How buildings learn

Whole Earth Review, Summer, 1994 by Stewart Brand

TIME ANALYSIS of buildings on the scale of decades and centuries is well established in Europe, as in this survey of a 17th-century Gloucestershire farm building. Similar studies could be made of contemporary buildings on a time scale of days, months, and years. Patterns and paces in moving furniture, for example, might suggest what people really would like parts of buildings to do.

There's no reason to rely only on professionals. This is not astrophysics; everybody is an expert on buildings. Amateur birdwatchers in their legions have profoundly influenced ornithology, population biology, and environmental politics. Maybe amateur building watchers could do the same for the yet-unnamed science of building behavior.

The need is to study all kinds of buildings and all kinds of uses, not just the prestige ones or the high-revenue ones. The point is both objective--knowledge for its own sake in an area of shocking ignorance--and subjective. Our buildings are such disasters that we need detailed evaluation and rethinking at every scale. We need failure analysis that is systemic over the full scope of building-related activities and the entire life of buildings. When we investigate a building that is loved or loathed, it is not a question of praising or blaming the designer or owner but of teasing apart the whole tangle of relationships that make the building work or not. All buildings have problems, but only some correct the problems. What is the systemic breakdown that leaves a problem unnoticed? Or if noticed, unreported? Or if reported, unacted on? Or if acted on, unsolved?

Without that kind of corrective feedback a building can't thrive. Neither can the building professions and trades. A skilled carpenter told me, "I do things better now that I'm older. Why? Because I've spent so much time fixing the things that I did when I was younger."

The research needs academic rigor, but not academic irrelevance. A utilitarian bias should color the collection of information, the testing of ideas that emerge, and the transmitting of the ideas that work. For that reason it's worth taking a purposeful look at how knowledge transmission has worked in the past--how do buildings learn from each other? Cross-cultural study could lend perspective and also be a fount of ideas. I'm acutely aware that a book like this one would be radically different if it expressed European or Asian experience--and what a joy that would be to research.

By considering buildings whole, university architecture departments could reverse their trend toward senescence. They could invigorate the faculty with an infusion of facilities managers, preservationists, interior designers, developers, project managers, engineers, con actors, construction lawyers, and insurance mongers. The departments could promote some of the marginalized people they already have--building economists, vernacular building historians, and post-occupancy evaluators. In that enriched context, what's left of art-oriented architecture would have all that its creativity could handle exploring new syntheses of the flood of data and ideas.

For such research to prosper at either the academic or the grassroots level, data has to cohere to buildings. We need to switch from the hotel-room aesthetic to the mountain-hut aesthetic about the accumulation of information. A hotel room is constantly scoured of any trace of previous use and is presented daily as if brand-new. Mountain huts are exuberant museums of their own past, with each hiker adding comments to the guest book, initials and dates to the woodwork, and food to the larder. What if every commercial building had an on-site journal and maintenance log, which the landlord could not legally remove or amend? What if city halls provided a repository for the full records of every house in town--not just the legal and title records, but photos and memorabilia voluntarily left by successive generations of tenantg.(7) (I know from my research for this book that photo archives in libraries are incomparably more usable when organized by building or street address rather than by dale of acquisition or name of collection.

There are so many questions worth exploring. What are the oldest buildings in various cities that still command high rents? What made that happen? What kinds of buildings were torn down, and why? What is the distribution of building types in a city, and how does their longevity sort out? How about in small towns? What is the real distribution of design approaches--how many buildings are specially architected, versus franchise cookie-cutter, versus developer assembly-line, versus vernacular?

A prime opportunity for comparative study would be the uniform arrays of buildings all constructed at once, such as in the original Levittowns. What was the pace and range and process of their subsequent divergence? Architects like to think that upscale suburban developments like Greenbelt and Holland Hills near Washington haven't changed much since they were built, and that's supposed to be a measure of their success. Is that true, or is the rapid change in the humble Levittowns an indication of the owners taking charge of the buildings and gaining greater satisfaction than the more passive tenants of Greenbelt? Which was the better investment?