How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

by Stewart Brand

Living at the construction site is an honorable vernacular practice. Limited resources made people occupy immediately, then build for years. Inside some of the nicest old adobe homes at Seton Village, near Santa Fe, you will find fully intact old railroad cars. That’s where the original family lived while the adobe construction labored on around them.

It would be nice if architects would design tiny starter homes for people, but they won’t. The profit margin is too small. And developers won’t do it for fear of encouraging too much grass-roots autonomy and change. Nearly all homes that grow from modest beginnings are, like Thomas Jefferson’s, owner-built and owner-designed. Usually an architect is rented briefly just to sign the plans. I think there’s an opportunity wai...

1939 - During the Depression, houses were often built by stages, as money came available. A tent on a floor platform like this is ...

ca. 1985 - The potter-jeweler living in this 8-by-45-foot house trailer in Crawford, Colorado, added a workshop (with recycled windows), a greenhouse (left), and bales of hay for insulation (right).

1993 - HANDMADE HIGHRISES like this are the contemporary vernacular for new housing throughout the eastern Mediterranean. There are tens of thousands of buildings just like it—concrete frame, structural clay tile walls (often made by the occupants), three to seven stories high (no elevator), often a solar water heater on top. Small local firms frame up the building in concrete with hand-built forms raised story by story—frequently with rebar left sticking out of the top in case more floors are added later. The floors are finished and occupied in random sequence (as here, in Seljuk, Turkey) because the floors are sold as condominiums, and the families complete their space and move in when finances permit.

here. Pipes are let into the tile by knocking in one or more cells. The surfaces of the blocks are scored to hold stucco finish. Unlike brick, the tiles are wide and light enough to be laid up only one layer thick for exterior as well as interior walls. Everywhere

Buildings that last are made of quality materials and with quality craftsmanship. It costs. Lumber that is close-grained, straight, and well dried is expensive. Quality builders are expensive too, but the investment pays well later in terms of durability and flexibility. Fine artisans treat code requirements as setting a minimum standard rather than a maximum. They know that step dimensions in stairs have to be consistent to within three-sixteenths of an inch or people will stumble and get hurt. (A major source of architectural malpractice suits is for sloppy or overly creative stairs.)6 Good carpenters employ measuring distinctions as fine as the “RCH.”7 Contractor Matisse Enzer explains: “RCH is a technical term, a unit of measurement an order of magnitude smaller than the last unit mentioned in a stream of adjustment commands—’Up an inch. Down a half. Down a quarter. OK, up an RCH and nail it.”’ An American carpenter apprenticing in Japan reported on their version: I watched four senior carpenters standing at attention, silently accepting a stiff rebuke from the master. Their crime: someone had miscalculated a few millimeters on a hip rafter. The difference was hardly noticeable, even close up, but since the beam was designed to achieve its perfect form only after several years of sagging and shrinking, this small error would be magnified and possibly distort the whole. Fumed Nishioka, “They’ll laugh at me. ‘They’ll say, That’s not the way a hip rafter should look!’ And...

Good artisans also know or can figure out the details that will make a building work right for the inhabitants, so the toilet-paper dispenser can be easily reached and the shower doesn’t spray the bathroom floor or burn the hand that adjusts the hot water. Well-made buildings are fractal—equally intelligent at every level of detail.

But the whole building doesn’t have to be gourmet-cooked; some parts should be left raw. Chris Alexander routinely cites the authority of the Japanese artistic virtue of wabi sabi—“the recognition that in a beautiful thing there is always some part which is lovingly and carefully done, and some parts which are very roughly done, because the compensation between the two is necessary in a real thing.” Undifferentiated, unpartitioned, unspecialized loft, attic, basement, garage, or storage spaces are essential.

It will take a year to work out just the major bugs. In the first year of the Media Lab building at MIT, the elevator caught fire, the revolving door broke weekly, all the doorknobs in the building failed and had to be replaced, the automatic door closers were stronger than people and had to be adjusted, and an untraceable stench of something horribly dead filled the public lecture hall for months. This is normal.

