I introduced Stewart Brand’s book How Buildings Learn last week. There is much in it, about which types of buildings learn best, and how to plan ahead to make new ones adaptable.
High Road vs Low Road
He discusses two very different ways buildings can adapt over time to fit the people living in them. The first he calls the Low Road.
Low Road buildings are unassuming and spacious. Like a loft, a barn, or a warehouse. Within a house the attic under a tall roof, the basement, or a garage are all Low Road spaces. They grant you the freedom to nail up partitions or shelves, cut in new skylights, or change your mind—adapting the space to fit your needs over time.
High Road buildings are rarer and not for the restless or faint of heart. They have a style and a structure that has survived decades or even centuries. Such as an old English manor, made of stone and grand intentions, refined by generations so every aspect fits just so.
Aspects of Low Road and High Road strategies can be incorporated without going to these extremes. Make the roof span the whole width of the house like a barn, leaving the inside walls free to be moved around. Or, more difficult, construct heavy sturdy walls like a manor, with very high finishes to inspire loving care over time.
Brand has these further suggestions on how to make houses that are “built to change”:
Start with a kernel or shell
- build a small core and add rooms over time—or—
- build a rudimentary but big overall shape—fill in and refine over time
Be conservative
- in room shapes, keep it simple—use rectangles
- with materials—use proven and durable
- with style—use local, not exotic
On style, he also has this to say:
If you design a building that you think tourists would admire and envy in ten years, and that preservationists will fight to save in fifty years, you’ll probably get the proper mix of bemused conservatism and mythic depth. Freed of fashion, a building can become honestly interesting in its own terms.
What an intriguing goal! It sets my mind to pondering just where this might lead.
Use scenario planning
Architects are taught to find out the details of how people actually live and work. This is great. But it tends to focus on the right now. What will change bring in the the future? Hard to say for sure.
Scenario planning, developed in the business world, is an approach to thinking about the future that allows for diverging paths. Stewart Brand thinks it is just the thing we need to design adaptive buildings. The idea is to spin stories, scenarios, about the vastly different ways major forces could affect how we use a building.
In the case of a house: what if one gets married? has lots of kids? gets divorced? becomes a wheelchair user? gets old? How can the house be designed to anticipate the adaptations needed in case life happens?
As you can see there is a lot in How Buildings Learn. I’m sure I’ll be working with these ideas for some time to come.