How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

In the older world [of Europe], the public facilities tended to copy the private. Inns were shaped like large private residences, town halls were fashioned after the palatial dwellings of rich citizens. But the urban communities which sprang up in the United States in the nineteenth century were bristling with newcomers, while there were still few rich men and, of course, no ancient palaces. Here public buildings and public facilities made their own style, which gradually influenced the way everyone lived.10 It was raffish commercial buildings rather than the stately institutional ones that led the way. Grand hotels, which historians consider to be an American invention, introduced gas light, spring mattresses, running water and central heating by mid-19th century. Guests soon took insistence on such luxuries home with them. Once people had experienced air conditioning in movie theaters in the 1930s, they could not bear to live without it at home. Maybe home adoption is the final test of the success of a new building element. That the sealed windows and services-hiding dropped ceilings of offices have not migrated to the home may signify that they are ultimately failures.