how-buildings-learn.yml

---
title: 'How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They''re Built'
author: Stewart Brand
notes:
- location: 3%
  highlight: Almost no buildings adapt well. They’re designed not to adapt; also budgeted
    and financed not to, constructed not to, administered not to, maintained not to,
    regulated and taxed not to, even remodeled not to. But all buildings (except monuments)
    adapt anyway, however poorly, because the usages in and around them are changing
    constantly.
- location: 4%
  highlight: In wider use, the term “architecture” always means “unchanging deep structure.”
    It is an illusion. New usages persistently retire or reshape buildings.
- location: 4%
  highlight: The word “building” contains the double reality. It means both “the action
    of the verb BUILD” and “that which is built”—both verb and noun, both the action
    and the result. Whereas “architecture” may strive to be permanent, a “building”
    is always building and rebuilding. The idea is crystalline, the fact fluid. Could
    the idea be revised to match the fact?
- location: 4%
  highlight: "“Form ever follows function.” Written in 1896 by Louis Sullivan, the
    Chicago highrise designer,"
- location: 4%
  highlight: Winston Churchill’s “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings
    shape us.”
- location: 4%
  highlight: First we shape our buildings, then they shape us, then we shape them
    again—ad infinitum. Function reforms form, perpetually.
- location: 4%
  highlight: BUILDINGS TELL STORIES, if they’re allowed—if their past is flaunted
    rather than concealed.
- location: 4%
  highlight: Deterioration is constant, in new buildings as much as old.
- location: 5%
  highlight: Buildings keep being pushed around by three irresistible forces—technology,
    money, and fashion.
- location: 5%
  highlight: The march of technology is inexorable, and accelerating.
- location: 5%
  highlight: Form follows funding.
- location: 5%
  highlight: As for fashion, it is change for its own sake—
- location: 5%
  highlight: commercial, domestic, and institutional.
- location: 5%
  highlight: Commercial buildings are forever metamorphic.
- location: 5%
  highlight: Domestic buildings—homes—are the steadiest changers, responding directly
    to the family’s ideas and annoyances, growth and prospects.
- location: 5%
  highlight: Institutional buildings act as if they were designed specifically to
    prevent change for the organization inside and to convey timeless reliability
    to everyone outside. When forced to change anyway, as they always are, they do
    so with expensive reluctance and all possible delay. Institutional buildings are
    mortified by change.
- location: 6%
  highlight: A FIX BECOMES A FEATURE. Add-ons often become a distinctive part of a
    generic building type.
  note: We see this a lot with patterns blindly applied across codebases even when
    the original reasons have long since stopped being applicable.
- location: 6%
  highlight: There is a universal rule—never acknowledged because its action is embarrassing
    or illegal. All buildings grow.
- location: 6%
  highlight: "“What makes a building come to be loved?” A thirteen-year-old boy in
    Maine had the most succinct answer. “Age,”"
  note: This is one big difference with code.
- location: 6%
  highlight: Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age
    (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay).
- location: 6%
  highlight: Some work invites you into itself by not offering a finished, glossy,
    one-reading-only surface. This is what makes old buildings interesting to me.
- location: 7%
  highlight: Architects and interior designers revile and battle each other.
- location: 7%
  highlight: Gradually the magazine noticed that its affluent readers rebuilt interiors
    much more often than they built houses.
- location: 7%
  highlight: different parts of buildings change at different rates.
- location: 7%
  highlight: The leading theorist—practically the only theorist—of change rate in
    buildings is Frank Duffy,
- location: 7%
  highlight: building properly conceived is several layers of longevity of built components.”
    He distinguishes four layers, which he calls Shell, Services, Scenery, and Set.
- location: 7%
  highlight: Over fifty years, the changes within a building cost three times more
    than the original building.
- location: 8%
  highlight: "“The dynamics of the system will be dominated by the slow components,
    with the rapid components simply following along.”2 Slow constrains quick; slow
    controls quick."
- location: 9%
  highlight: The quick processes provide originality and challenge, the slow provide
    continuity and constraint.
- location: 9%
  highlight: Small lots will support resilience because they allow many people to
    attend directly to their needs by designing, building, and maintaining their own
    environment.
- location: 9%
  highlight: And many property owners slow down the rate of change by making large-scale
    real estate transactions difficult.
- location: 9%
  highlight: Otis Elevator contractors don’t bother to make money on their first installation.
- location: 9%
  highlight: Energy Services such as electricity and gas are driven constantly toward
    greater efficiency by their sheer expense—30 percent of operating costs, equal
    over a building’s life to the entire original cost of construction.
- location: 9%
  highlight: An adaptive building has to allow slippage between the differently-paced
    systems of Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space plan, and Stuff.
- location: 9%
  highlight: Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first, but over
    time it is the opposite, and destructive as well.
- location: 10%
  highlight: "“Things that are good have a certain kind of structure,” he told me.
    “You can’t get that structure except dynamically. Period. In nature you’ve got
    continuous very-small-feedback-loop adaptation going on, which is why things get
    to be harmonious. That’s why they have the qualities that we value."
