The F-word

Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built Chapter Six "Unreal Estate" proffers a marvellous piece of pastiche:

Form follows failure.

It closes a paragraph

Building's can't learn if they don't last. Most building code systems are a manifestation of the whole community learning. What they embody is good sense, acquired the hard way from generations of recurrent problems. Form follows failure.

So much of Brand's book also plays it the other way: form leads to failure.

And so for day 186
18.06.2007