The most interesting architecture story of recent months is neither Adrien Brody’s Oscar for playing an architect, nor Donald Trump’s executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”. It was the revelation, late last year, that the first building to win the prestigious Stirling Prize is now scheduled to be demolished.
The building, the University of Salford’s Centenary Building, was only completed in 1995 and for nearly a decade it has been largely vacant. The plans to knock it down have frustrated those who argue that it is greener to repurpose a building than to replace it. Former Riba president Jack Pringle has suggested that all Stirling Prize winners should be “listed”, introducing more regulatory barriers to changing or replacing them. But if architects did a better job of making beautiful, practical and adaptable buildings, would such protections really be needed?
About the same time as the Centenary Building was receiving its plaudits from the architectural establishment, the iconoclastic thinker Stewart Brand published a book and presented a BBC television series, both titled How Buildings Learn. Brand was unsparingly critical of much contemporary architecture, but his work was much more than a grumble about carbuncles. Instead, he made a striking and powerful argument: all buildings are predictions, and all predictions are wrong.
Sometimes the errors are obvious and blameworthy. Flat roofs often leak, large windows trap the sun’s heat, hard surfaces reflect noise. No matter how pretty your award-winning library looks on Instagram, such failings will make it unloved if not unusable.
But often the predictions are wrong because they could never have been right. Inventions from air conditioning to the car, the shopping mall to the internet, have reshaped what we can do with buildings and what we need from them. Nobody can reasonably blame the Victorian architect of a quayside warehouse for not anticipating the rise of the shipping container, nor the designer of a fine Georgian townhouse for failing to foresee the coming of the safety elevator. For Brand, then, the mark of a good building is that it gracefully adapts in the face of change.
Building on the work of the architect Frank Duffy, Brand outlined six different layers of a building, from the site to the structure (which can last decades) to the skin and services (cladding and wiring may be changed every decade or so) to the space plan (which may change every few years) and the “stuff” (furniture and appliances in frequent motion). Buildings adapt well when the slow layers such as the structure do not prevent changes to faster layers.
So what sort of buildings age gracefully? Brand outlines three approaches.
First, the “High Road”: build something so staggeringly beautiful that the world will contort itself to preserve it, such as Rouen Cathedral, Chatsworth House or the Parthenon. More practical, however, is the “Low Road”, relying on simple and unpretentious shapes and structures. Old warehouses and terraces endure because they are easy to amend or extend.
Absolutely to be avoided is the third way, which Brand disdains as “Magazine Architecture” — clever exteriors that look good in photographs but are impractical and inflexible for those unfortunate enough to have to inhabit them. A geodesic dome looks amazing, until you want to soundproof it, insulate it, extend it or even put up a set of shelves.
All buildings are predictions, then. But useful as that perspective might be, why stop there? Many other things are also predictions. A marriage is a prediction. So is a new business. So is an institution such as the UK parliament or Nato. And since all predictions are wrong, marriages, businesses and institutions also have to change, whether gracefully or not.
Insert your own metaphor here: strong foundations, expensive renovations, endless leaks. One can push the analogy too far. But Brand’s idea remains insightful. Our lives are shaped by relationships and organisations that must keep adapting to changing circumstances.
Airport bookshops are full of books about corporate adaptability. What is a start-up if not a Low-Road institution, simple, spare and ready to pivot? Marriages and institutions, in contrast, lean heavily on the High-Road idea that nothing will, should or can change. Or perhaps they are more like Magazine Architecture, designed to be photogenic but rotten under the surface.
In fact, marriages often adapt just fine. Step beyond the wedding vows and the impractical dress, and a good marriage is a Low-Road structure after all: unpretentious, unflashy and practical. It is built of timeworn elements, to be adjusted as needed. It is not made for show.
Institutional change is not so easy. Many institutions are High Road at best, and Magazine Architecture at worst. Much of their dignity and their power comes from their pretence at permanence. Nato needs to be flexible, sure — but isn’t the whole point of Nato a certain unyielding constancy? One might say the same for the US constitution.
These institutions have committed themselves to the High Road: grand, noble and often expensive. But they also need to serve a practical function, which means they must adapt. If not, we can all see that the wrecking crews grow ever bolder.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 14 March 2025.
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