How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

Two quotes are most often cited as emblems of the way to understand how buildings and their use interact. The first, echoing the whole length of the 20th century, is “Form ever follows function.” Written in 1896 by Louis Sullivan, the Chicago highrise designer, it was the founding idea of Modernist architecture.1 The very opposite concept is Winston Churchill’s “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

The one garment in the world with the greatest and longest popularity—over a century now—is Levi’s denim blue jeans. Along with their practical durability, they show age honestly and elegantly, as successive washings fade and shrink them to perfect fit and rich texture. Ingenious techniques to simulate aging of denim come and go, but the basic indigo 501s, copper-riveted, carry on for decades. This is highly evolved design. Are there blue-jeans buildings among us?

Are there old program designs? Do we respect age for the right reasons?

Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s (March 1896), pp. 403-409. This much-anthologized, beautifully bombastic essay climaxes with: “It is the pervading law of all things organic, and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expressions, that form ever follows function.”

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Gradually the magazine noticed that its affluent readers rebuilt interiors much more often than they built houses.

Are the internal details of software systems the same? Are APIs forever whilst implementations ephemeral? My gut says yes. Could these be two separate studies?

“Our basic argument is that there isn’t such a thing as a building,” says Duffy. “A building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components.” He distinguishes four layers, which he calls Shell, Services, Scenery, and Set. Shell is the structure, which lasts the lifetime of the building (fifty years in Britain, closer to thirty-five in North America). Services are the cabling, plumbing, air conditioning, and elevators (“lifts”), which have to be replaced every fifteen years or so. Scenery is the layout of partitions, dropped ceilings, etc., which changes every five to seven years. Set is the shifting of furniture by the occupants, often a matter of months or weeks.

Hardware. Interconnects. Interface. Language. Design. Storage. What could be our layers?

Buildings steady us, which we can probably use. But if we let our buildings come to a full stop, they stop us. It happened in command economies such as Eastern Europe’s in the period 1945-1990. Since all buildings were state-owned, they were never maintained or altered by the tenants, who had no stake in them, and culture and the economy were paralyzed for decades.

Could something similar happen with Cloud services?

Unlike Los Alamos, the MIT radar project was not run by the military, and unlike Los Alamos, no secrets got out. The verdict of scientists afterward was, “The atom bomb only ended the war. Radar won it.”

Temporary is permanent, and permanent is temporary. Grand, final-solution buildings obsolesce and have to be torn down because they were too overspecified to their original purpose to adapt easily to anything else. Temporary buildings are thrown up quickly and roughly to house temporary projects. Those projects move on soon enough, but they are immediately supplanted by other temporary projects—of which, it turns out, there is an endless supply. The projects flourish in the low-supervision environment, free of turf battles because the turf isn’t worth fighting over. “We did some of our best work in the trailers, didn’t we?”

Is this true for software? A shell script is temporary. There are always more scripts. PHP uploads are fast, they expand into messy but well loved environments. Prototyping is always temporary.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old buildings.

Do new ideas come from old technologies? Deployments? Solving the hard problems or pulling out the half specified good ideas? Event sourcing / Elm architecture / functional reactivity / immutible messaging are all the same pattern repeatedly reformed.

He turned out to be very wise, often much wiser than Jefferson, much more feet-on-the-ground.

The Founding Fathers were men. It's special that America's national myth is a group of falliable men coming together and compromising their individual visions for the greater good. But they were all men, each with a unique vision. Anyone who conjures these dead and buried men and their dead and buried opinions is also conjuring you. These men all diagreed, sometimes violently. The Founding Fathers intended nothing more than democratic compromise from our nation.

Does the building manage to keep the rain out? That’s a core issue seldom mentioned in the magazines but incessantly mentioned by building users, usually through clenched teeth. They can’t believe it when their expensive new building, perhaps by a famous architect, crafted with up-to-the-minute high-tech materials, leaks. The flat roof leaks, the parapets leak, the Modernist right angle between roof and wall leaks, the numerous service penetrations through the roof leak; the wall itself, made of a single layer of snazzy new material and without benefit of roof overhang, leaks. In the 1980s, 80 percent of the ever-growing postconstruction claims against architects were for leaks. Architects’ reputations should rot if their buildings can’t handle rain. Frank Lloyd Wright was chosen by a poll of the American Institute of Architects as “the greatest American architect of all time.” They all knew his damp secret: Leaks are a given in any Wright house. Indeed, the architect has been notorious not only for his leaks but for his flippant dismissals of client complaints. He reportedly asserted that, “If the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough.” His stock response to clients who complained of leaking roofs was, “That’s how you can tell it’s a roof.”11

It is in the nature of hustling for a living that the hustler must always focus on the next job, giving just enough attention to current jobs to get by, and no attention at all to past jobs. Two famed California architects, Bernard Maybeck and Charles Greene (of Greene and Greene), overcame the discontinuity problem by performing constant experiments on their own homes. Those houses became showcases, not of some finished theory, but of lifelong never-finished learning. A walk through their houses was said to be like a walk through the history of their creative development. The instance is noteworthy because it is rare.

This is exactly true for programmers. If you aren't experimenting with your own space then you're doing it with your client's.

Buildings can’t learn if they don’t last. Most building code systems are a manifestation of the whole community learning. What they embody is good sense, acquired the hard way from generations of recurrent problems. Form follows failure.

Preservationist Paul Goldberger: “A lot of our belief in preservation comes from our fear of what will replace buildings that are not preserved; all too often we fight to save not because what we want to save is so good but because we know that what will replace it will be no better.”

The French archaeologist A. N. Didron stated in 1839 the slogan that still guides all preservationists: “It is better to preserve than to repair, better to repair than to restore, better to restore than to reconstruct.”

Current preservationist doctrine says to respect them; they are a valid part of the building’s history. Clem Labine takes a pragmatic approach: “If it works, and it’s built well, and it’s a nice example of whatever it was intended to be, and it’s not getting in the way, then I say leave it.”

Vernacular building traditions have the attention span to incorporate generational knowledge about long-term problems such as maintaining and growing a building over time. High-style architecture likes to solve old problems in new ways, which is a formula for disaster, according to Dell Upton at the University of California. Vernacular builders, he says, are content to accept well-proven old solutions to old problems. Then they can concentrate all their design ingenuity strictly on new problems, if any. When the standard local roof design works pretty well, and materials and skills are readily available for later repair, why would you mess with that?

What are the common forms that have been retained through language, architecture and center of computing shifts? Command lines…

Paint color and trim vary with fashions in style. The heart of vernacular design is about form, not style. Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student.

Writing about the depth of complexity in the common abstractions… Strings, addressable storage, numbers maybe even just integers.

Something evidently drives continuity between buildings at a mythic level. Masonry fireplaces and chimneys have been utterly obsolete since the popularization of the Franklin stove by the 1830s, yet 160 years later every house that can afford it still has at least a facsimile of a masonry fireplace and chimney. Some deep lullaby croons, “Hearth and home.”

Soon to be replaced by the TV space…

Learning that doesn’t produce habit is a waste of time. Habit that does not resist learning is failing in its function of continuity and efficiency.

The Art of the Long View - (Peter Schwartz, Doubleday, 1991) - Until there is a book on scenario planning specifically for buildings, this is the best introduction to the field. By being imaginative and conservative about the future, buildings can remain exceptionally alert to the on-going present.

Problem Seeking - (William Peña, et al., AIA, 1987) - The standard primer on programming—discerning the needs of the expected users of a building in a structured way.

Post-Occupancy Evaluation - (Wolfgang Preiser, et al., Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1988) - The standard primer on POEs—discerning what went wrong (and ri...