Shear Complexity

In his 1995 classic How Buildings Learn, generalist Stewart Brand describes this dynamic on the scale of an individual house, in an attempt to understand how spaces adapt over time, or fail to adapt, to the needs of the people who live in them.

Drawing on the earlier work of architect Frank Duffy, Brand introduces something he calls the "shearing layer diagram," which identifies six layers - from the site, which may evolve only over geological stretches of time, to stuff, which changes at the whim and ability of the inhabitants.

A bricks-and-mortar building can easily last fifty, a hundred, three hundred years. By contrast, the social and cultural conventions that go a long way toward shaping the lives lived in that building - understandings regarding the division of labor, gender roles, the place of leisure, the very definition of a family - may undergo titanic changes in a fraction of that time.

Families themselves expand and contract over the course of decades. Styles in furniture and the technologies underpinning the communications devices and other appliances daily life depends on probably change significantly at least once or twice a decade. Windows need cleaning and rain gutters need clearing at yearly intervals. Lightbulbs burn out and lawns need mowing still more often than that.

Brand argues, therefore, that architecture that hardwires a given fashion or social arrangement or deployment of technology into its deeper, slower layers is architecture that is ultimately bound to fail its users.

The insight contained in the diagram, startlingly novel as it was at first appearance, is at root commonsensical. It accords perfectly with those early perceptions of the world: the diverse aspects of the phenomenal world change at different rates, and the differences matter.