How Buildings Learn

The building was too humble for anyone to worry about whether they were violating its historical or aesthetic integrity.

Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment? Art flouts convention. Convention became conventional because it works. Aspiring to art means aspiring to a building that almost certainly cannot work, because the old good solutions are thrown away. The roof has a dramatic new look, and it leaks dramatically.

The effort is to make everything perfect and final for each of these opening nights. The finished-looking model and visually obsessive renderings dominate the let’s-do-it meeting, so that shallow guesses are frozen as deep decisions. All the design intelligence gets forced to the earliest part of the building process, when everyone knows the least about what is really needed. “A lot of the time now, you see buildings that look exactly like their models,” one model maker told me. “That’s when you know you’re in trouble.”

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. New buildings should be judged not just for what they are, but for what they are capable of becoming. Old buildings should get credit for how they played their options.

Plummeting real-estate value is devastating, and soaring real estate value paralyzes homes and guts commercial districts. But in a slow down market, people stay where they are, improving their property for themselves and becoming real denizens of their neighborhoods. In a slow up market, they are rewarded for rehabilitating marginal structures, gradually turning factory lofts into artists’ studios or townhouses, retaining a civilized urban mix.

The building became more interesting when it left its original function behind. The continuing changes in function turn into a colorful story which becomes valued in its own right. The building succeeds by seeming to fail.

Against the flow of this constant entropy, maintenance people must swim always upstream, progressless against the current like a watchful trout. The only satisfaction they can get from their work is to do it well. The measure of success in their labors is that the result is invisible, unnoticed. Thanks to them, everything is the same as it ever was.
The romance of maintenance is that it has none. Its joys are quiet ones. There is a certain high calling in the steady tending to a ship, to a garden, to a building. One is participating physically in a deep, long life.

Inhabitation is a highly dynamic process, little studied. There’s a term floating around the fringes of biology that applies—“ecopoiesis”: the process of a system making a home for itself. The building and its occupants jointly are the new system. The dwelling and the dwellers must shape and reshape themselves to each other until there’s some kind of tolerable fit. It takes time and money that are seldom budgeted for. A building can be stillborn if it is too thoroughly finished and fitted out and isn’t given a chance to respond to the life moving into it.

To change is to lose identity, yet to change is to be alive. Buildings partially resolve the paradox by offering the hierarchy of pace — you can fiddle with the Stuff and Space plan all you want while the Structure and Site remain solid and reliable.

Evolution is always away from known problems rather than toward imagined goals. It doesn’t seek to maximize theoretical fitness; it minimizes experienced unfitness. Hindsight is better than foresight. That’s why evolutionary forms such as vernacular building types always work better than visionary designs such as geodesic domes. They grow from experience rather than from somebody’s forehead.

Well-made buildings are fractal—equally intelligent at every level of detail.

Fine-tuning is what turns a building from a nuisance into a joy.

‍

‍