How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

Adaptive use is the destiny of most buildings, but the subject is not taught in architectural schools. Any kind of remodeling skills are avoided in the schools because they seem so unheroic, and the prospect of remodeling or rehabilitation happening later to one’s new building is even more taboo. Predictably paralyzed buildings are the result. But suppose preservationists taught some of the design courses for architects, developers, and planners. The subject would not be how to make new buildings look like old ones. It would be: how to design new buildings that will endear themselves to preservationists sixty years from now. Take all that a century of sophisticated building preservation has learned about materials, space-planning, scale, mutability, adaptivity, functional tradition, functional originality, and sheer flash, and apply it to new construction.