Stewart Brand Quotes

“A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.”

“A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.”

“Against the flow of constant entropy, maintenance people must swim always upstream, progresses against the current like a watchful trout. The only satisfaction they can get from their work is to do it well. The measure of success in their labors is that the result is invisible, unnoticed. Thanks to them, everything is the same as it ever was.”

“All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.”

“Art flouts convention. Convention became convention because it works.”

“Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative. Art must experiment to do its job. Most experiments fail. Art costs extra. How much extra are you willing to pay to live in a failed experiment?”

“Buildings keep being pushed around by three irresistible forces—technology, money, and fashion.”

“Favor moves that increase options; shy from moves that end well but require cutting off choices; work from strong positions.”

“Function reforms form, perpetually.”

“Institutional buildings act as if they were designed specifically to prevent change for the organization inside and to convey timeless reliability to everyone outside. When forced to change anyway, as they always are, they do so with expensive reluctance and all possible delay. Institutional buildings are mortified by change.”

“It seems there is an ideal degree of aging which is admired. Things should not be new, but neither should they be rotten with age (except in New Orleans, which fosters a cult of decay).”

“Redundancy of function is always more reliable than attempts at perfect, which time treats cruelly.”

“Style is time’s fool. Form is time’s student.”

“The fashion game is fun for architects to play and diverting for the public to watch, but it’s deadly for building users. When the height of fashion moves on, they’re the ones left behind, stuck in a building that was designed to look good rather than work well, and now it doesn’t even look good.”

“The house and its occupants mold to each other twenty-four hours a day, and the building accumulates the record of that intimacy.”

“The one garment in the world with the greatest and longest popularity—over a century now—is Levi’s denim blue jeans. Along with their practical durability, they show age honestly and elegantly, as successive washings fade and shrink them to perfect fit and rich texture. Ingenious techniques to simulate aging of denim come and go, but the basic indigo 501s, copper-riveted, carry on for decades. This is highly evolved design. Are there blue-jeans buildings among us?”

“The temptation to customize a building around a new technology is always enormous, and it is nearly always unnecessary. Technology is relatively lightweight and flexible—more so every decade. Let the technology adapt to the building rather than vice versa, and then you’re not pushed around when the next technology comes along.”

“To change is to lose identity; yet to change is to be alive.”