Customer Reviews
What works, what doesn’t, and why:
Stewart Brand has identified the core that makes a building supremely good at what it does: the twin traits of being underspecialized and highly adaptable, possibly two names for the same thing. This brilliant, readable, and richly ilustrated book makes the same point again and again, in every architectural idiom that’s lasted and especially in the ones that haven’t. Longevity implies adaptation to changing uses. That includes configurable and customizable interior spaces, as well as walls that can be knocked down easily for expansion and new construction. Between renovations, the building must also be kept alive; the things that make its systems easy to modify also make the building easy to care for and repair. In other words, success means all the things that modern “architected” buildings aren’t. Once you’ve really understood this wise book, just about every construction that fails in its purpose without actually falling down can be understood, and those failures predicted. MIT’s misconceived Stata Center fits the failure pattern perfectly, being unmaintainable, unmodifiable, and unwilling or unable to address a future different from its present. Ironically, the very failure of that MIT building cuild have been averted using the lessons Brand learned during his residence at MIT’s Media Lab.
If you love buildings, you’ll see what makes them lovable. If you’ve lived through at least one renovation, you’ll see spelled out much of what you learned the hard way. And if you have a building that just isn’t working, no matter how, you must read this book to understand why. This is a fitting companions to Christopher Alexander’s book on design for living and for purpose. It covers the other decades or centuries of a building’s life after initial design: the living redesign as it’s repurposed, or its spiritual if not physical death, when purpose changes but the building can’t.
– wiredweird
And what you might want to teach them:
It is no surprise that the creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue decided to take a close look at buildings; because how we live shapes — and is shaped by — the what and where of our living spaces. Brand’s driving idea here is that buildings are never static. Far from being the unchanging “given” we often suppose it to embody, architecture flows. The goal is to figure out which buildings are most adaptive over the longest spans and use that new knowledge to build for change. One of the most important pointers is to spend more on basic Structure, and less on finishing. Finish changes with taste and necessity — last century’s factory remade as a postwar office building to become a 70s artists’ co-op and now a mini-mall with boutiques and a Starbucks. Substantial structures can and will learn new functions. Most radical of all is the suggestion to eschew a mortgage. Sixty percent of the final cost of a building is interest paid to a bank. Why not build a small, finished core building or a large but rudimentary building, using what would usually be considered down-payment money? Absent mortgage payments there will then be cash available to continue building — and a chance to see what might develop. Every new owner sees projects-in-waiting immediately after moving in — why not plan for that? (This is my own advice to would-be “alternative” householders, but there is no reason it shouldn’t apply to commercial builders as well as homesteaders.) The overall lesson one draws from the photos, plans and text in this comprehensive work is this: buildings exist in and morph through time. The ones that last — that we love to inhabit, to look at, to feel — have learned and been encouraged to learn. Teach your buildings well. Brand’s sendoff is appropriate for this review: “What about the building you see when you look up from this book? Go do something timely to it.”
Relevance to software engineering:
I heard of this book from my fellow software engineers. I then read it with fascination. You can essentially substitute “software” for “building”, and it’ll be a terrific book on design principles of software.
Highly recommended… to software engineers!
an enjoyable must-read for anyone who works with buildings and/or lives in one:
An inspiring meander that outlines a gaping hole in architectural thought and practice, and well-written enough that one of the personal anecdotes almost made this grown engineer cry. What Brand suggests about four-dimensional architecture contributes (along with other such thoughts by Alexander and related thoughts from disparate sources such as d’Estree Sterk and Rybczynski) to a still-developing architectural outlook that incorporates human-building interactions and the consideration of time - an outlook that holds much promise and should be further investigated by building professionals and architectural theorists alike.
I read this book as a metaphor:
The book is about buildings — but read this as a metaphor and you’ll see that he is also talking about how we change as a society. I read this book and thought about the computer industry — how computer systems change as the learn about users. This is a clever book and informative. Read it with an open mind and you may find more than what is in the pages.
