In an interview on Architectural Context

Architecture Depends. On what?

Architecture depends at the building stage on a whole lot of external forces and influences – obvious things like money but also less obvious things like politics. After a building has been finished, it becomes dependent upon other things: users, time, and weather and so on. It’s self-evidently true that architecture depends – it’s actually a bit of a no-brainer to say it. But the argument in my book says something else as well: I argue that architects and architectural culture do everything possible to deny that dependency. If you are dependent, then you are in some way fragile, and professionals don’t like that, especially male professionals (and I think architecture is a particularly male profession). The books that I have chosen, therefore, are not about architecture as object (because one can escape that dependency in the seduction of the object) but rather about the temporal and social context in which architecture finds itself.

Your first book recommendation, How Buildings Learn, also relates to the idea of ‘dependency’ in architecture.

The book is written by a non-architect. Stuart Brand is a person who thinks clearly about our future, and therefore is in a good position to comment on the future life of architecture. He makes the very simple argument that buildings have a life beyond their immediate completion, and that architects should design their buildings acknowledging that. It is a particularly interesting book because, in the American edition, Brand made a criticism of the famous British architect Lord Rogers, in what I thought were quite mild terms. Brand basically said that the rhetoric of one of his buildings, the Pompidou Centre, didn’t match the reality. He said you couldn’t mix and match and change it, that it is quite frozen as a building. Lord Rogers took such exception to this that he asked the publishers to take the section out when they published the British edition. This is really interesting because it’s not likely that it’s going to be read by lots of architects and clients. What touched him so poignantly, perhaps, was the idea that his buildings couldn’t learn.

What features of a building allow it to ‘learn’?

I think it is largely about the architect working in the background rather than the foreground. It’s being aware of the way that people use buildings. The standard architectural approach to adaptable buildings is to use lots of gizmos: sliding doors, folding screens and so on. Brand’s thesis is different – although he does talk about the technical stuff, his view is that adapting buildings is more of a social endeavour. You have to allow people to adjust their buildings when they adjust their lives. In British housing, everything is designed down to the smallest detail. Every room is labelled; there’s the dining room which is designed so that you can just about fit a dining room table in but nothing else. But if you look at some types of German housing, for example, a room is just called a room – there is no designated use for it. This is the sort of building that can learn: it can adapt to changing conditions.