“Function reforms form, perpetually”*…
Diagrams from How Buildings Learn. On the left, a diagram by Frank Duffy showing the increasing capital costs over the lifetime of a building. On the right, a diagram by Stewart Brand and Donald Ryan showing the Shearing Layers of Change. (source)Over the years I have given away many, many copies of many books in the hope that they might be of interest/use to the recipient. The book of which I’ve gifted the most copies is How Buildings Learn- What Happens After They’re Built, published in 1995 by my GBN partner and Long Now colleague Stewart Brand. While it has certainly earned its plaudits as a work of architectural criticism, I’ve handed it out because it’s the most thoughtful and evocative book on strategy I’ve come across; it’s p-o-v and principles, rooted in (often literally) concrete examples, amount to the best manifesto I’ve found for thinking and planning for the long term.
In 1997, The BBC released a six-part series based on the book (with music by GBN and Long Now colleague and friend Brian Eno). As Open Culture reports, Stewart has created a YouTube channel to make the series available to us all…
Stewart Brand came onto the cultural scene during the 1960s, helping to stage the Acid Tests made famous by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, and later launching the influential Whole Earth Catalog (something Steve Jobs described as “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along”). He also vigorously campaigned in 1966 to have NASA release a photograph showing the entirety of Earth from space—something we take for granted now, but fired humanity’s imagination back then.
During the 1970s and beyond, Brand founded CoEvolution Quarterly, a successor to the Whole Earth Catalog; the WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link”), “a prototypical, wide-ranging online community for intelligent, informed participants the world over;” and eventually The Long Now Foundation, whose work we’ve highlighted here before. When not creating new institutions, he has poured his creative energies into books and films…
… Based on [the book, How Buildings Learn], the TV series offers a critique of modernist approaches to architecture (think Buckminster Fuller, Frank Gehry, and Le Corbusier) and instead argues for “an organic kind of building, based on four walls, which is easy to change and expand and grow as the ideal form of building.”
Brand made the series available on his YouTube channel, with these words: “Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like… Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project.” And he added the noteworthy footnote: “this was one of the first television productions made entirely in digital—shot digital, edited digital.”…
A wonderful series on architecture– and more broadly, on planning for the long term: “Watch Stewart Brand’s 6‑Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno,” from @openculture.bsky.social.
Watch the series here.
Further to yesterday’s post (and thanks to friend MK) an obituary of Don Michael, another GBN friend, and author of another book– Learning to Plan and Planning to Learn: The Social Psychology of Changing Toward Future-Responsive Societal Learning— that I’ve given away many, many times.
* Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built
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As we take the long view, we might recall that it was on this date in 1914 that Frank Lloyd Wright’s self-designed home in Wisconsin, Taliesin, was the site of mass murder and arson. Julian Carlton, a servant of Wright, set fire to the home and brutally attacked the people there during lunch. He ultimately killed seven, including Wright’s partner, “Mamah” Borthwick.
Wright was among the architects that Brand criticized in How Buildings Learn. Brand argued that Wright designed rigid, static “magazine architecture” that prioritized photogenic style and artistic ego over practical function, durability, and the way buildings must adapt to weather and human use over time. That said, Stewart never even thought of reaching for the matches nor a hatchet.
The earliest known image of Taliesin I, taken in the winter of its construction in 1911-12. Southwest elevation (source) #architecture #BrianEno #culture #FrankLloydWright #history #HowBuildingsLearn #longTermThinking #planning #StewartBrand #Taliesin #trueCrime
