How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

Stewart Brand

Penguin, Oct 1, 1995 - Architecture - 252 pages

Buildings have often been studies whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time. How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that 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.

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 artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - modioperandi - LibraryThing

First Stewart Brand is an expert observer. Next Stewart Brand is skilled at thinking about what he has seen. How Buildings Learn is a fantastic read from a writer that who has the uncanny ability to ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - elenchus - LibraryThing

My approach is to examine buildings as a whole -- not just whole in space, but whole in time. Some buildings are designed and managed as a spatial whole, none as a temporal whole. In the absence of ...

About the author

Though honored as a writer—with the National Book Award for the Whole Earth Catalog, Eliot Montroll Award for The Media Lab, Golden Gadfly Award for his years as editor of CoEvolution Quarterly—Steward Brand is primarily an inventor/designer. Trained as a biologist and army officer, he was an early multimedia artist. He has created a number of lasting institutions, including New Games Tournaments, the Hackers Conference, and The WELL, a bellwether computer conference system. He is co-founder of Global Business Network, a futurist research organization fostering "the art of the long view."

Bibliographic information

• Title: How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
• Author: Stewart Brand
• Publisher: Penguin, 1995
• ISBN: 1101562641, 9781101562642
• Length: 252 pages
• Subjects: Architecture / Criticism; Architecture / Historic Preservation / General; Architecture / History / General