How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand is a really great read about the underlying processes that govern the evolution of buildings over time.
All predictions are wrong.
The product of skilled scenario work is not a plan but a strategy. Where a plan is based on prediction, a strategy is designed to encompass unforseeably changing conditions. A good strategy ensures that, no matter what happens, you always have maneuvering room.
Many a building is a brilliant (or pedestrian) design solution to the wrong design problem.
The iron rule of planning is: whatever a client or architect says will happen with a building, won't.
"Our most important responsibility to the future is not to coerce it but to attend to it" [Kevin Lynch, city theorist]
Build something smaller and more solid now that can expand in a variety of directions later.
You have to iterate [Frederick Brooks]