John Abrams, the design/builder in Massachusetts, discovered that his business was being hurt by new-building problems on the far side of the “occupancy” barrier. “We would have these terrific relationships with clients,” he recalls, “and then all of a sudden they’d start to deteriorate right after the completion of a building, due to very minor problems. My thinking always was, we’ve been on this grand excursion with these people, and we’ve done such a great job, and we love them and they love us; these little things don’t matter that much. Well, they turned out to matter a lot. “After seeing this for a while and seeing that it was fundamental, we hired someone just to handle those problems—a full-time handyman for our clients. He does nothing but adjust, repair, and maintain, and he’s always available in a day or two. We never question whether a problem is our fault or their fault or anybody’s fault. It’s something that’s wrong with the building, and it has to be dealt with immediately! We don’t bill for much of his time. We believe it’s our duty in building a building that it should work well for twenty-five or fifty years. We’re trying to make a building that doesn’t need his time, and whatever time of his it needs is our responsibility. That completely changed how our relationships with our clients endure. When they eventually want to improve or change the building, they come back to us. That’s where a lot of our work is now.”9

When he turns over a new house to the family, Abrams writes a detailed letter that goes with The Book of photographs of the open walls and a packet of manuals of all the operating equipment in the house. The letter says, “During the first year, we will deal with all subcontractors. At the conclusion of the first year we can do a walk-through and try to solve any problems that are unsolved at that time.” In the letter are the names and phone numbers of all the subcontractors on the building, along with a suggested schedule of maintenance.

At the building site Abrams has the work crew leave a tidy pile of lumber ends that can be used as firewood, plus surplus building materials such as bathroom tiles that will make later repair or expansion easier. Historic building maintenance professionals have a standard list of materials worth stockpiling—such things as extra shingles, tiles, or slates, roof gutter materials, bricks or building stone, paving materials, awnings, door hardware and doors, window hardware and windows, specialized glass, paneling and trim, and wallpaper.

Besides spare parts, a new building needs a complete and accurate record of itself. A building of any complexity must have a set of “as-built” drawings showing what was actually constructed. Rehab and restoration architects routinely charge significantly less for their work if as-builts are available. Part of the shame of the headquarters building (1970) of the American Institute of Architects in Washington is that it was completed without as-builts, making the later all-too-necessary renovations even more of a pain. There also needs to be assembled in one place a complete legal paper trail of the building—all the contracts, bonds, gu...

WRONG DOOR. Think of every restaurant, shop, and public building you’ve visited. The entrance has double doors, by law. But one door opens and one doesn’t, and you can’t tell which is which until you’ve crunched into the wrong one. That one detail of staff failing to unlock both doors shrieks of laziness, disinterest, and unwelcome. Every cust...

All ships have scrupulous maintenance logs, and so should buildings. The logs show precisely what was done, when, and by whom. They also schedule the routines of periodic inspection, servicing, and preventive maintenance. In buildings the record of work done can sometimes be attached to the point of work, such as servicing tags on equipment. A room’s paint, wallpaper, and carpet specifications can be taped to the inside of a light switch cover in the room. Old lead roofs customarily have the date of their installation marked in them, along with the name of the “plumber” who did the work, and contemporary lead roof renovators continue the tradition.

A successful building has to be periodically challenged and refreshed, or it will turn into a beautiful corpse. The scaffolding was never taken completely down around Europe’s medieval cathedrals because that would imply that they were finished and perfect, and that would be an insult to God.

What about the building you see when you look up from this book? Go do something timely to it.

The second-largest portion of landfill waste disposal is taken up by building debris, according to definitive studies reported in William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). The largest portion is paper.

There are so many questions worth exploring. What are the oldest buildings in various cities that still command high rents? What made that happen? What kinds of buildings were torn down, and why? What is the distribution of building types in a city, and how does their longevity sort out? How about in small towns? What is the real distribution of design approaches—how many buildings are specially architected, versus franchise cookie-cutter, versus developer assembly-line, versus vernacular?

Ships are the best-documented large structures in existence. Might they be studied simply as buildings? Could some of their high-density design and rigorous servicing discipline be transferred to ordinary buildings?