- location: 10%
  highlight: "“What does it take to build something so that it’s really easy to make
    comfortable little modifications in a way that once you’ve made them, they feel
    integral with the nature and structure of what is already there? You want to be
    able to mess around with it and progressively change it to bring it into an adapted
    state with yourself, your family, the climate, whatever."
- location: 11%
  highlight: But only sometimes are additions an improvement.
- location: 11%
  highlight: Age plus adaptivity is what makes a building come to be loved. The building
    learns from its occupants, and they learn from it.
- location: 11%
  highlight: domus referred not only to the walls but also to the people within them.
  note: Programming as theory building
- location: 11%
  highlight: "“Oh, old ones,” he said. “They are much more freeing.”"
  note: Interesting in light of One Apple Park
- location: 11%
  highlight: Any change is likely to be an improvement.
- location: 12%
  highlight: elegant because it is quick and dirty.
- location: 12%
  highlight: "“We feel our space is really ours. We designed it, we run it. The building
    is full of small microenvironments, each of which is different and each a creative
    space. Thus the building has a lot of personality. Also it’s nice to be in a building
    that has such prestige.”"
- location: 13%
  highlight: Temporary is permanent, and permanent is temporary. Grand, final-solution
    buildings obsolesce and have to be torn down because they were too overspecified
    to their original purpose to adapt easily to anything else.
- location: 13%
  highlight: Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must come from old
    buildings.
- location: 14%
  highlight: What do people do to buildings when they can do almost anything they
    want?
- location: 14%
  highlight: Low Road buildings are peculiarly empowering.
  note: I.e., old-fashioned webpages where the source is exposed and easy to read.
- location: 15%
  highlight: It has all been done by the confident dictators of yesteryear, with no
    recourse to committees or wondering what other people will think about their additions
    and subtractions.
- location: 15%
  highlight: Such agglomerations become highly evolved, refinement added to refinement
    (“The bridge is at a comfortable angle”), the sensible parts kept, the humorous
    parts kept, the clever idea that didn’t work thrown away, the overambitious conservatory
    torn down, the loved view carefully maintained, until the aggregate is all finesse
    and eccentricity. The measure of successful evolution is intricate vivacity.
- location: 15%
  highlight: Occupants in a lean time can be crushed by trying to maintain what was
    built in fat times.
- location: 16%
  highlight: The High Road is high-visibility, often high-style, nearly always high-cost.
- location: 16%
  highlight: Low Road buildings are successively gutted and begun anew, High Road
    buildings are successively refined.
- location: 16%
  highlight: "“r-strategy” versus “K-strategy”"
- location: 16%
  highlight: Would Washington have known how to make the piazza so amenable if he
    hadn’t lived in the house for fourteen years first?
  note: Not a lot of software has this contributor history.
- location: 17%
  highlight: Most owner-builders take inordinate lengths of time to complete their
    projects; Jefferson took fifty-four years. Many owner-builders construct dwellings
    larger than necessary; Jefferson, a widower, built a thirty-five-room mansion.
    Owner-builders invariably extemporize as they build, adding to and modifying their
    original design as the house grows. Jefferson built one house, tore much of it
    down, doubled its size, and continued to alter, remodel, improve, and add to it
    for decades. It is a wonder that the house was ever finally completed; many thought
    it never would be.
  note: This feels familiar.
- location: 18%
  highlight: The building tries to stand for the function instead of serving it.
- location: 18%
  highlight: Military buildings are rich, not in money, but in people with time to
    work on them.
- location: 18%
  highlight: A frozen bureaucracy and a frozen building reinforce each other’s resistance
    to change. Change is obligatory, since bureaucracies always grow, but responsibility
    is dispersed and delayed in a maze of anxious responsibility-avoidance, and the
    building sits heavy and inert. Near any institutional building more than a decade
    old, you are likely to find a host of clumsy Low Road expediencies—trailers, temporary
    add-ons, people working in windowless storage rooms, space rented in nearby commercial
    buildings.
- location: 18%
  highlight: "“There’s a huge lag time between when you need something and when you
    actually get it."
- location: 18%
  highlight: Because it is not allowed to anticipate its growth realistically, this
    superb institution barely functions.
- location: 18%
  highlight: compact shelving
  note: So that’s what it’s called!
- location: 20%
  highlight: MOST BUILDINGS have neither High Road nor Low Road virtues. Instead they
    strenuously avoid any relationship whatever with time and what is considered its
    depredation.
- location: 21%
  highlight: How did architects come to be such an obstacle to adaptivity in buildings?
- location: 21%
  highlight: "“The problem with architects,” he rasped, “is they think they’re artists,
    and they’re not very competent.”"
- location: 21%
  highlight: 'The problems of “art” as architectural aspiration come down to these:
    • Art is proudly non-functional and impractical. • Art reveres the new and despises
    the conventional. • Architectural art sells at a distance.'
- location: 21%
  highlight: Architect Peter Calthorpe maintains that many of the follies of his profession
    would vanish if architects simply decided that what they do is craft instead of
    art.
- location: 21%
  highlight: "“If a pleasure-giving function predominates, the artifact is called
    art; if a practical function pred..."
