How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

This is a gain and a loss for quality in buildings. The worst are less bad because of having to meet fairly intelligent standards. But the best are less innovative as a whole, and they are less likely to be finely adapted, or adaptable, to their unique circumstances. Instead of learning from each other, such “catalog architecture” buildings are guided by a standard homogenized pool of building lore which is no longer regional and often not even national, but world-encompassing, inescapable and unchallengeable. How else can we explain the survival from decade to decade of the aluminum-frame sliding glass door? It seems to serve simultaneously as door, window, and wall, but it’s terrible at all three. As a door it’s fiddly and awkward to open, and dangerous, since it has the vicious property of looking the same when open or closed, and people walk smack into the glass. As a window it reveals too much in both directions and makes any view quickly boring. And it’s worthless as wall, being nonstructural and noninsulated, bleeding heat in whatever is the wrong direction. The sliding glass door is a measure of how remote the builders’ decisions have become from the users’ experience and of how powerless users are in the face of standardized building doctrine.