Book Review: "How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built" by Stewart Brand

People who fart about with computers like to give themselves highfalutin titles. We're not programmers; we're architects!

Yeah, nah.

I wish I knew who recommended this book to me so that I could properly thank them. It is an astonishing series of life lessons viewed through the lens of architecture. Even to a lay-person like me, it was an accessible work - helped by Brand's friendly and unpretentious demeanour.

It is chock-full of photos with lots of before-and-after shots - to the point where it sometimes feels like this could be a documentary. It lovingly details what makes a building work and what sorts of mistakes people make when they design, adapt, and use them. Almost every chapter contained a lesson applicable to technology.

As someone who has had a hand in "renovating" some old websites and systems, this quote runs true:

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.

And anyone who has worked in technology will recognise what's being described here:

As a designer you avoid such classic mistakes as solving a five-minute problem with a fifty-year solution, or vice versa.

There are so many "quick fixes" which should be wholesale changes - and that build up of tech-debt haunts us all. Similarly, we constantly over-engineer something which could be a change to a single line of code.

The book calls for us to be more experimental in how we live in our buildings:

One day I acquired a fax machine. There being no convenient place to park it, I used a saber saw to hack out a level place by the old steering wheel, along with a hole for the electrical and phone lines. It took maybe ten minutes and required no one else’s opinion. When you can make adjustments to your space by just picking up a saber saw, you know you’re in a Low Road building.

That's what MySpace was. A grungy little shed where no-one cared if you added weird HTML and off-beat colour-schemes. Now we're stuck in the rigid corporate office of Facebook.

If you've ever had to use the antiquated back-end of a shiny website, you'll be relieved to know that physical buildings suffer the same problems:

Only if there is a heavily trafficked courtyard or garden do the building dwellers notice the exterior at all after the first few days. Most often they don’t even enter by way of the facade and big lobby; they come in by the garage door. And yet, ever since the Renaissance, “the history of architecture is the history of facades.” It is a massive misdirection of money and design effort, considering how badly buildings need their fundamentals taken care of. Chris Alexander is vehement: “Our present attitude is all reversed. What you have is extremely inexpensive structure and all this glitz on the surface. The structure rots after thirty years, and the glitz is so expensive that you daren’t even fuck with it.”

I've lost count of how many "award winning" bits of software are held together by spit and hope once you peal back the exciting front.

There's also some wonderful descriptions of the usability of buildings:

The entrance has double doors, by law. But one door opens and one doesn’t, and you can’t tell which is which until you’ve crunched into the wrong one. That one detail of staff failing to unlock both doors shrieks of laziness, disinterest, and unwelcome. Every customer enters in a state of having been humiliated by the building, by a nuance untended to.

It's like having a website telling you to piss off because you didn't guess what its password requirements were!

This is an astonishing and delightful book. It has caused me to re-evaluate how I look at the built environment and the environment I build.