How Buildings Learn

I really enjoyed Stewart Brand's illustrated reflection on the life of buildings How Buildings Learn: What happens to them after they're built.  It is another classic of the anti-architecture genre pioneered by people like Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs.  After reading these books you can't help but look at the building, the neighborhood, and the city around you in a new light, this time from the perspective of their impact on the structures of our everyday life rather than through the house-porn photography that has come to mediate our relationship to most architecture.

Brand has very little love lost for architects, who he portrays as prima donna artists who mostly just make a grand sculpture the client ends up squatting in.  His idea of a beautiful building is a life form coadapted to its human inhabitants, able to expand and contract as their needs change.  In other words, he considers the elements of time and situation as indispensable to the idea of architecture.  This is a controversial departure from Modern or Post-Modern ideas about the subject, but it really boils down to common sense -- buildings hang around for a long time and shape our environment so dramatically that they are almost indistinguishable from a definition of human civilization.  While you may not agree with every idea about how to make an adaptable and enduring building that the opinionated Brand comes up with, you can't help but be compelled by the question he asks about why we seem so intent on building disposable ones these days.

A review of this book would not be complete without some mention of the extensive use Brand makes of historical pictures.  He does an amazing job of digging up documentary evidence of how various buildings change over time.  He shows many many sequences of up to half a dozen interior and exterior shots of buildings of all descriptions, from warehouses to palaces, that give you a view of how they've evolved over decades.  It's just fascinating to watch what changes and what doesn't in these panels.