Built How Buildings Learn.

Transcript context

…— would stress the dynamic properties of decentralized social evolution. If we want our buildings to be more of an organically evolving architecture, so they change with the times, according to some beneficial decentralized mechanisms, what should we do to get there? Well, I wrote a whole book called How Buildings Learn, which is probably my best book, and it’s certainly the most successful. It’s now treated as a classic and taught in classes and so on. It’s basically that a building is not something you finish. A building is something you start. The building is an ongoing process that is in perpetual dialogue with the users of the building, and the uses of the building, and its standing in the real estate market, and so on. Professional high-concept architecture is allergic to all of that, and they want to make a work of art or signature piece of something or other with the look of that particular architect, and they hope that the function will work out. The buildings that tend to go best are ones that are really durable, like the old brick factories of the East Coast or some of the tilt-up concrete spaces, what I call low-road buildings. For example, at Stanford, when I was there, there were temporary buildings left over from World War II. And at MIT, the Rad Lab, Building 20, was where much of the real innovation that happened in curriculum in science or in engineering happened — in the trailers. It happened in Building 20. Because those were buildings that nobody cared about, you could do anything you wanted in there. You could adapt the building to whatever research you were doing, and it was cheap. You could throw things together and have them fall apart and not care, or have them take over the world. Because you started cheap, you were able to get there without having to overinvest. Buildings that adapt well over time are basically built strong for certain reasons, then stay strong as the decades go by and the different uses go by. In the book, I wound up sorting out various things that have those qualities and things that don’t. I had a chapter on maintenance because buildings are the most maintenance-needing and maintenance-defying things that we build. So, there’s a constant dialogue between keeping up with that and letting it go, and then cycles of real estate value that go in and out, and so on and so forth. I don’t have a short answer to your question of what makes them more adaptable, but really looking at what buildings do over time sure helps. Why does Japan fascinate you so much?…

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