Books by Stewart Brand
“Brand wrote it in 1999. It came out of his Long Now Foundation which has at its core the idea of expanding our time horizons. For Brand and the Foundation, ‘long-term’ means 10,000 years in the future. One of their main projects is the clock you mentioned. And yes, it is an actual clock being built inside a mountain in the Texas desert as we speak.” Read more...
The Best Books for Long-Term Thinking
Roman Krznaric, Philosopher
Whole Earth Discipline
by Stewart Brand
This is a paean for three things he thinks the environmental movement should adopt and has got wrong. One is nuclear power, the other is GM food and the third is cities. He says urbanisation is a good thing because it’s all about people moving from the countryside into cities where there’s opportunity and they can raise their living standards and escape the stifling social aspects of villages.
How Buildings Learn
by Stewart Brand
The book is written by a non-architect. Stuart Brand is a person who thinks clearly about our future, and therefore is in a good position to comment on the future life of architecture. He makes the very simple argument that buildings have a life beyond their immediate completion, and that architects should design their buildings acknowledging that. The standard architectural approach to adaptable buildings changing is to use lots of gizmos: sliding doors, folding screens and so on. Brand’s thesis is different – although he does talk about the technical stuff, his view is that adapting buildings is more of a social endeavour.
Interviews where books by Stewart Brand were recommended
The best books on The Context of Architecture, recommended by Jeremy Till
Architecture depends at the building stage on money and politics, and later on users, time and weather. Jeremy Till picks five books to allow you behind the scenes of the building sites.
The best books on Technology and Optimism, recommended by Matt Ridley
The science writer says we are obsessively pessimistic for no good reason. Our innate ability to innovate with technology is what will ultimately save us from disaster
The Best Books for Long-Term Thinking, recommended by Roman Krznaric
We would all love our economic and political systems to be less short-termist in approach, but how do we set about encouraging a more long-term ethos? Cultural thinker Roman Krznaric, author of The Good Ancestor, recommends five books to get us thinking about the long term, up to ten millennia in the future.