- location: 21%
  highlight: Craft is something useful made with artfulness, with close a...
- location: 21%
  highlight: Convention became conventional because it works.
- location: 21%
  highlight: Tales were told of ambitious architects specifically designing their
    buildings to photograph well at the expense of performing well.
- location: 22%
  highlight: Teachers began to talk of the need for “loose fit” in designing buildings,
    so that unexpected uses of the building could be accommodated.
- location: 22%
  highlight: Chris Alexander and colleagues came up with their “pattern language”
    of design elements that wear well.
- location: 22%
  highlight: All that effort goes into impressing the wrong people—passers-by instead
    of the people who use the building.
  note: 'Software analogy insight: software architects design for the business and
    to impress other architects, but not for the actual inhabitants of the code -
    the dev team.'
- location: 24%
  highlight: The contractor passes 80 percent of the work to subcontractors. They
    are often the ones with the cutting-edge technical skills, but they are too far
    downstream to affect design. Once the building is finished, it is turned over
    to facilities managers who will actually run the building. They of course have
    had no hand in its design.
  note: 'Elided: architect-> engineers -> general contractor.'
- location: 24%
  highlight: The Japanese design-build methodology has developed to such efficiency
    that some highrises have construction begun on their base before the top is completely
    designed—“just-in-time” design.
- location: 24%
  highlight: Clients often are no better at representing building users than architects
    are. Usually a building is so large and complex an undertaking that the “stakeholders”
    are too diverse, scattered, and at odds to agree on much of anything.
- location: 24%
  highlight: Major design decisions wind up being made semi-randomly by the lawyer
    because no one is crisply in charge.
- location: 24%
  highlight: The percent approach is a conflict of interest for the architect;
- location: 24%
  highlight: What is punished by claims is any kind of adaptivity during construction—
- location: 25%
  highlight: The simultaneous seizing of power and shedding of responsibility by contractors
    puts the onus on architects to anticipate perfectly all of a building’s needs.
    Nothing is left to the builders, to the client, or to actual usage.
- location: 25%
  highlight: All the design intelligence gets forced to the earliest part of the building
    process, when everyone knows the least about what is really needed.
- location: 25%
  highlight: Chris Alexander likes to make on-site adjustment to a building as it’s
    being constructed. “Architects are supposed to be good visualizers, and we are,”
    he says, “but still, most of the time we’re wrong. Even when you build the things
    yourself and you’re doing good, you’re still making nine mistakes for every success.
    So you take the time to correct them. The more at each stage you can approach
    being able to experience the contemplated reality, the more it will give you feedback
    and you’ll be able to intelligently develop it.”
- location: 25%
  highlight: "“Architects think of a building as a complete thing, while builders
    think of it and know it as a sequence—hole, then foundation, framing, roof, etc.
    The separation of design from making has resulted in a built environment that
    has no ‘flow’ to it—you simply cannot design an improvisation or an adaptation.
    It’s dead.”"
- location: 25%
  highlight: The race for finality undermines the whole process. In reality, finishing
    is never finished, but the building is designed and constructed with fiendish
    thoroughness to deny that.
- location: 25%
  highlight: "“post-occupancy evaluation” (POE)"
- location: 25%
  highlight: Why not just “use-evaluation,” since that’s what it is?
- location: 26%
  highlight: "“We believe you should go back three times. You should do it with the
    people who are going to use the building six weeks before it opens, to record
    their expectations. That gives you a very interesting base. You should go back
    within the first six months, when they’re still fresh on the place and really
    feeling all the uneasy elements. Then you should go back about two years later,
    after they’ve accommodated themselves to the building. It would be wonderful to
    do a fourth one maybe ten years later, because by then the world has changed.
    Has your building been able to accommodate that change?”"
- location: 26%
  highlight: "“The fundamental reason is: the difficulty of putting buildings up is
    so great, and the pressures of getting it right on the night are so enormous,
    that squeezes out concern for the user and it squeezes out concern for time."
- location: 26%
  highlight: In the 1980s, malpractice lawsuits against architects surpassed those
    against doctors.
- location: 26%
  highlight: Legal action is a hugely inefficient method of failure analysis.
- location: 27%
  highlight: The field of architecture takes its counsel from two main sources—architecture
    schools and architecture magazines—both of which deliberately isolate themselves
    from the real sources of feedback on building performance—lawyers and developers.
- location: 27%
  highlight: "“I prefer a one-story responsive wood building to a ten-story extremely
    inflexible concrete one."
- location: 27%
  highlight: They focus obsessively on visual skills such as rendering, models, plans,
    and photography. Sight substitutes for insight.
- location: 28%
  highlight: We need to honor buildings that are loved rather than merely admired.
    Admiration is from a distance and brief, while love is up close and cumulative.
- location: 28%
  highlight: The needed conversion is from architecture based on image to architecture
    based on process.
- location: 28%
  highlight: Architecture should offer an incentive to its users to influence it wherever
    possible, not merely to reinforce its identity, but more especially to enhance
    and affirm the identity of its users.”
- location: 29%
  highlight: "“Rushing is at the root of all lack of quality.”"
