“How Buildings Learn”, by Stewart Brand

Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built. New York, NY: Viking, 1994. Print.

Now, my devoted readers (all four of you!) are going to be annoyed, because I’m going to use the word ‘transformative’ again for this book, and you are all the type to notice that I’ve used the same word twice in a day.  But what can I do?  Christopher Alexander’s The Timeless Way of Building and this book, taken together as a single dose in the same month, literally did transform my thinking about building.

Stewart Brand is the originator of the Whole Earth Catalog that I remember my folks used to have around and read.  They had a bit of a hippie vibe going in the 1970s despite their professional engineer/nurse careers, what with the two-room log cabin in the bush and all.  Brand also has an impressive list of education and jobs he has done.

That’s only partially relevant to my thinking about the book, though.  He claims that he’s the only person who has made a study of buildings over time, and I certainly can’t think of any book that contradicts him.  I have a tendency to always want houses, especially, to stay the same, and he has compelling reasons why they shouldn’t.  He distinguishes between two types of houses that work.  The first is what he calls ‘high-road’ houses, like Chatsworth, an old stately home in England I’ve visited.  It has had enough money and visibility to have stayed in good repair, and has had only sympathetic renovations done on it.  By contrast, ‘low-road’ houses or buildings don’t have historical significance, and can have chunks of work done on them to make them livable without worrying so much about authenticity.  Where the changes made to the two originally idential buildings on the cover make me anxious, he just finds it interesting.

It’s a challenge for me to think of my two homes as ‘low-road’ houses that I can hack about at will, but I’m making an attempt.  I’m not likely to go too far in that direction and become unbalanced the other way!

Brand also discusses quite a bit why architecture doesn’t work.  Flat roofs, for instance, always leak.  I was apalled to learn that the original owner of Fallingwater, one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous houses, privately called it ‘Rising Damp’.  Wright was so controlling, though, that nothing could be changed – not even the orientation of the screw heads, which have to be horizontal to match his famous Prairie line.  Brand doesn’t focus on big-name architects, though, but the ranks of women and men creating office buildings and houses that can’t adapt to what people need them to do.  A case study of one that works tremendously well an MIT building that went up in a hurry during wartime, meant to be temporary, but that has survived because people love working in it.  Surprising to me, though, was that Brand also doesn’t approve of the modern architect’s method of designing the spaces that people want.  Spaces should be generic, argues Brand, so that they can take on whatever’s needed.  His arguments are surprisingly compelling, especially when he shows a picture of a modern house that tries to express Alexander’s pattern of “Cascading Roofs”; and that by having a half-dozen little roofs over various sets of rooms, the house reaches for a pattern that it can never truly have, since it’s impossible to add on to.  The simple gable-roofed rectangle (like our farmhouse!) that lets a homeowner add on to any of the four sides is a better starting point.

Need I even say at this point that I highly recommend the book?