Buildings Learn, Can We?

I've been wanting to read Stuart Brand's book How Building's Learn, for quite some time.  I just haven't been able to get around to it yet.  So naturally I was excited to discover that the BBC had put out a 6 part mini-series on the book.  (You can watch it HERE).

Brand is an author, inventor and designer. He has created a number of lasting institutions, including New Games Tournaments, the Hackers Conference, and The WELL, a bellwether computer conference system. His foundation, The Long Now was established in 1996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

In this series, Brand takes a critical stance against modernist and visionary architecture - promoting instead buildings that are designed to be adaptable over time by the people that use them. Time and again we see, that buildings designed to adapt and change succeed, while buildings designed to be visionary statements about the future fail.

"Every building is a forecast. Every forecast is wrong." - Stewart Brand

Early in the series Brand highlights the folly of visionary Architecture, and promotes the wisdom of building for adaptability. He proves that many architects take pride in the un-usability of their structures, and think that people ought to change how they live, to conform to the design of the building. The problem, he says, is that architects are expected to be.

In a previous post, I shared a post Smart Cities: Transactive Memories - where I contrasted natural forms of collective intelligence with the trend to put sensors in just about everything. Sensors to measure what we like, what we do, and how often we do it. There are downsides to digital surveillance - but I can only see upsides to building for adaptability.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be taking some of my favorite thoughts from Brand's series and sharing them here. I think there is a lot of wisdom here that we can tap for our the life of the church - which is also a sort of building using "living stones."

Here is a list of episodes - links to future blog posts will become active as I share my thoughts on the episode. Stay tuned.

1. Flow
2. The Low Road
3. Built for Change
4. Unreal Estate
5. The Romance of Maintenance
6. Shearing Layers