How Buildings Learn What Happens After They're Built [Paperback]

Buildings have often been studies whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time.How Buildings Learnis a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time.

From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from satisficing to form follows funding, from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth—this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory.

More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time—if they're allowed to.How Buildings Learnshows how to work with time rather than against it.

Acknowledgments
Cover Story

1. Flow
2. Shearing Layers
3. Nobody Cares What You Do In There : The Low Road
4. Houseproud: The High Road
5. Magazine Architecture: No Road
6. Unreal Estate
7. Preservation: A Quiet, Populist, Conservative, Victorious Revolution
8. The Romance of Maintenance
9. Vernacular: How Buildings Learn from Each Other
10. Function Melts Form: Satisficing Home and Office
11. The Scenario-buffered Building
12. Built for Change

APPENDIX: The Study of Buildings in Time
Recommended Bibliography: Books for Time-kindly Buildings
Index

It's about time somebody wrote this book. This quirky, thoughtful volume, bursting with curiosity and intelligence, may make our everyday world more visible to more Americans. Architecture is too important to be left to architects alone.
—Mixed Media

A stunning exploration of the design of design …How Buildings Learnwill irrevocably alter yor sense of place, space, and the artifacts that shape them.
—Michael Shrage,Wired

Penetratingly original.
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