How buildings learn : what happens after they're built
"Buildings have often been studied whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time." "Architects (and architectural historians) are interested only in a building's original intentions. Most are dismayed by what happens later, when a building develops its own life, responsive to the life within. To get the rest of the story - to explore the years between the dazzle of a new building and its eventual corpse - Stewart Brand went to facilities managers and real estate professionals, to preservationists and building historians, to photo archives and to futurists. He inquired, "What makes some buildings come to be loved?" He found that all buildings are forced to adapt, but only some adapt gracefully." "How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis which proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. A rich resource and point of departure, as stimulating for the general reader and home improvement hobbyist as for the building professional, the book is sure to generate ideas, provoke debate, and shake up habitual thinking." "From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from "satisficing" to "form follows funding," from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth - this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory." "More than any other human artifact, buildings improve with time - if they're allowed. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it."--Jacket
1 online resource (viii, 243 pages) : illustrations
892055053
Flow
Shearing layers
"Nobody cares what you do in there": the low road
Houseproud: the high road
Magazine architecture: no road
Unreal estate
Preservation: a quiet, populist, conservative, victorious revolution
The romance of maintenance
Vernacular: how buildings learn from each other
Function melts form: satisficing home and office
The scenario-buffered building
Built for change
Appendix: The study of buildings in time
Electronic reproduction, [Place of publication not identified], HathiTrust Digital Library, 2014