print this article | 
e-mail this article
comment True Green
Lessons from 1960s’-70s’ Counterculture Architecture
Modernism and the cult of the machine seemed corrupt. Who wanted to live in a soul-withering box? Who really wanted to live in Corb’s machine à habiter? Instead of steamships and airplane fuselages, young architects were studying bird’s nests, honeycombs, bowers, anthills, and beaver dams while condemning the monuments of the modern movement as so many “architectural bombing runs.” One long-haired builder explained, “We want our homes to spring from the soil like trees.” (Bernard Rudofsky’s 1964 Architecture Without Architects and D’Arcy Thompson’s 1917 On Growth and Form were popular sources of inspiration.) In his fervently utopian proposals for Mesa City (1955–60), Soleri was studying seedpods and stamens. Others, borrowing Soleri’s silt-casting techniques, built mounds of earth, covered them with concrete, and scooped out the dirt when the concrete had set. In 1972, Aleksandra Kasuba created a cocoon dwelling in the woods of Woodstock, New York, by pulling stretch fabric between the branches and trunks of different trees. “The approach was spontaneous throughout,” she said. Fourteen people lived inside the ghostly membrane during Whiz Bang City East, an alternative gathering held that summer.
Based on what you have seen and read about this project, how would you grade it? Use the stars below to indicate your assessment, five stars being the highest rating.
In 1970, Charles Harker and members of the Tao Design collaborative—most of them disillusioned students from the architecture program at the University of Texas, Austin—built “Earth House” working without plans, improvising as they went, weaving strands of PVC piping into nestlike configurations and then spraying the structural skeleton with polyurethane foam. “All design is spontaneous,” said Harker, who compared the process to the metamorphosis of a butterfly. Around the same time, Bob de Buck built a house that resembled a giant anthill in the desert near Truchas, New Mexico, using scrap wood scavenged from building sites around Albuquerque. “Tools not to have: straightedge, square, level, plumb,” advised de Buck. Steve Baer, itinerant hippie builder and inventor of the “Zome,” drove by one afternoon and mistook it for a heap of garbage until he got closer and began to see the beauty of its weird, fractured anatomy.
In the funky, self-build revolution, making shelter was seen as an act of personal transformation and revelation. This credo was spread by word of mouth, by contact high, by a kind of telepathic interconnection that was also known as grokking. It was just there, somehow, in the air, the back-to-nature vibe, the need to make shelter, the need to uncomplicate one’s life. There was scrounging and recycling of old materials, living off the spoils of straight society. “Trapped inside a waste economy, man finds an identity as a consumer,” wrote Bill Voyd. “Once outside the trap, he finds enormous resources at his disposal—free.” Voyd and other pioneers at Drop City learned to chop the metal tops out of junked cars and shape them into building panels. Other free-form builders learned to work with bottles, mounds of earth, mud bricks, old tires, and bales of hay. Hippie surfers in Big Sur, California, fabricated driftwood houses and lived there happily until the Coast Guard bulldozed the funky structures into the sea. A more permanent community was established across the border on Hornby Island, British Columbia, by U.S. draft dodgers and self-build architects who fashioned surprisingly sophisticated shelters using only driftwood.
While ideas from the outlaw architects would filter quietly into the mainstream, the movement as a whole, the urge to build like beavers, was later dismissed along with LSD, tie-died T-shirts, and free love. Ronald Reagan, when running for Governor of California in 1967 said, “There will be no more Morning Stars,” referring to the infamous free-land commune in Sonoma County. He rode the reactionary upswell all the way to the White House. The proverbial genie somehow was put back into the bottle. By the late ’70s and early ’80s, architects started talking more about Palladian villas than biodegradable privies. Domes were dissed. (They leaked.) Walls and doors were seen as good things. People wanted privacy, not the communal bean pot. Hollow Corinthian columns and faux facades filled the architecture magazines while talk of solar, sustainable, or recycled design was shrugged off, seen as something of an embarrassment, a holdover from funky, Birkenstock-wearing hippies.
Notions of sustainability, ephemeralization, simplifying life, and reducing our carbon footprint have come full circle and seem more urgent today than ever before. But while the shaggy ’60s may be up for review, they come with a haircut, shorn as they are of the social/cultural revolution that drove them. And the question remains, can you have one without the other? True sustainability without sweeping social change? True green without revolution? Consumers beware: When one hears companies like Exxon, General Motors, and Merck Chemical talking green, then you know it’s probably time to check in with Alice and slide back down the rabbit hole.
del.icio.us
Subscribe to Get Free Architectural Record newsletter | Architectural Record in print | Back Issues | Manage your subscription | Get Architectural Record digitally
Reader Comments:
