Stewart Brand
Penguin Books, 1994
p 54
Marvin Minsky [...] was gazing across the deserted Media Lab atrium with me one day. "The problem with architects," he rasped, "is they think they're artists, and they're not very competent."
p 141
Instead of learning from each other, [...] "catalog architecture" buildings are guided by a standard homogenized pool of building lore which is no longer regional and often not national, but world-encompassing, inescapable and unchallengeable.
How else can we explain the survival from decade to decade of the aluminium-fram sliding glass door? It seems to serve simultaneously as door, window, and wall, but it's terrible at all three.
p 188
A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
In the 1980s, both ecology and economics underwent a quiet revolution when they began to realize that natural and market systems [are] "variance-driven" rather than "equilibrium-based."
Command economies collapsed. Market economies muddled through. By making more mistakes, they had less failures.