Originally published: New York, NY : Viking, 1994.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 224-229) and index.

Flow -- Shearing layers -- "Nobody cares what you do in there": the low road --- Houseproud: the high road -- Magazine architecture: no road -- Unreal estate -- Preservation: a quiet, populist, conservative, victorious revolution -- The romance of maintenance -- Vernacular: how buildings learn from each other -- Function melts form: satisficing home and office -- The scenario-buffered building -- Built for change -- Appendix: The study of buildings in time.

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.