Online Screening:
How Buildings Learn, Part 6: Shearing Layers
Online
November 7 – November 13, 2022
How Buildings Learn (1997)
Episode 6: Shearing Layers
Writer/Presenter: Stewart Brand
Director: Ed Stobart
Production Company: BBC TV
30 minutes
English; Turkish subtitles
Salt presents an online screening of How Buildings Learn, a six-part documentary that offers insight into how buildings change over time to meet the varying needs of their inhabitants.
In the final part of the documentary, Brand explores different typologies of buildings and their evolution, departing from the example of an 18th-century house in Islington, a prosperous area in north London that ended up as a punk squat in the 1970s and 80s. Brand also considers St. Albans Abbey and almshouses that date back to the 15th century but are still in use today, and although modernized, the basic structure remains intact.
Written by Stewart Brand in 1994 and adapted into a television series by BBC in 1997, How Buildings Learn offers a critique of modernist approaches to architecture and argues for “an organic kind of building, which is easy to change and grow as the ideal form of building.” Refusing the “center out” understanding of design, Brand adopts an evolutionary approach where users can change the functions of a building to meet their varying needs.
All episodes are streaming online until Sunday midnight, November 13 via saltonline.org.
Episode 6: Shearing Layers
Writer/Presenter: Stewart Brand
Director: Ed Stobart
Production Company: BBC TV
30 minutes
English; Turkish subtitles
Salt presents an online screening of How Buildings Learn, a six-part documentary that offers insight into how buildings change over time to meet the varying needs of their inhabitants.
In the final part of the documentary, Brand explores different typologies of buildings and their evolution, departing from the example of an 18th-century house in Islington, a prosperous area in north London that ended up as a punk squat in the 1970s and 80s. Brand also considers St. Albans Abbey and almshouses that date back to the 15th century but are still in use today, and although modernized, the basic structure remains intact.
Written by Stewart Brand in 1994 and adapted into a television series by BBC in 1997, How Buildings Learn offers a critique of modernist approaches to architecture and argues for “an organic kind of building, which is easy to change and grow as the ideal form of building.” Refusing the “center out” understanding of design, Brand adopts an evolutionary approach where users can change the functions of a building to meet their varying needs.
All episodes are streaming online until Sunday midnight, November 13 via saltonline.org.