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How long does it take to read How Buildings Learn?

What Happens After They're Built

Stewart Brand

How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand takes about 4 hours 27 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 27 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1994. 243 pages, about 66,825 words.

9 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 7 hours 26 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 27 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 47 minutes

The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

Buildings have often been studies whole in space, but never before have they been studied whole in time. How Buildings Learn is a masterful new synthesis that proposes that buildings adapt best when constantly refined and reshaped by their occupants, and that architects can mature from being artists of space to becoming artists of time. From the connected farmhouses of New England to I.M. Pei's Media Lab, from "satisficing" to "form follows funding," from the evolution of bungalows to the invention of Santa Fe Style, from Low Road military surplus buildings to a High Road English classic like Chatsworth -- this is a far-ranging survey of unexplored essential territory. More than any other human artifacts, buildings improve with time -- if they're allowed to. How Buildings Learn shows how to work with time rather than against it. - Publisher.

Subjects: Buildings, Performance, Human factors, Architecture, Utilization, Long Now Manual for Civilization

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