How Buildings Learn

Brand argues that buildings are best understood as processes rather than objects, since almost all of them are modified continuously after construction, and that architecture as a discipline ignores this because it is organised around the appearance of the finished building.

His central analytical device is the shearing layers of change, adapted from architect Frank Duffy. A building consists of site, which is eternal; structure, lasting thirty to three hundred years; skin, changing every twenty years; services, meaning wiring, plumbing and heating, changing every seven to fifteen; space plan, meaning interior layout, changing every three to thirty; and stuff, meaning furniture, changing constantly. Because these layers change at different rates, a building that binds them together, as many modern designs do, cannot be adapted without destroying it.

He distinguishes low road buildings, meaning cheap unloved structures that people modify freely and which therefore host innovation, from high road buildings, meaning well-built structures maintained over long periods, and argues that both work while designed magazine architecture does not.

His criticism of the profession is direct. He argues that architects are rewarded for photographs of new buildings, that they do not revisit their work, that innovation in form frequently produces leaking roofs and unusable spaces, and that occupant adaptation is treated as a failure of the design rather than as the normal condition. The shearing layers concept has been adopted well beyond architecture, particularly in software architecture and in organisational design. The book is illustrated heavily with before and after photographs, which carry much of the argument.