came up with their “pattern language” of design elements that wear well.

All that effort goes into impressing the wrong people—passers-by instead of the people who use the building.

Software analogy insight: software architects design for the business and to impress other architects, but not for the actual inhabitants of the code - the dev team.

The contractor passes 80 percent of the work to subcontractors. They are often the ones with the cutting-edge technical skills, but they are too far downstream to affect design. Once the building is finished, it is turned over to facilities managers who will actually run the building. They of course have had no hand in its design.

Elided: architect-> engineers -> general contractor.

The Japanese design-build methodology has developed to such efficiency that some highrises have construction begun on their base before the top is completely designed—“just-in-time” design.

Clients often are no better at representing building users than architects are. Usually a building is so large and complex an undertaking that the “stakeholders” are too diverse, scattered, and at odds to agree on much of anything.

Major design decisions wind up being made semi-randomly by the lawyer because no one is crisply in charge.

The percent approach is a conflict of interest for the architect;

What is punished by claims is any kind of adaptivity during construction—

The simultaneous seizing of power and shedding of responsibility by contractors puts the onus on architects to anticipate perfectly all of a building’s needs. Nothing is left to the builders, to the client, or to actual usage.

All the design intelligence gets forced to the earliest part of the building process, when everyone knows the least about what is really needed.

Chris Alexander likes to make on-site adjustment to a building as it’s being constructed. “Architects are supposed to be good visualizers, and we are,” he says, “but still, most of the time we’re wrong. Even when you build the things yourself and you’re doing good, you’re still making nine mistakes for every success. So you take the time to correct them. The more at each stage you can approach being able to experience the contemplated reality, the more it will give you feedback and you’ll be able to intelligently develop it.”

“Architects think of a building as a complete thing, while builders think of it and know it as a sequence—hole, then foundation, framing, roof, etc. The separation of design from making has resulted in a built environment that has no ‘flow’ to it—you simply cannot design an improvisation or an adaptation. It’s dead.”

The race for finality undermines the whole process. In reality, finishing is never finished, but the building is designed and constructed with fiendish thoroughness to deny that.

“post-occupancy evaluation” (POE)

Why not just “use-evaluation,” since that’s what it is?

“We believe you should go back three times. You should do it with the people who are going to use the building six weeks before it opens, to record their expectations. That gives you a very interesting base. You should go back within the first six months, when they’re still fresh on the place and really feeling all the uneasy elements. Then you should go back about two years later, after they’ve accommodated themselves to the building. It would be wonderful to do a fourth one maybe ten years later, because by then the world has changed. Has your building been able to accommodate that change?”

“The fundamental reason is: the difficulty of putting buildings up is so great, and the pressures of getting it right on the night are so enormous, that squeezes out concern for the user and it squeezes out concern for time.

In the 1980s, malpractice lawsuits against architects surpassed those against doctors.

Legal action is a hugely inefficient method of failure analysis.

The field of architecture takes its counsel from two main sources—architecture schools and architecture magazines—both of which deliberately isolate themselves from the real sources of feedback on building performance—lawyers and developers.

“I prefer a one-story responsive wood building to a ten-story extremely inflexible concrete one.

They focus obsessively on visual skills such as rendering, models, plans, and photography. Sight substitutes for insight.

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.

The needed conversion is from architecture based on image to architecture based on process.

Architecture should offer an incentive to its users to influence it wherever possible, not merely to reinforce its identity, but more especially to enhance and affirm the identity of its users.”

“Rushing is at the root of all lack of quality.”

Every building leads three contradictory lives—as habitat, as property, and as component of the surrounding community.

Is your house primarily a home or primarily an asset?