1. How Buildings Learn - Stewart Brand - 1 of 6 - “Flow”

Stewart Brand has done lots of good stuff. My favorite is the 6 part BBC series on "How Buildings Learn". It really opened my eyes to the importance of buildings. Very relevant to the frequent discussions here about zoning, design, etc. But also just an amazing, clear, well-informed amateur analysis of how the US has been doing in this field over the last 100 years. ▶ this video

Ah, yes, I watched this series a few years ago and just realized that it may have inspired my post above a bit. PS: I just shamelessly throw in another excellent BBC documentary series here: How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand [0]. I sometimes see it mentioned here on HN, but it cannot be mentioned too often. If you haven't seen it, please please do. [0] ▶ this video

How Buildings Learn, based on (and in some ways better than) the Stewart Brand book. Definite takeaways for software architecture, and includes appearances by Christopher Alexander, a key instigator of the patterns movement. Produced by the BBC in the 90's, now on Youtube - ▶ this video Turns out that many architects of the built environment are just as prone as those of the software kind to not caring about the usability and maintainability of their systems, let alone how how they will evolve over extended periods of time.

That's a SUPER book. Everyone in software should read it. The primary expense in software is long-term maintenance, not initial construction. Stewart Brand also made a video series: ▶ this video

video documentary of the book with Stewart Brand hosting for anyone that's interested: ▶ this video Saw the documentary and now reading the book, it's good.

Ooh, that reminds me of another excellent book on failure, Sidney Dekker's "Field Guide to Understanding Human Error": link It's about investigating airplane crashes, and in particular two different paradigms for understanding failure. It deeply changed how I think and talk about software bugs, and especially how I do retrospectives. I strongly recommend it. And the article made me think of Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn": link It changed my view of a building from a static thing to a dynamic system, changing over time. The BBC later turned it into a 6-part series, which I haven't seen, but which the author put up on YouTube, starting here: ▶ this video I especially like that in the comments he writes: "Anybody is welcome to use anything from this series in any way they like. Please don’t bug me with requests for permission. Hack away. Do credit the BBC, who put considerable time and talent into the project."

There's a really good BBC TV series about this topic, which also covers the MIT Radio Lab that Tim mentions: ▶ this video "How Buildings Learn" (1997)

Steward Brand has a documentary and book on "How Buildings Learn". A building isn't made for architects, it's for people to use, and people over time are going to use their building for different, often very different things. Even such trivial things like "roof shouldn't leak" can be handwaved around. ▶ this video

I fear that another BBC favorite of mine, How Buildings Learn [0], is too modern (90ies) to have been produced on film... [0] ▶ this video

Strongly reminded of How Buildings Learn's first episode[1], about buildings as statements which turn out to neglect the people who occupy them. [1] ▶ this video