- location: 29%
  highlight: Every building leads three contradictory lives—as habitat, as property,
    and as component of the surrounding community.
- location: 29%
  highlight: Is your house primarily a home or primarily an asset?
- location: 29%
  highlight: Seeking to be anybody’s house it becomes nobody’s.
- location: 29%
  highlight: The overall rule is always “Fit in.” It is never “Become interesting.”
- location: 29%
  highlight: As a youth I regarded building codes as the embodiment of all that was
    unoriginal and constricting in society. Later I learned their value.
- location: 29%
  highlight: "“Earthquakes don’t kill people. Buildings do.”"
- location: 29%
  highlight: Most building code systems are a manifestation of the whole community
    learning.
- location: 29%
  highlight: The codes often force builders and dwellers to act against their short-term
    interests,
- location: 29%
  highlight: This is an old and interesting problem in organizational learning. How
    do people learn to do cheap problem-prevention instead of expensive problem-cure?
- location: 30%
  highlight: codes established minimal standards, and minimal standards sanctify mediocrity.
    Mediocre builders can undersell good builders.
- location: 30%
  highlight: At their worst, code enforcers block creativity and defy reason, answerable
    to remote abstractions that have nothing to do with the present case or opportunity.
- location: 30%
  highlight: One of the major features of the ongoing life of any building is the
    hide-and-seek between remodelers, both amateur and professional, and the enforcers
    of codes—the building inspectors.
- location: 30%
  highlight: The result is a mixed bag. Certainly more constant adjustment to buildings
    comes from all this informality, but every carpenter I’ve talked to complains
    that the thing they most dread in any remodeling job is shoddy prior work done
    on the sly and not up to code—“cob work done by some handyman.” They contract
    to fix a warped bathroom floor and find they have to completely redo the plumbing,
    wiring, walls, and floor joists because earlier slapdash work put in hazardous
    wiring and leaky, rot-producing pipes.
- location: 30%
  highlight: Communities that want their built environment to improve over time would
    do well not to punish remodeling work.
- location: 30%
  highlight: Small lots give greater individual control and thus greater variety,
    and they encourage more pedestrian activity.
- location: 31%
  highlight: Garreau defines master planning there as “that attribute of a development
    in which so many rigid controls are put in place, to defeat every imaginable future
    problem, that any possibility of life, spontaneity, or flexible response to unanticipated
    events is eliminated.”
- location: 31%
  highlight: American planners always take inspiration from Europe’s great cities
    and such urban wonders as the Piazza San Marco in Venice, but they study the look,
    never the process.
- location: 31%
  highlight: That is the essence of good urban design—respect for what came before.”
- location: 31%
  highlight: Quelling change, zoning quells life.
- location: 32%
  highlight: What makes homeowners’ associations so viciously conservative?
- location: 32%
  highlight: "(Americans move every eight years, on average),"
- location: 32%
  highlight: This degree of institutionalization of real estate value over use value
    is odious enough as an invasion of privacy, but it also prevents buildings from
    exercising their unique talent for getting better with time.
  note: Is consistency at odds with innovation?
- location: 32%
  highlight: Any improvements made are for the imaginary next buyers, not themselves.
- location: 33%
  highlight: 'Thus they insist on blitzkrieg construction schedules, and then they
    shovel in the tenants to get some rent flowing. The result: instant, shallow,
    flashy buildings with no adaptivity and no investment for the long term.'
- location: 33%
  highlight: "“The money is wrong in most buildings, and it’s crucial. There should
    be more in basic structure, less in finish, more in maintenance and adaptation.
    Once a building heads downhill, you lose motivation to fix it. You have to maintain
    a steady flow of money into a building, and mortgages skim that.”"
- location: 34%
  highlight: In Japan and Germany—nations highly regarded and highly rewarded for
    taking the long view—mortgages are commonly written to amortize over 100 years.
- location: 34%
  highlight: Japan further discourages commoditization of houses with tax laws that
    punish rapid purchase and sale.
- location: 34%
  highlight: Two out of every three dollars spent on the purchase of the building
    go into paying interest—
- location: 34%
  highlight: The building can’t learn much with all those shock treatments.
- location: 34%
  highlight: Nearly everything about real estate estranges buildings from their users
    and interrupts any form of sustained continuity.
- location: 34%
  highlight: The “real” in “real estate” derives from re-al—“royal”—rather than from
    res—“thing”—which is the root of “reality.”
- location: 34%
  highlight: a dollar gains its time-and-space binding power from having no history,
    and the dollar wins.
- location: 34%
  highlight: Monetization frees from history by destroying history.
- location: 34%
  highlight: The opposite strategy is much surer, because the errors are piecemeal
    and correctable. When you proceed deliberately, mistakes don’t cascade, they instruct.
- location: 34%
  highlight: "‘oikonomia’"
- location: 34%
  highlight: "‘chrematistics.’"
- location: 34%
  highlight: Oikonomia, by contrast, is the management of the household so as to increase
    its use value to all members of the household over the long run.”
- location: 36%
  highlight: Since few buildings live so long, it has earned the stature of rarity
    and the respect we give longevity.
  note: Not really the case for codebases.
