Why do some buildings age like wine and others like milk?

I recently read an old but brilliant book: How Buildings Learn (1994) by Stewart Brand. Buildings exist in space, but also across time. Why do some buildings age like wine - but others like milk? A memo with multiple answers👇👇👇

Failing to learn from nature. Nature is a builder worth learning from. Natural scenes are harmonious because they evolve slowly. Natural elements respond to feedback and constantly micro-adjust. Human buildings are set up too rigidly with little room to evolve over time.

Blame the magazines. Architectural mags mislead builders to focus on the building's exterior. How it looks takes precedence over whether it works. Brand: "Effort goes into impressing the wrong people—passers-by instead of the people who use the building."

Architecture can't be art. Brand: "Art must be inherently radical, but buildings are inherently conservative." Art is experimental & "most experiments fail." Buildings can't afford to fail - people live inside.

Architects must be craftsmen not artists. A craft item is "something useful made with artfulness." A craftsman doesn't let practical utility get elbowed out by novel design. Neither should architects.

Final look vs the process. Copy the process that leads to great cities, not their final look. Venice is "a monument to a dynamic process, not to great planning." Beautiful cities emerge when builders follow “the cardinal rule of good urban design—respect for what came before.”

Aesthetic infrastructure. A city needs transport, utilities - but also an “aesthetic infrastructure.” Tourism contributes more to NYC’s GDP than anything else, including its financial sector. Tech is great - but to prosper, a city also needs “a background of valued remains.”

Old buildings = freedom. Old buildings free the builders through their very constraints. A new site is paralyzing. Brand: “It is much easier to continue than to begin.” Old buildings restrict what you can do with them - & these constraints shape one’s “effort & ingenuity.”

Against sliding doors. Sliding doors are meant to be “door, window, and wall,” but they’re “terrible at all three.” People bump into them, they reveal too much, & they bleed heat - always in the wrong direction.

Bottom line: The magazines’ shallow focus on the exterior & architecture’s ambition to be an artform hurts the long-term survival of buildings. Builders should embrace the organic process that built great cities & rethink architecture as a craft to help buildings age better.