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A review by jdv
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand
5.0
This book is, nominally, a book about architecture and buildings, but it is actually a book about modernity and the products of modernity. It is a book about most, if not all, of today's professions; architecture is analyzed because its fruits are particularly visible and familiar. Stewart Brand lovingly describes two varieties of production that improve with time: Low Road and High Road; and one variety of production that worsens with time: No Road. Low Road production is carried out by laymen, it is impromptu and flexible, sometimes crude and always improvisational. High Road production is carried out by artisans, it is passion-driven and well-funded, it spans generations. No Road production shares none of the Low Road or High Road virtues, it is carried out by consultants without skin in the game and it is over-prescribed and inflexible, it is bureaucracy-driven with tight timelines and tighter budgets.
This book could just as easily be about medicine, engineering, tech, or agriculture. No Road exists across all of these disciplines, and, sadly, is often the norm. No Road medicine materializes as declining life expectancy in the 21st century. No Road engineering is an innovative and high-tech hydrocarbon sector that is making the earth uninhabitable. No Road tech is social networks (goodreads included, of course) that are driving monopoly and surveillance capitalism. No Road agriculture is intensive farming practices that increase short-term production at the expense of sustainable land use. These sectors produce impressive and useless products: pills to mask symptoms of diseases that are easily prevented; cars capable of achieving impressive speeds that spend their days crawling in traffic; smartphones that distract and track their owners; flavourless tomatoes and textureless "instant" food. Stewart Brand's advice regarding reform is universally true (replace "architecture" as necessary):
This book is a five-star read because, unlike many in the genre, it does not stop at diagnosing the problem (to do so would make him guilty of his own critiques, I suspect). More than half of How Buildings Learn is dedicated to presenting strategies for reform that span scale from the micro to the macro. The reader is left feeling inspired and empowered to make micro changes to their own home, and they are left optimistic about the potential futures of architecture and urban planning at large. Brand presents a loose but instructive framework for a utopian cure for the often dystopian present. His utopia includes renovations and retrofittings that conserve the embodied energy in our present fleet of buildings and new construction that will be well-suited for the future, regardless of which outcomes are realized out of these turbulent times.
How Buildings Learn has been in print for a quarter of a century. It reads as if it was published yesterday. Brand's conclusion needs to be read and interpreted and reinterpreted across disciplines and across time: "What is called for is the slow moral plastic of the "many ways" diverging, exploring, insidiously improving. Instead of discounting time, we can embrace and exploit time's depth. Evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design."
This book could just as easily be about medicine, engineering, tech, or agriculture. No Road exists across all of these disciplines, and, sadly, is often the norm. No Road medicine materializes as declining life expectancy in the 21st century. No Road engineering is an innovative and high-tech hydrocarbon sector that is making the earth uninhabitable. No Road tech is social networks (goodreads included, of course) that are driving monopoly and surveillance capitalism. No Road agriculture is intensive farming practices that increase short-term production at the expense of sustainable land use. These sectors produce impressive and useless products: pills to mask symptoms of diseases that are easily prevented; cars capable of achieving impressive speeds that spend their days crawling in traffic; smartphones that distract and track their owners; flavourless tomatoes and textureless "instant" food. Stewart Brand's advice regarding reform is universally true (replace "architecture" as necessary):
The conversion will be difficult because it is fundamental. The transition from image architecture to process architecture is a leap from the certainties of controllable things in space to the self-organizing complexities of an endlessly raveling and unraveling skein of relationships over time.
This book is a five-star read because, unlike many in the genre, it does not stop at diagnosing the problem (to do so would make him guilty of his own critiques, I suspect). More than half of How Buildings Learn is dedicated to presenting strategies for reform that span scale from the micro to the macro. The reader is left feeling inspired and empowered to make micro changes to their own home, and they are left optimistic about the potential futures of architecture and urban planning at large. Brand presents a loose but instructive framework for a utopian cure for the often dystopian present. His utopia includes renovations and retrofittings that conserve the embodied energy in our present fleet of buildings and new construction that will be well-suited for the future, regardless of which outcomes are realized out of these turbulent times.
How Buildings Learn has been in print for a quarter of a century. It reads as if it was published yesterday. Brand's conclusion needs to be read and interpreted and reinterpreted across disciplines and across time: "What is called for is the slow moral plastic of the "many ways" diverging, exploring, insidiously improving. Instead of discounting time, we can embrace and exploit time's depth. Evolutionary design is healthier than visionary design."