Watch Stewart Brand's 6-Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno | Open Culture

-->

-->

-->

-->

-->

-->

Watch Stewart Brand's 6-Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno

-->

The best free cultural &<br>educational media on the web

-->

-->

--><br>Online Courses

Certificates

Degrees & Mini-Degrees

--><br>Audio Books

Movies

Languages --><br>Podcasts

Textbooks --><br>K-12

K-12<br>--><br>eBooks

Languages

Donate

--> -->

Aug<br>12

-->

How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno">Watch Stewart Brand’s 6‑Part Series How Buildings Learn, With Music by Brian Eno

in Architecture, Film | August 12th, 2026 Leave a Comment

-->

-->

Stew­art Brand came onto the cul­tur­al scene dur­ing the 1960s, help­ing to stage the Acid Tests made famous by Ken Kesey and the Mer­ry Pranksters, and lat­er launch­ing the influ­en­tial Whole Earth Cat­a­log (some­thing Steve Jobs described as “Google in paper­back form, 35 years before Google came along”). He also vig­or­ous­ly cam­paigned in 1966 to have NASA release a pho­to­graph show­ing the entire­ty of Earth from space—some­thing we take for grant­ed now, but fired human­i­ty’s imag­i­na­tion back then.

Dur­ing the 1970s and beyond, Brand found­ed CoEvo­lu­tion Quar­ter­ly, a suc­ces­sor to the Whole Earth Cat­a­log; the WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lec­tron­ic Link”), “a pro­to­typ­i­cal, wide-rang­ing online com­mu­ni­ty for intel­li­gent, informed par­tic­i­pants the world over;” and even­tu­al­ly The Long Now Foun­da­tion, whose work we’ve high­light­ed here before. When not cre­at­ing new insti­tu­tions, he has poured his cre­ative ener­gies into books and films.

Above you can watch How Build­ings Learn, Brand’s six-part BBC TV series from 1997, which comes com­plete with music by Bri­an Eno. Based on his illus­trat­ed book shar­ing the same title, the TV series offers a cri­tique of mod­ernist approach­es to archi­tec­ture (think Buck­min­ster Fuller, Frank Gehry, and Le Cor­busier) and instead argues for “an organ­ic kind of build­ing, based on four walls, which is easy to change and expand and grow as the ide­al form of build­ing.”

Brand made the series avail­able on his YouTube chan­nel, with these words: “Any­body is wel­come to use any­thing from this series in any way they like… Hack away. Do cred­it the BBC, who put con­sid­er­able time and tal­ent into the project.” And he added the note­wor­thy foot­note: “this was one of the first tele­vi­sion pro­duc­tions made entire­ly in digital—shot dig­i­tal, edit­ed dig­i­tal.”

Find the first three parts above, and the remain­ing parts below:

Part 1: Flow

Part 2: The Low Road

Part 3: Built for Change

Part 4: Unre­al Estate

Part 5: The Romance of Main­te­nance

Part 6: Shear­ing Lay­ers

You can find How Build­ings Learn added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stew­art Brand’s List of 76 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion

The Acid Test Reels: Ken Kesey & The Grate­ful Dead’s Sound­track for the 1960s Famous LSD Par­ties

Bri­an Eno Explains the Ori­gins of Ambi­ent Music

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and Oth­er Whole Earth Pub­li­ca­tions, Tak­ing You from 1970 to 2002

by OC | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!

-->

Place related post plugin php here...

-->

-->

Comments (0)

Be the first to comment.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

--><br>XHTML: You can use these tags:<br>--><br>Message

Click here to cancel reply.

Wordpress Hashcash needs javascript to work, but your browser has javascript disabled. Your comment will be queued in Akismet!

Essentials

1,700 Free Online Courses

100+ Online Degree & Mini-Degree Programs

1,150 Free Movies

1,000 Free Audio Books

150+ Best Podcasts

800 Free eBooks

200 Free Textbooks

300 Free Language Lessons

Support Us

We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!

Free Courses

Art & Art History

Astronomy

Biology

Business

Chemistry

Classics/Ancient World

Computer Science

Data Science

Economics

Engineering

Environment

History

Literature

Math

Philosophy

Physics

Political Science

Psychology

Religion

Writing & Journalism

All 1700 Free Courses

Free Movies

1150 Free Movies Online

Free Film Noir

Silent Films

Documentaries

Martial Arts/Kung Fu

Animations

Free Hitchcock Films

Free Charlie Chaplin

Free John Wayne Movies

Free Tarkovsky...