How Buildings Learn

What happens after they're built
Stewart Brand
Penguin Books, 1994

Chapter 5. Magazine Architecture: No Road

p 54
Marvin Minsky [...] was gazing across the deserted Media Lab atrium with me one day. "The problem with architects," he rasped, "is they think they're artists, and they're not very competent."

Chapter 9. Vernacular: How Buildings Learn From Each Other

p 141
Instead of learning from each other, [...] "catalog architecture" buildings are guided by a standard homogenized pool of building lore which is no longer regional and often not national, but world-encompassing, inescapable and unchallengeable.

How else can we explain the survival from decade to decade of the aluminium-fram sliding glass door? It seems to serve simultaneously as door, window, and wall, but it's terrible at all three.

Chapter 11. The Scenario-buffered Building

p 188
A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.

In the 1980s, both ecology and economics underwent a quiet revolution when they began to realize that natural and market systems [are] "variance-driven" rather than "equilibrium-based."

Command economies collapsed. Market economies muddled through. By making more mistakes, they had less failures.


Essays
Marc Girod