How important is local control? An intriguing project would be to design some houses and small commercial buildings specifically to be serviced and maintained by their users. Only amateur skills would be required, and everything that needed work would be self-obvious. No outside expertise or special materials necessary. Maybe this is the secret of high longevity at low cost—like the Volkswagen beetle.

adjustment to a norm, change of the norm, and change of change. (This is seen in the pedagogic sequence of learning a language, learning languages, and learning to learn languages and hence anything.) Might that layering be reflected in a building designed for multilevel adaptivity? Maybe that’s what Architecture Department buildings should be designed to handle—triple-level learning.

Since every building is expected to reach out thirty to one hundred years into the future, it’s astonishing that the building industry doesn’t do extensive futures research. Perhaps it’s a paradoxical effect of the acceleration of change in our lifetimes. The very compression of events that makes futures study more necessary makes us more ahistorical in our outlook. We’re too immersed in the onrush of change (no one calls it progress these days, interestingly) to do much looking backward or forward, and so we put ourselves at the mercy of events, repeatedly surprised and baffled. Buildings might help us out of that impasse. Their material persistence steadies us. Embodying the past, they invite us to think seriously and confidently about the future.

In that case there will be added to the Low Road and the High Road an exquisitely tunable High Tech Road. It will be obvious how those buildings learn. They learn by paying attention.

3D Home Architect (software) - (Brøderbund, 1994) - Architecture without architects. There’s no better way to try out space plans, room design, and building configurations than with this intuitively adept software (the best as of 1994). The program prevents you from doing impossible things, offers recommendations, and provides 3D views of what you design, along with precise dimensions and materials lists. It’s CAD (computer-aided design) for amateurs. It won’t do finished drawings; for that you still need an architect.

The Occupier’s View - (Vail Williams, 1990, £50 from Vail Williams, 43 High Street, Fareham, Hampshire, PO16 7BQ, England) - The scalding product of post-occupancy evaluation of fifty-eight new business buildings near London. I would not set about building or remodeling a business building without studying this report first. Then I’d go talk to nearby facilities managers to learn about local problems of the same sort. The report stands as an indictment of contemporary design, construction, and real estate practices.

The Changing Workplace - (Francis Duffy, Phaidon, 1992) - This is an anthology of the writings of Frank Duffy, the architect who noticed and codified the layering of change in buildings. His primary focus is office environments, but his insights often apply much wider. All the articles and essays collected here are enlivened by Duffy’s recent comments on them in the margins. The Total Workplace - (Franklin Becker, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990) - Now that there is an enlightened textbook like this for facilities managers of “elastic organizations,” other building professionals may want to investigate the design implications.

Edge City - (Joel Garreau, Doubleday, 1988) -Garreau’s book is just as embarrassing to architects and city planners as Jacobs’s was, because the real action (this time in new peripheral cities) has once again eluded their notice and theory. Garreau, a demographer and Washington Post journalist, reveals more of present-day American reality than any other book I can think of. (Garreau edits an expensive newsletter to keep up with the rapid change in edge cities, from PO Box 1145, Warrenton, VA 22186.)

Built for Change - (Anne Vernez Moudon, MIT, 1986) - Extensive analysis of a large area of San Francisco Victorian row houses showed that they and their neighborhoods owe their remarkable resilience to just a few major patterns—including small lot size, individual ownership, and easily adaptable room layouts.

Wheel Estate - (Allan D. Wallis, Oxford, 1991) - Why do the most important and interesting subjects get so few books about them? In terms of innovation and quantity, trailers and mobile homes led the way in American housing in the later 20th century. Here was the subversive arrival of factory-made housing. Wallis scooped everybody with his excellent book.

Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings - (Edward S. Morse, Dover, 1886, 1961) - A 19th-century masterpiece, this exquisite little book conveys the genius of traditional Japanese houses in detail never surpassed. The quiet influence of this book keeps being renewed decade after decade.

San Francisciana: Photographs of the Cliff House - (Marilyn Blaisdell, San Francisco: Blaisdell, 1985) - The best photo-series I’ve seen of a spectacular site attracting and shedding building after building.