- location: 37%
  highlight: Rehabilitation of an old building may be expensive, but it’s still significantly
    less than comparable new construction.
- location: 37%
  highlight: The rehab work often can proceed by stages, while part of the building
    is still profitably occupied, and it can take less time than new construction.
- location: 39%
  highlight: "“FACADISM” is the dirty word preservationists use for projects that
    save the illusory fronts of old buildings to mask entirely new construction."
- location: 40%
  highlight: 'The Improviser’s Standards would read: “Mess with the building as needed
    until it works.”)'
- location: 41%
  highlight: When a building designed for one purpose is put to a completely different
    use, its value deepens,
- location: 41%
  highlight: Where does that leave design truisms like “Form follows function”? Completely
    invalidated.
- location: 42%
  highlight: preservationists encourage the leaving of “hidden treasures” for later
    remodelers to find,
- location: 43%
  highlight: Adaptive use is the destiny of most buildings, but the subject is not
    taught in architectural schools.
- location: 43%
  highlight: 'The subject would not be how to make new buildings look like old ones.
    It would be: how to design new buildings that will endear themselves to preservationists
    sixty years from now.'
- location: 43%
  highlight: The wisdom acquired looking backward must be translated into wisdom looking
    forward.
- location: 44%
  highlight: No wonder people get in a permanent state of denial about the need for
    building maintenance. It is all about negatives, never about rewards. Doing it
    is a pain. Not doing it can be catastrophic. A constant draining expense, it never
    makes money. You could say it does save money in the long run, but even that is
    a negative because you never see the saving in any accountable way.
- location: 44%
  highlight: "“Preservation IS maintenance.”"
- location: 44%
  highlight: The sequence of effects of deterioration on ordinary buildings has never
    been formally studied—a curious lapse, considering the massive capital loss involved—
- location: 44%
  highlight: Most buildings you can expect to require complete refurbishing from eleven
    to twenty-five years after construction.
- location: 45%
  highlight: An empty building rots fast and attracts trouble.
- location: 45%
  highlight: Since the downward spiral of dilapidation can accelerate so quickly,
    the trick is to keep a building from entering the spiral at all. Two methods are
    supposedly standard, but both are in practice somewhat rare.
- location: 45%
  highlight: One is “preventive maintenance”—
- location: 45%
  highlight: The other is designing and constructing the building in such a way that
    it doesn’t need a lot of maintenance.
- location: 45%
  highlight: Building maintenance has little status with architects. They see the
    people who do the maintaining as blue-collar illiterates and the process of upkeep
    as trivial, not a part of design concerns.
- location: 45%
  highlight: "“a staggering one-fifth of the sample said that the need to clean their
    windows had not even been considered during the design and construction of the
    building.”"
- location: 45%
  highlight: Incompetent design often is matched by hurried, shoddy construction,
    which can be concealed or can get by on being just good enough, just long enough.
- location: 45%
  highlight: "“The older a building, the more likely it is to be right. Since the
    1970s, buildings don’t work.”"
- location: 45%
  highlight: European families think in generations while Americans are still trying
    to master decades.
- location: 45%
  highlight: The longer that buildings are expected to last, the more you can expect
    maintenance and other running costs to overwhelm the initial capital costs of
    construction, and the more inclined owners will be to invest in better construction
    so they can spend less on maintenance.
  note: How long is software expected to last?
- location: 46%
  highlight: The worst of it is, when water comes through a flat roof, you can’t tell
    where the leak is
- location: 46%
  highlight: Washington left abundant (if often angry) correspondence about what he
    wanted for the building because he expanded the house while battling the British.
  note: Kind of funny to think about the banality of normal life even while fighting
    a war.
- location: 47%
  highlight: Like people, buildings would have far fewer upkeep problems if they had
    no orifices.
- location: 47%
  highlight: 'The question is this: do you want a material that looks bad before it
    acts bad, like shingles or clapboard, or one that acts bad long before it looks
    bad, like vinyl siding?'
- location: 47%
  highlight: Remodelers love shingled and tile-hung walls because changes are so easy
    to make and then hide.
  note: Design for replacement.
- location: 47%
  highlight: Maintenance is no mystery.
- location: 47%
  highlight: New materials are unproven, by definition. Like most experiments, they
    tend to fail.
- location: 47%
  highlight: Redundancy of function is always more reliable than attempts at perfection,
- location: 47%
  highlight: The Sydney Opera House, one of the most memorable buildings built during
    this century, was finished in 1973 at a cost of $120 million, with a cost overrun
    of roughly 1,700 percent.
- location: 47%
  highlight: The materials are often one-offs that would take a whole industry to
    reproduce, and the failures can be massive.
- location: 49%
  highlight: walls, it appears, are better if they’re low-maintenance rather than
    no-maintenance.
- location: 49%
  highlight: Wood and brick walls invite change by involving us in their upkeep. What
    begins as repair easily becomes improvement—
- location: 49%
  highlight: "“It’s one thing with a building if it’s going downhill and you know
    you can fix it and bring it into a perfect state, but if it’s generally starting
    to go downhill, and you know that it’s not going to last more than thirty years,
    then the motivation is not there."
