If a building is allowed to fail small, early and often, and be corrected, the building as a whole can succeed

- Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn (1995)

I'd heard of Stewart Brand's book How Buildings Learn before, but didn't know there was an accompanying TV series (with music by Brian Eno). The TV series is available in full online (episodes 1-6). By focusing on what happens to buildings after they're built, Brand articulates lots of principles that we use in software today. Brand's own notes even refer to it:

Most of the 27 reviews on Amazon treat it as a book about system and software design, which tells me that architects are not as alert as computer people.

It's interesting to see so many insights that tie together the two kindred fields of architecture and software design in one place. The fact is architects still struggle with the seeming permanence of their design decisions - even big memes of recent years like parametric design haven't laid the path for conscious design of adaptive buildings yet. And as Brand points out, it's not neccessarily a technological question, simply a re-definition of the architect's role and attitude.

We, on the other hand, have got it easy, working in a fairly pliable medium of pixels on screens, with tight feedback loops and the opportunity to evolve our design over time both available at a low cost.