How buildings learn : what happens after they're built

Summary: Buildings have often been studies whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time. How Buildings Learn is 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 Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it. - Publisher.

Record details

ISBN: 0140139966
ISBN: 9780140139969
ISBN: 0670835153
ISBN: 9780670835157
Physical Description: print
viii, 243 pages : illustrations ; 22 x 28 cm
Publisher: New York : Penguin Books, 1995, ©1994

Content descriptions

General Note:	Originally published: New York, NY : Viking, 1994.
Bibliography, etc. Note:	Includes bibliographical references (pages 224-229) and index.
Formatted Contents Note:	Flow -- Shearing layers -- "Nobody cares what you do in there": the low road --- Houseproud: the high road -- Magazine architecture: no road -- Unreal estate -- Preservation: a quiet, populist, conservative, victorious revolution -- The romance of maintenance -- Vernacular: how buildings learn from each other -- Function melts form: satisficing home and office -- The scenario-buffered building -- Built for change -- Appendix: The study of buildings in time.