- location: 50%
  highlight: If that small stuff isn’t happening all the time, you’re not going to
    take care of it, and it isn’t going to come to order.”
- location: 50%
  highlight: "“Large-lump development is based on the idea of replacement. Piecemeal
    growth is based on the idea of repair."
- location: 50%
  highlight: Large-lump development is based on the fallacy that it is possible to
    build perfect buildings. Piecemeal growth is based on the healthier and more realistic
    view that mistakes are inevitable….
- location: 50%
  highlight: Maintenance, in this light, is learning.
- location: 50%
  highlight: feed it money, but not too much and not too little. Too much encourages
    orgies of radical remodeling that blow a building’s continuity and integrity.
    Too little, and a building becomes destructive to itself and the people in it.
- location: 50%
  highlight: As-builts are building plans that show in detail exactly what was built,
    which is always significantly different from what was in the original plans.
- location: 50%
  highlight: "‘The more complicated the system the greater the chance of things going
    wrong.”’"
- location: 51%
  highlight: I’d like to see building designers take on problem transparency as a
    design goal.
- location: 51%
  highlight: Once attention is deferred, deferring of maintenance comes naturally.
    It might be better if some of the original work were intentionally ephemeral,
    with everyone knowing it will require maintenance or replacement within a year.
    “How might a new building teach good maintenance habits?” is a question worth
    giving to architecture students.
- location: 51%
  highlight: Maintenance comes in two major flavors, especially around houses—cosmetic
    and real. Unfortunately the cosmetic is more fun.
- location: 51%
  highlight: Or be sure that any repair includes the reward of some improvement.
  note: I.e., never refactor just for its own sake.
- location: 52%
  highlight: The existence of plans on paper is an indicator of cultural weakening.
    The amount of detail in a plan is an exact measure of the degree of cultural disharmony;
    the more minimal the plan, the more completely the architectural idea abides in
    the separate minds of architect and client.1
- location: 52%
  highlight: Vernacular builders, he says, are content to accept well-proven old solutions
    to old problems. Then they can concentrate all their design ingenuity strictly
    on new problems, if any.
- location: 53%
  highlight: no two communities dwell alike.
- location: 53%
  highlight: Each person becomes a vernacular builder and a vernacular speaker by
    growing up, by moving from one initiation to the next in becoming either a male
    or a female inhabitant.
- location: 54%
  highlight: Vernacular building historians excel at “reading” buildings—analyzing
    the physical evidence of what actually happened in a building, and when, and why.
- location: 54%
  highlight: they are universally expert at growing by stages.
- location: 54%
  highlight: Style is the last thing that I would teach a student about architectural
    history, because it’s so misleading.
- location: 58%
  highlight: native adaptivity got left behind when vernacular form was translated
    into “vernacular” style.
- location: 58%
  highlight: Specialized knowledge distances buildings from users. Specialized space
    hinders future flexibility.
- location: 59%
  highlight: That’s why 10 percent of all houses in America are mobile homes, housing
    12.5 million people. In 1985, mobile homes comprised one-fifth of all new houses
    sold in the US, and two-thirds of all new low-cost single-family houses.
- location: 60%
  highlight: Builders of would-be popular buildings do better when they learn from
    folklore than when they ape the elite.
- location: 61%
  highlight: the constant change in homes and offices is usually done by the occupants
    in a manner classically vernacular—informal, pragmatic, alive with offhand ingenuity,
    officially invisible. Direct, amateur change is the norm.
- location: 62%
  highlight: Too eager to please the moment, over-specificity crippled all future
    moments.
- location: 62%
  highlight: The credo “form follows function” was a beautiful lie. Form froze function.
- location: 64%
  highlight: It’s a good example of the destructive power of money and of the way
    differently paced parts of a building can tear at each other.
- location: 64%
  highlight: "“Every house is a work in progress,”"
- location: 64%
  highlight: To tinker with a house is to commune with the people who have lived in
    it before and to leave messages for those who will live in it later.
- location: 64%
  highlight: "“finishing is never finished.” There are several reasons for that. You’re
    down to detail, and details are endless."
- location: 64%
  highlight: Also you’re down to where the building most interfaces with the people
    who will be living in it, and they discover that some important things were left
    out, and some ideas that seemed so sensible on the plans aren’t going to work.
- location: 64%
  highlight: Finally the work crew goes away and the occupants move in.
  note: This is at least not the case for devops wrt. building software.
- location: 64%
  highlight: 'ecopoiesis”: the process of a system making a home for itself.'
- location: 65%
  highlight: The countermanding sign is an example of the way most problems are handled
    in buildings once they’re occupied. The solutions are inelegant, incomplete, impermanent,
    inexpensive, just barely good enough to work. The technical term for it, which
    arose from decision theory a few decades back, is “satisficing.”22 It is precisely
    how evolution and adaptation operate in nature.
- location: 65%
  highlight: SATISFICING doesn’t try to solve problems. It reduces them just enough.
- location: 65%
  highlight: Zero expense, zero waste of time, scant investment in an evanescent piece
    of technology, but a highly customized and convenient workspace.
