Even in the introduction alone, Peter Lindberg finds quite a lot in Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn. His initial insight – in terms of the kind of software development we should focus on – is excellent:
“Brand’s point is that much of architecture today neglects maintenance and adaptation, and his book tries to find out how buildings adapt – how they learn – to see in what ways architecture needs to change.”
“In software development, despite the gaining popularity of agile methods, the trend still is to distinguish between “architects” and mere developers, and to see design as something that is to be completed before implementing. First come the architects and draw boxes and arrows, then the developers to churn out the code. Modern development tools are designed to dispense of developers, by generating the code directly from the boxes and arrows.”
“What software development needs is to stop imitating the illusion of what brick-and-mortar architecture is. According to Brand, brick-and-mortar architecture itself is in a state of illusion, having lost the knowledge of how to successfully build functioning, adaptable houses.”
City of Sound 
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