How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

The cut-and-try approach can lead to doing some parts of a building quick and dirty with the idea that they will be temporary tests. If they work well, one imagines, they will be improved later. If they don’t work, it’s no loss to replace them with something that works better. This can be a wholesomely Low Road invitation to later refinement, but beware: in the real world “temporary” is permanent most of the time. If the cheap trial worked, it will be left alone, no matter how funky it is. If it failed, it’s embarrassing to fix. Life rushes on to more pressing or interesting problems. Once “finishing” on a building begins, the guessing and trying multiplies. Contractors know that when a building is fully closed to the weather, the job is only half done. A maddening amount of debate and adjustment is coming. Even so simple a thing as paint color gets complicated. An anthropologist friend of mine studied paint-purchasing behavior for an advertising firm. It turns out that people can’t guess from the sample chips in stores how paint will actually appear on a wall. “They buy a quantity, go home and paint half a wall, groan at how it looks, and then they bring it back to change the shade, usually by lightening it.” Try modeling that on a computer; it’s worse than sample chips.