What Happens to Buildings After They're Built
Written: Jul 26 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: An excellent book on an important and neglected topic
Cons: None
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| jbeidler's Full Review: Stewart Brand - How Buildings Learn: What Happens ... |
What happens to buildings after they're built? That's the long-neglected question that the writer, inventor, futurist, and gadfly Stewart Brand tries to answer in How Buildings Learn. Although we often think of buildings as permanent and static things, they are in fact regularly expanded, subdivided, restyled, and demolished as markets, fashions, and their inhabitants demand.
"Almost no buildings adapt well," Brand says, "...[b]ut all buildings (except monuments) adapt anyway, however poorly, because the usages in and around them are changing constantly."
Just how buildings adapt depends in large part on the ecological niche they occupy. Here Brand draws a broad distinction between stately High Road buildings, such as castles and mansions, and raw, cheap Low Road buildings, such as warehouses and garages. High Road buildings endure because people care about them. Paradoxically, Low Road buildings remain useful for the opposite reason: since no one cares about them, their occupants are free to hammer nails into the walls, run cables helter-skelter, and otherwise customize their environments at whim. As Brand observes, "When you can make adjustments to your space by just picking up a saber saw, you know you're in a Low Road building."
Unfortunately, most buildings lack either High Road or Low Road virtues. There are several reasons for this, but Brand is particularly scornful of "magazine architects" who design homes and offices with a fashion designer's flair for bold visual statements, and a similar unconcern for utility. The problem, he says, is that architects think of their profession as an art when it's really a craft.
"Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically."
The result is "grand, final-solution buildings [that] obsolesce and have to be torn down because they were too overspecified to their original purpose to adapt easily to anything else." No wonder that the lifespan of the average North American building is a fleeting thirty-five years.
Brand also blames overly rigid buildings codes and the the vicissitudes of the real estate market: "[H]aste, waste, and avarice distort buildings throughout their lives. Even if architects and builders were perfect, most buildings still would maladaptively freeze up or lose their way because of other pressures. These influences control the building from afar, not to evil ends but to distant ends, locally deadening. The building tenant lives in diffuse dread of the remote landlord, the remote prospective buyer, the remote building inspector and tax assessor."
"Real estate bubbles inflate and pop, inflate and pop with amnesiac regularity," and "Even the up part of the real-estate cycle is crippling to buildings. People get into a 'trade-up' mentality about their houses and treat them as investments. Any improvements are made for the imaginary next buyers, not themselves. The homeowners' associations or zoning bodies savagely resist any degradation of value brought by on such aberrations as, say, a smaller, cheaper house on the block. When all the houses are investments, nobody will waste money being nicer than the rest of the neighborhood (since neighborhood determines value), and nobody will be permitted to be less nice, so they're stuck in lockstep, commodities on the shelf."
In a landscape of cookie-cutter "planned communities" and Orwellian office parks, Brand finds several causes for hope. Foremost among them is the historical preservationist movement, which he lauds as "a quiet, populist, conservative, victorious revolution." Preservationists, he says, "are the only building professionals with a pragmatic interest in the long-term effects of time on buildings."
Another chapter addresses vernacular architecture—"everything not designed by architects." Conservative, practical, and localized, it's the polar opposite of magazine architecture.
Finally, Brand explains how scenario planning can be used to design buildings flexible enough to remain functional, even when they're put to uses their designers never anticipated.
Thoroughly researched and illustrated with fascinating before-and-after photos, How Buildings Learn is required reading for architects, builders, and homeowners.
If You Like This Book, Try These
•A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander, et al.
•Edge City by Joel Garreau
•The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
Related Resources
•Stewart Brand's Home Page <http://www.well.com/user/sbb/>
Recommended:
Yes
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jbeidler
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Member: Joshua Beidler
Location: San Diego, California
Reviews written: 33
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I like film noir, Jose Cuevo, and women who can't stay out of trouble.
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