A great look at how buildings could be built better to serve the people who live and work within them – architects right now design solely for beauty and don’t ever consider creating a building which will be usable in the long run after it outgrows the function it was designed for. Buildings should encourage and simplify change. They should be adaptable to the max, not austere and sedentary.
I don’t really feel like summarizing, so I’ll leave my favorite quote of the book:
The iron rule of planning is: whatever a client or an architect says will happen with a building, won’t. Architects always want to control the future. SO do clients. A big, physical building seems a perfect way to bind the course of future events. (“Once we move the company into the new building, then we can use it to limit our growth.”) It never works. The future is no more controllable then it is predictable. The only reliable attitude to take toward the future is that it is profoundly, structurally, unaviodably perverse. The rest of the iron rule is: whatever you are ready for, doesn’t happen; whatever you are unready for, does. pg 181
So build around uncertainty, plan for different ideas, and you could possibly be all set.