Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Cover Story
1. Flow
2. Shearing Layers
3. "Nobody Cares What You Do In There": The Low Road
4. Houseproud: The High Road
5. Magazine Architecture: No Road
6. Unreal Estate
7. Preservation: A Quiet, Populist, Conservative, Victorious Revolution
8. The Romance of Maintenance
9. Vernacular: How Buildings Learn from Each Other
10. Function Melts Form: Satisficing Home and Office
11. The Scenario-buffered Building
12. Built for Change
APPENDIX: The Study of Buildings in Time
Recommended Bibliography: Books for Time-kindly Buildings
Index

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."

Reviews

All buildings are forced to adapt over time because of physical deterioration, changing surroundings and the life within--yet very few buildings adapt gracefully, according to Brand. Houses, he notes, respond to families' tastes, ideas, annoyance and growth; and institutional buildings change with expensive reluctance and delay; while commercial structures have to adapt quickly because of intense competitive pressures. Creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and founder of CoEvolution Quarterly (now Whole Earth Review ), Brand splices a conversational text with hundreds of extensively captioned photographs and drawings juxtaposing buildings that age well with those that age poorly. He buttresses his critique with insights gleaned from facilities managers, planners, preservationists, building historians and futurists. This informative, innovative handbook sets forth a strategy for constructing adaptive buildings that incorporates a conservationist approach to design, use of traditional materials, attention to local vernacular styles and budgeting to allow for continuous adjustment and maintenance. (June)

"It's about time somebody wrote this book. This quirky, thoughtful volume, bursting with curiosity and intelligence, may make our everyday world more visible to more Americans. Architecture is too important to be left to architects alone."
Mixed Media"A stunning exploration of the design of design How Buildings Learn will irrevocably alter yor sense of place, space, and the artifacts that shape them."
Michael Shrage, Wired"Penetratingly original."
Philip Morrison, Scientific American"An extremely attractive volume that will forever alter the way we respond to the buildings around us. We may also hope it will alter the way architects design buildings."
Harold Gilliam, San Francisco Chronicle"A fascinating and indefinable book How Buildings Learn is a hymn to entropy, a witty, heterodox book dedicated to kicking the stuffing out of the proposition that architecture is permanent and that buildings cannot adapt."
Stephen Bayley, The Times (London)"The book's diagnosis is clear and to the poiny, and its illustrations of how buildings change are both fascinating and instructive. This is, in short, one of the rare books that every architect should read."
Thomas Fisher, editor, Progressive Architecture"A book of good sound-bites and laser-sharp insight No architecture students should complete their preliminary studies without reading it from cover to cover."
Patric Hannay, The Architects' Journal