Last Futures

“No one warns you that when you get old eras that you lived through are, to the next generation, history. And it is salutory to have one of the wilder fringes of that history recounted with the acuity, sympathy and fluency Douglas Murphy brings to it. The cast is extraordinary: oddballs, philosophers, seers—and a few frauds.” – Jonathan Meades

“In Last Futures, such one-time commonplaces as three day weeks, the elimination of labour, geodesic domes, walking cities, space colonies and industrialised housing are removed from dimwitted ‘where’s my jetpack’ nostalgia and put back into history. In so doing, Douglas Murphy performs the useful service of making clear when the ideas of the unrealised futures of the 1960s and 1970s were stupid and wasteful, and when they were exceptionally smart—serious solutions to problems we still haven’t solved, and problems we seem intent on making considerably worse. Last Futures is the Silent Running to contemporary architecture’s The Fountainhead.” – Owen Hatherley, author of Landscapes of Communism

“Murphy’s chief virtue is the faculty with which he connects the dots between various, seemingly unconnected developments in architecture and theory with the ecological, financial, and military crises of an earlier era, holding a mirror onto our own anxious epoch of globalized precarity labor and anthropogenic climate change.” – Anna Khachiyan, Metropolis Magazine

“A fluent, chronological narrative in which oddities from the recent past form sequences in an unfolding drama … Murphy deploys his storytelling with great effect.” – Architecture Today