How Buildings Learn: Chapter 11 - The Scenario-buffered Building

How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand is a really great read about the underlying processes that govern the evolution of buildings over time.

All predictions are wrong.

The product of skilled scenario work is not a plan but a strategy. Where a plan is based on prediction, a strategy is designed to encompass unforseeably changing conditions. A good strategy ensures that, no matter what happens, you always have maneuvering room.

Many a building is a brilliant (or pedestrian) design solution to the wrong design problem.

The iron rule of planning is: whatever a client or architect says will happen with a building, won't.

"Our most important responsibility to the future is not to coerce it but to attend to it" [Kevin Lynch, city theorist]

Build something smaller and more solid now that can expand in a variety of directions later.

You have to iterate [Frederick Brooks]