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

Stewart Brand · 115.3K views · 2012-06-10 · 29:36

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Overview

The first episode of Stewart Brand's 1997 BBC series based on his book How Buildings Learn, covering how buildings change after they are built. Brand presents and the series has music by Brian Eno.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a view of buildings as dynamic systems, with lessons for software architecture and long-term maintenance.

Recommended by 8 HN people across 8 months · HN mentions 2013–2020

Topics

Civil engineering & construction Visual arts, photography & architecture Documentaries & storytelling

What people said

monkeypizza · 2020-07 · Strong recommendation
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. [VIDEO]
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lqet · 2019-04 · Strong recommendation
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] [VIDEO]
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asplake · 2018-09 · Strong recommendation
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 - [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.
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Sources

Video by Stewart Brand, played through YouTube.

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