Cities, buildings, architecture 1

I’ve been interested in buildings, architecture and cities for about ten years now. Truth be told, probably for much longer than that: but I’ve been conscious of it as an interest for that time. It is an enormously interesting and absorbing subject in more ways than are worth enumerating here. But one of the aspects that has interested me as a philosopher and borderline social scientist is the way in which buildings and cities are records of human reason in the face of all kinds of practical problems (social, topographical, economic, weather-related, material related) at the same time as being items of great aesthetic importance. Form, style, design are all products of human trial and error and what emerges is often striking and beautiful. Sometimes the product of an individual’s vision; at others the result of the accumulated strivings of numbers of people working without any general conception. (Often, for cities at least, the best results have come when humans have worked blind; and the worst when some architect of other has been given free rein.)

I’ve blogged about this before on Junius. But a new forum gives an opportunity to look again, so I thought I’d do a series of posts about important books in the field that I’ve learnt from and been inspired by. First of these is Stewart Brand’s remarkable How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re built. Brand’s book really gripped me when I first read it, and looking back over its pages is still both informative and fun. I’ve given copies to a number of friends and relatives over the years and I’d recommend it to anyone. Aside from the intrinsic interest of the subject matter, Brand had a biggish effect on my political and philosophical outlook. To caricature what I believed before somewhat, I moved from being somone who thought that smart people applying the right principles could make the world right to someone inclined to be much more sceptical about what we know or can know in politics, who takes much more seriously people’s lived experience of institutions, plans, projects and buildings (devised by ‘experts’) and who has more of a focus on rules of thumb, practice, ‘knowing how’, tacit knowledge, “satisficing”, skill, craft and so on.

Brand’s book is a visual delight. Much of the book consists of pictures of the same buildings or urban vistas over a series of decades. The cover features at drawing of two identical Greek Revival brick townhouses from the 1850s next to a photograph of the same buildings in 1993. One has become a storey higher, the other has grown sideway. This kind of juxtaposition is repeated through the book for restaurants, gas stations, living rooms and streetscapes, all complete with commentary on the pressures which led to change. Brand’s focus isn’t on any one kind of building: he’s happy discussing Chatsworth and Salisbury Cathedral one moment and MIT’s Building 20 or an office in a container the next.

As a fairly neglectful and manually incompetent householder, I can’t read the chapter called “The Romance of Maintenance” without feeling guilty, but Brand manages to bring some poetry to the subject:

The root of all evil is water. It dissolves buildings. Water is exilir to unwelcome life such as rot and insects. Water, the universal solvent, makes chemical reactions happen every place you don’t want them. It consumes wood, erodes masonry, corrodes metals, peels paint, expands destructively when it freezes, and permeates everywhere when it evaporates. It warps, swells, discolors, rusts, mildews, and stinks.

Most basically the book is about adaptation and flexibility and the need to design in ways that permit change. Most architects build to a conception of a building’s purpose. But two things are likely to happen after a building gets built: people start to use it in ways that the architect didn’t predict (will the building help or hinder their preferred ways of working or living) or the building gets sold and used for some quite different purpose. As Brand puts it “All buildings are predictions. All buildings are wrong.”

Although the book has a more or less sequential text, much of the pleasure of it (particularly coming back later) lies in the little bits of sidebar commentary to the pictures, the diagrams etc. Brand really is a master of all this and he also has a magpie like ability to draw on anecdote, history and literature in support of his thesis. (Check out, for example, the Gregory Bateson story about the renewal of the oak beams in the New College, Oxford dining room on pp. 130-1). Highly recommended.

Brand’s book finishes with a really extensive list of further reading, some of which I’ll write about in future posts.