- location: 65%
  highlight: The advantage of ad hoc, make-do solutions is that they are such a modest
    investment, they make it easy to improve further or to tweak back a bit.
- location: 65%
  highlight: Style cramps life, and life erodes style. All too soon the unified look
    is polluted by use, and it’s time to hire someone to supply another alien unity.
- location: 66%
  highlight: Paradoxically, habit is both the product of learning and the escape from
    learning. We learn in order not to learn. Habit is efficient; learning is messy
    and wasteful. Learning that doesn’t produce habit is a waste of time. Habit that
    does not resist learning is failing in its function of continuity and efficiency.
- location: 66%
  highlight: A third level of learning is “learning to learn.”
- location: 66%
  highlight: Particularly worth examining is the history of the “open office,” an
    innovation that swept the world in a decade.
- location: 66%
  highlight: What used to be semipermanent Space plan material had turned into mobile
    Stuff.
- location: 66%
  highlight: no great improvement in costs or flexibility was detected.
- location: 67%
  highlight: was designed by professionals for professionals and assumed no incremental
    change and no handling by building dwellers.
- location: 67%
  highlight: Integrating all the complexity in one bundle meant that only a specialist
    could understand or handle the system,
  note: Ironies of Automation
- location: 67%
  highlight: "“We found that any user sophisticated enough to seek out a ‘smart’ building
    was also sophisticated enough to home-brew a more flexible system.”"
- location: 67%
  highlight: These were classic cases of overspecificity, overcentralized control,
    and “tight fit.”
- location: 68%
  highlight: Change is often followed by reversal of the change,
- location: 68%
  highlight: most change is really undertaken as a trial, no matter what people say
    at the time. And most trials are errors.
- location: 68%
  highlight: Smart organizations, therefore, push control of space as far “down” the
    organization as they can.
- location: 68%
  highlight: At each level of scale, it is those actually using the space who understand
    best how it can made/altered to have the character of being conducive to the work,
- location: 69%
  highlight: 'The lesson: adaptivity too can be overspecified.'
- location: 69%
  highlight: "“The thing which has characterized MIT’s success is a physical environment
    which does not impair communication and set up arbitrary barriers to it."
- location: 70%
  highlight: The common attribute of vernacular remodeling (and construction) is that
    it is done without plans. You proceed by improving on what already exists, following
    wherever usage demands. “Wanderer,” wrote a Spanish poet, “there is no path. You
    lay down a path in walking.”
- location: 70%
  highlight: "“Evidently organisms adapt well enough to ‘satisfice’; they do not,
    in general, ‘optimize.”’ In 1958 he wrote, “To optimize requires processes several
    orders of magnitude more complex than those required to satisfice.”"
- location: 71%
  highlight: ALL BUILDINGS are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
- location: 71%
  highlight: Buildings can be designed and used so it doesn’t matter when they’re
    wrong.
- location: 71%
  highlight: The product of skilled scenario work is not a plan but a strategy. Where
    a plan is based on prediction, a strategy is designed to encompass unforeseeably
    changing conditions. A good strategy ensures that, no matter what happens, you
    always have maneuvering room.
- location: 71%
  highlight: SCENARIO PLANNING leads to a more versatile building. It takes advantage
    of the information developed by programming (detailed querying of building users)
    and offsets the major limitation of programming (overspecificity to immediate
    desires). The building is treated as a strategy rather than just a plan.
- location: 71%
  highlight: many a building is a brilliant (or pedestrian) design solution to the
    wrong design problem,
- location: 71%
  highlight: "“When architects design buildings for themselves, you invariably have
    an interesting time.”"
- location: 71%
  highlight: his highest priority in planning the building was “to force interaction
    between research groups and individuals….”
- location: 72%
  highlight: The great virtue of programming is that it deeply involves the users
    of a building and makes it really their building. The great vice of programming
    is that it over-responds to the immediate needs of the immediate users, leaving
    future users out of the picture,
- location: 72%
  highlight: He gets the client to discuss the vision of the building at the very
    beginning in some depth, and then he can harken back to that vision when obsessive
    details threaten to overwhelm the building with fussiness. Vision is generic,
    and generic is adaptive.
- location: 72%
  highlight: 'The iron rule of planning is: whatever a client or an architect says
    will happen with a building, won’t.'
- location: 72%
  highlight: It never works. The future is no more controllable than it is predictable.
    The only reliable attitude to take toward the future is that it is profoundly,
    structurally, unavoidably perverse.
- location: 72%
  highlight: instead of converging on a single path, its whole essence is divergence.
- location: 72%
  highlight: The group ranks these driving forces in terms of importance and uncertainly,
    placing the most important and most uncertain highest, because it is the important
    uncertainties that will drive the scenarios apart.
  note: 2x2
- location: 73%
  highlight: The goal is to develop scenarios that are both plausible and surprising—shocking,
    in fact.
- location: 73%
  highlight: A building is a huge investment, a black tarry pit of sunk costs, a trap
    and a prison.
- location: 73%
  highlight: "“Never expect a building to solve organizational problems.”"
- location: 74%
  highlight: Anyone could reach in and move things around.
- location: 75%
  highlight: Some design is better if it’s postponed.
