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BUILDINGS_LEARN
February 19, 2012
I considered naming this one
'the learning tower of pisa'.
But not for long.
About Stewart Brand's book
"How Buildings Learn" (1995)
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/how-buildings-learn-stewart-brand/1003186690
This is an excellent book
that I suspect has succeeded
in changing the architectural I feel like I've known
world already... many a about this book for ages,
"Green" architectural firm and I've owned a copy for From a
has it up on their shelves, ten years, but only reciept in
and perhaps embedded in recently did I actually the book: I
their cultural DNA. read it... bought this
at the Barnes
"Evolutionary design is healthier A side-effect of and Nobles in
than visionary design." moving from SF to Redwood City,
-- Stewart Brand, 1997 Oakland is that all in 2001,
BEEB_LEARNS of my books have been using a gift
scrambled out of card.
their old, familiar
Notably, this book is not locations and as a
exactly a polemic. Brand consequence many of
is attempting to make them made it off of
generalizations based on the "been meaning to"
observations without being to the active list.
dogmatic, and central to
the book is an admission
that there are multiple
approaches that seem to
work.
He discusses "the low road" (where
his sympathies lie), but he also
covers "the high road" and some of
it's successes.
PUNK_CITY
The idea of the "low road" is that when
you're living somewhere that's cheap,
forgotten and abandoned, you can do A key example for Brand:
almost anything you want with it. when he was living in a
beached, rotting boat,
Artist freaks inhabiting he made room for a fax
old industrial spaces-- before machine up by the steering
they get picked up and condified wheel by getting out a
as trendy yuppie spaces-- sabre saw and cutting
immediately recognize what he away stuff in the way.
means... This book has many
young fans from that world.
And whenever I begin
talking about things like
this, (the pitfalls of
Grand Designs, the way
trying to do the right
thing can prevent it from
happening), I will, of
course, drop in a link to:
UNINTENDED
He comments with some
approval on rapid growth of
the preservation movement-- Preservation fits in
a case of bottom-up, well with his
"grassroots" movement. conservative stance
on architecture...
But it's opposition to
the low road is obvious:
preservation freezes in
place, makes flexibility
impossible.
Brand also speaks with
approval of "high road", He has some contempt for institutional
the massive, family-owned attempts at imitating this: they
structures carefully build gigantic, inflexible edifices
maintained and modified that they're nearly incapable of
for years, perhaps for adjusting to changing needs.
generations.
Brand does not regard
the difference between A more rigid intellect could easily
the low and high as a have trouble with this: the tendency is
significant conundrum: to seize on the first thing that you've
they're just different seen work, and elevate it to the status
strategies: of a grand principle, and then deny
that anything else can work.
"Whereas Low Road buildings are
successively gutted and begun anew,
High Road buildings are successively
refined. These are precisely the two
principal strategies of biological
populations-- the opportunist versus
the preserver: 'r-strategy' versus
'K-strategy' in the jargon." p. 38
The third chapter, viciously
titled "The No Road: Magazine REVIEWERS_LEARN
Architecture", is a familar
attack on the architecture In contradiction to Wolfe,
profession that is perhaps most Brand makes the point that
remarkable for when it was architects almost *never*
written: Tom Wolfe's "From go back. They never check
Bauhaus to our House" came out to see how their ideas
in 1975. How can it be that worked in practice.
there are people who still
haven't gotten the word about Actual surveys apparently
post-WWII architecture? How tend to show universal
can it be you haven't learned dissatisfaction: everyone
to hate it first hand? always prefers their old
building.
"Art must be inherently radical, but
buildings are inherently conservative. He has a point about
Art must experiment to do its job. Most architecture, but this
experiments fail. ... Convention became view of art is
conventional because it works ..." oversimplfied.
Is "One-Piece" radical?
Is it Not Art?
Brand has veered from being a young
advocate of Fuller domes to an elder
with respect for tradition, for
vernacular.
A nit: the form factor for this book is
very unusual. I read it at home in short Very wide, but
bursts, over meals. I wasn't going to try not tall, and
reading it on the train. in paperback form,
quite floppy.
Brand's respect for the "vernacular" does
not prevent him from innovating with new
forms...
Myself, I have some
sympathy for both sides of
the war on boxes... Yes,
we're rectangular Also, from a structural
creatures and that makes point of view, angular
non-rectangular forms bracing is a necessity.
difficult to work with.
But 'tis also true that The trellis of the Bay Bridge:
right angles are
tremendously boring: ----------------------------
nearly anything that looks | /|\ | /|\ | /|
good will have triangles | / | \ | / | \ | / |
in it (though they're | / | \ | / | \ | / |
sometimes hidden |/ | \|/ | \|/ |
triangles). ----------------------------
I think the trick is to
find ways to mate-up odd
angles with the I call this the
rectangular world. search for the
60-90 connection.
An odd point that occurs
(perhaps significantly) (Though 60 degrees
just in a side-bar: is not always the
angle in question.)
He acknowledges the
appeal of the "fractal",
the chaotic. Quoting This would seem
Mandlebrot (via Gleick) to be an argument
on it's role in anything against boxes:
we call "natural beauty". our architecture
can hardly be Arguably, cities
An accompanying called "fractal"... taken as a whole
photo of a Victorian have that chaotic
bay window suggests aspect.
that their
articulated fronts The hillside
have a fractal covered with
quality. I would call buildings can
the bay windows be beautiful,
Elsewhere, Brand an excellent even though
uses Victorians example of each individual
as examples of joining up building is
the triumph of the square and nearly
the box. the angled world. worthless.
Everyone wants the BAY_WINDOW
Victorian on their
side.
In this side-bar about
fractals, Brand does not take
up this argument again instead
he does an odd shift (perhaps
characteristic for Brand):
Fractal designs have
depth to them, they
change as viewed from
different angles.
He leaps to the
notion of building
"fractal in time".
In principle, the idea of buildings
adapting and learning sounds wonderful,
but it's not the only thing we want from
our environments, and at this point a lot
of us wince at every single change we hear
proposed-- things go from bad to worse
so often, that we end up fanaticial
preservationists.
The modern world has all but lost
the ability to build anything worth
having.
Should we let Larry Ellison re-build
the waterfront? I'd rather watch (Actually, they kept
the docks crumble, myself. it cheap and simple,
and the temporary
stuff really does
seem to be temporary--
I gather they managed
to restrain their
worst impulses this time.)
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