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True Green

Lessons from 1960s’-70s’ Counterculture Architecture

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By Alastair Gordon

So much depends on the perception of a post-petroleum future, a single tree, melting ice caps, Al Gore’s waistline, innovations in alternative energies, and C.E.O.s who convince their boards to go green or, at least, adopt the rhetoric of green. Meanwhile, Americans are consuming more, driving bigger SUVs, buying more needless stuff, living in denial, and dumbing down. So can we still look to architects and planners for new attitudes and new paradigms? Good architecture, like some of the freestanding houses in this issue, can help shape our expectations and give us an idea of what the future might bring, truly sustainable or not. “Green” may be a pill that’s harder to swallow than one imagined, and maybe it’s not so bad to talk about aesthetics after all: Are we still waiting for the green version of the Villa Savoie or the Farnsworth House? There is no unity or single direction apparent.

Photo © Jack Fulton

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It’s a good time to look back to the originating seeds of green, to the anarchic 1960s and Bucky Fuller’s philosophy of “ephemeralization” (doing more with less.) Conspicuous similarities can be detected between then and now, certainly a general ennui and loss of confidence in the status quo, along with the urge to save our planet. Conventional parameters of city, community, family, and housing were all thrown out in the psychedelic era, seen as part of the same mind-set that brought carpet bombing to Vietnam.

In 1965, a group of art students founded Drop City, a domed commune in Colorado. “Houses in our society are walls, blocking man from man, man from the universe, man from himself,” wrote Bill Voyd, one of the founders. Paolo Soleri was preaching arcology, a combination of architecture and ecology, back in the early ’60s, and instead of just theorizing, he went into the Arizona desert like an Old Testament prophet and began to actually build Arcosanti, the prototype for a new kind of organic, high-density city (without cars) surrounded by natural wilderness. It still thrives today, 38 years later. Steve Durkee and other members of USCO (“Company of Us”), a multimedia collaborative formed in New York in 1964, conjured up the idea of “Solux” in early manifestos and then went forth and built their “spiritual dude ranch” on a mountainside near Taos, New Mexico. (The name changed from Solux to Lama.) Anything seemed possible since young people were willing to give up the comforts of middle-class affluence and live in a state of what Ivan Illich, Austrian philosopher and anarchist, called “voluntary primitivism.” They did without television or plumbing or central heating while learning the ways of the compost heap, the privy, and the communal washtub.

With hallucinogenic drugs as lubricant, college dropouts who had never built much of anything felt empowered to move into the wilderness and create whole new communities. A group of Yale architecture students, led by Dave Sellers and Bill Rienecke, were sick of Modernist theory, moved to Prickly Mountain, Vermont, in the mid-’60s and started building houses with their own hands. A group of Princeton students, led by Steve Badanes, called themselves Jersey Devil and followed suit.

For many New Age utopians, Fuller’s geodesic dome offered the greatest promise, with its single embracing space, ideal for collective living, maximum enclosure constructed from minimum material. There seemed to be an inherent magic in all things circular. “Corners constrict the mind,” wrote one hippie builder. “Build circular musical structures and help destroy rational box-reality,” declared another who believed that the square had contaminated every aspect of Western civilization from the sandbox to the grid of corporate Modernism. While hundreds of domes had been built by 1959, Fuller’s vision flowered in the mid-to-late ’60s when the children of the counterculture adopted the dome as a symbol of both resistance and solidarity. Indeed, it could be seen as the seed for a whole new civilization, one that was communal, self-supporting, nonhierarchical. Its simple geometry suggested a multifaceted crystal, the eye of God, a circle of fellowship, and the mysterious oneness that so many had experienced on LSD and Psilocybin. “You merge with the dome; its skin becomes your skin,” said one geodesic convert.

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