- location: 75%
  highlight: Taking a strategic approach to a building may mean postponing many design
    decisions and leaving them to the eventual users of the building.
- location: 75%
  highlight: Postponing some of the design yields more building for less money,
- location: 75%
  highlight: A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
- location: 75%
  highlight: A building “learns” only through people learning, and individuals typically
    learn much faster than whole organizations.
- location: 76%
  highlight: architects maturing from being just artists of space to artists of time.
- location: 76%
  highlight: Initial conservatism would be the natural result of a scenario approach
    to design,
- location: 76%
  highlight: Revisiting and changing design decisions must not be allowed to stop
    or to confuse the drive toward completion.
- location: 76%
  highlight: there needs to be more money than usual spent on the basic Structure,
    less on finishing, and more on perpetual adjustment and maintenance.
- location: 77%
  highlight: Sixty percent of the final cost of a mortgaged building disappears as
    interest to the bank instead of going into the building.
- location: 77%
  highlight: the mortgage temptation—buy too much now, pay too much later.
- location: 77%
  highlight: The temptation to customize a building around a new technology is always
    enormous, and it is nearly always unnecessary.
- location: 80%
  highlight: Try things first. Feel your way.
- location: 80%
  highlight: 'beware: in the real world “temporary” is permanent most of the time.
    If the cheap trial worked, it will be left alone, no matter how funky it is. If
    it failed, it’s embarrassing to fix. Life rushes on to more pressing or interesting
    problems.'
- location: 80%
  highlight: Some say you should flee a building while it is being finished or remodeled.
    I recommend occupying it. Bad as the inconvenience and aggravation get, it’s worthwhile
    for the fine-tuning that only presence at the worksite affords.
- location: 81%
  highlight: every building has some crucial parts that have to be done carefully
    for it to age well.
- location: 81%
  highlight: wabi sabi—“the recognition that in a beautiful thing there is always
    some part which is lovingly and carefully done, and some parts which are very
    roughly done, because the compensation between the two is necessary in a real
    thing.”
- location: 81%
  highlight: "“Finishing is never finished,” but at some point you have to just stop,
    let the builders go away, and start living in the place."
- location: 81%
  highlight: It will take a year to work out just the major bugs. In the first year
    of the Media Lab building at MIT, the elevator caught fire, the revolving door
    broke weekly, all the doorknobs in the building failed and had to be replaced,
    the automatic door closers were stronger than people and had to be adjusted, and
    an untraceable stench of something horribly dead filled the public lecture hall
    for months. This is normal.
- location: 81%
  highlight: "“After seeing this for a while and seeing that it was fundamental, we
    hired someone just to handle those problems—a full-time handyman for our clients."
- location: 82%
  highlight: We don’t bill for much of his time. We believe it’s our duty in building
    a building that it should work well for twenty-five or fifty years. We’re trying
    to make a building that doesn’t need his time, and whatever time of his it needs
    is our responsibility.
- location: 82%
  highlight: "“We get to see what works in our buildings and what doesn’t work."
- location: 82%
  highlight: Besides spare parts, a new building needs a complete and accurate record
    of itself.
- location: 82%
  highlight: In a healthy building, maintenance, correction of faults, and improvements
    all blend together.
- location: 82%
  highlight: It’s a waste to do anything for just one reason.
- location: 83%
  highlight: Learning in a building, then, is a simultaneous process of constant self-healing
    and of arranging for greater possibilities.
- location: 83%
  highlight: Nuances are as important as systemic problems.
- location: 83%
  highlight: Fine-tuning is what turns a building from a nuisance into a joy.
- location: 83%
  highlight: The point is to make adjustments to a building in a way that is always
    future-responsible—open to the emerging whole, hastening a richly mature intricacy.
    The process embraces error; it is eager to find things that don’t work and to
    try things that might not work. By failing small, early, and often, it can succeed
    long and large. And it turns occupants into active learners and shapers rather
    than passive victims.
- location: 83%
  highlight: That goes better if the place is neither owned nor maintained by remote
    antagonists, because they distance the building from its users. What makes a building
    learn is its physical connection to the people within.
- location: 83%
  highlight: Finally, an adapted state is not an end state. A successful building
    has to be periodically challenged and refreshed, or it will turn into a beautiful
    corpse.
- location: 84%
  highlight: City planning used to imitate architecture, and it failed because of
    that.
  note: And software development too?
- location: 84%
  highlight: Get down to cases—what exactly is the performance record of buildings
    that won architectural awards?
- location: 84%
  highlight: there were two types of people in the world—those who deal with something
    new by really looking at it, devoid of preconception, versus those who prefer
    to form hypotheses first and then study the thing to see which ideas were right.
    Both are honorable and productive. With “Look first,” new perception changes understanding.
    With “Think first,” new understanding changes perception.
- location: 84%
  highlight: Still, theories mislead as much as they lead.
- location: 85%
  highlight: We measure what is easy to measure and ignore what is difficult.
- location: 85%
  highlight: There’s no reason to rely only on professionals.
- location: 87%
  highlight: People will be as baffled trying to program their house as they were
    trying to program the early video cassette players.
  note: Yup.