How Buildings Learn Quotes

“A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Function reforms form, perpetually.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Buildings keep being pushed around by three irresistible forces—technology, money, and fashion.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“We are convinced by things that show internal complexity, that show the traces of an interesting evolution. Those signs tell us that we might be rewarded if we accord it our trust. An important aspect of design is the degree to which the object involves you in its own completion. Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me. I think that humans have a taste for things that not only show that they have been through a process of evolution, but which also show they are still a part of one. They are not dead yet.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“What does it take to build something so that it’s really easy to make comfortable little modifications in a way that once you’ve made them, they feel integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? You want to be able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted state with yourself, your family, the climate, whatever. This kind of adaptation is a continuous process of gradually taking care.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay).”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“The product of careful continuity is love....Trust, intimacy, intense use, and time are what made these buildings work so well.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Redundancy of function is always more reliable than attempts at perfection, which time treats cruelly.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“A frozen bureaucracy and a frozen building reinforce each other's resistance to change”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“To change is to lose identity; yet to change is to be alive.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“The temptation to customize a building around a new technology is always enormous, and it is nearly always unnecessary. Technology is relatively lightweight and flexible—more so every decade. Let the technology adapt to the building rather than vice versa, and then you’re not pushed around when the next technology comes along.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Favor moves that increase options; shy from moves that end well but require cutting off choices; work from strong positions”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“In 1990 the American Institute of Architects polled its members on what competencies they would most like to develop. Out of the dozens offered, the next-to-last was “Develop facilities management services.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Architects generally have been slow to join the evaluation bandwagon. More often than not, the pull to conduct evaluations has come from client organizations, not from the architects themselves. Many architects in the past have regarded POE as negative feedback….”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Wright is an interesting study of a superstar architect having both right and wrong influence. “All Architecture, worthy the name,” he decreed in 1910, “will, henceforward, more and more be organic.”12 So inspired by Viollet-le-Duc and Louis Sullivan, he inspired countless others (including young me) toward an organic approach to architecture. At the same time, the very pomposity of his decrees helped inflame a fatal egotism in generations of architects, and his most famous buildings belie his organic ideal. They were so totally designed—down to the screwheads all being aligned horizontally to match his prairie line—that they cannot be changed. To live in one of his houses is to be the curator of a Frank Lloyd Wright museum;”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“The fashion game is fun for architects to play and diverting for the public to watch, but it’s deadly for building users. When the height of fashion moves on, they’re the ones left behind, stuck in a building that was designed to look good rather than work well, and now it doesn’t even look good.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“No one could accuse Building 20 of burying its Services too deep in the Structure. Recabling from office to office, lab to lab, or even wing to wing is largely a matter of do-it-yourself. Rather than a burden, the occupants consider this a benefit. 1990 - The wide wood stairs in Building 20 show wear in a way that adds to its myth. You feel yourself walking in historic footsteps in pursuit of technical solutions that might be elegant precisely because they are quick and dirty. And that describes the building: elegant because it is quick and dirty.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“long-time professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, Chris Alexander”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“The one garment in the world with the greatest and longest popularity—over a century now—is Levi’s denim blue jeans. Along with their practical durability, they show age honestly and elegantly, as successive washings fade and shrink them to perfect fit and rich texture. Ingenious techniques to simulate aging of denim come and go, but the basic indigo 501s, copper-riveted, carry on for decades. This is highly evolved design. Are there blue-jeans buildings among us?”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

“Institutional buildings act as if they were designed specifically to prevent change for the organization inside and to convey timeless reliability to everyone outside. When forced to change anyway, as they always are, they do so with expensive reluctance and all possible delay. Institutional buildings are mortified by change.”
― Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built