Architecture in the Sixties and the Sixties in architecture

This article was downloaded by: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] On: 15 June 2009 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 755239602] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK The Sixties Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://wwwintra.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t777764756 Architecture in the Sixties and the Sixties in architecture Timothy Hyde a a Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Online Publication Date: 01 June 2009 To cite this Article Hyde, Timothy(2009)'Architecture in the Sixties and the Sixties in architecture',The Sixties,2:1,97 — 105 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17541320902909623 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17541320902909623 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www-intra.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture Vol. 2, No. 1, June 2009, 97–105 REVIEW ESSAY Architecture in the Sixties and the Sixties in architecture Topologies: the urban utopia in France, 1960–1970, by Larry Busbea, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2007, 320 pp., $24.95 (paperback), ISBN 78-0262026112 Downloaded By: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] At: 16:03 15 June 2009 NG8 Dr RSIX_A_391134.sgm Taylor The 10.1080/17541320902909623 1754-1328 210Original 2009 000002009 TimothyHyde Sixties: 1BBthyde@gsd.harvard.edu & and Article Francis (print)/1754-1336 Francis A Journal of History, (online) Politics and culture Spaced out: radical environments of the psychedelic Sixties, by Alastair Gordon, New York, Rizzoli, 2008, 304 pp., $65.00 (cloth), ISBN-10 0847831051 From agit-prop to free space: the architecture of Cedric Price, by Stanley Matthews, London, Black Dog Publishing, 2007, $45.00 (cloth), ISBN-10 1904772528 Architecture or techno-utopia: politics after modernism, by Felicity Scott, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2007, $29.95 (cloth), ISBN-10 0-262-19562-3 Living archive 7: Ant Farm, by Felicity Scott, Barcelona, ACTAR, 2007, $54.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-84-96954-24-3 Beyond Archigram: the structure of circulation, by Hadas A. Steiner, London, Routledge, 2008, $43.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-415-39477-2 In 1966, a leading architectural journal published an article entitled, “LSD: A Design Tool?” Interviews with architects who had experimented with LSD and a survey of medical data led the magazine to conclude that the drug, carefully administered, promised to “enhance creativity to the extent that it vastly speeds up problem-solving, aids in visualizing three-dimensionally, and generally heightens perceptivity.”1 In 1967, the Yale School of Architecture initiated a program in which the first-year students would construct a building of their own design. The first two projects, community centers for small Appalachian towns in Kentucky, were among the activities that prompted the Dean to proudly report to the Yale Corporation that his was an “extraordinarily turned on school.”2 And in May 1968, in Paris, the architecture students of the Ecole des Beaux Arts transformed their occupied school into a self-proclaimed Atelier Populaire. They produced dozens of revolutionary affiches that were first plastered along the streets of the city and then, only a few months later, exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art. Still, the intentions and impulses of the Sixties did not banish the institutional tendencies of architecture. Schools of architecture adopted real changes to their curricula, but none so far-reaching as to fully expurgate the habits and practices of schools a decade earlier. The individualism and non-conformism of the Sixties was easily assimilated into the discipline’s existing model of the iconoclastic visionary – a process Frank Lloyd Wright had already demonstrated in television interviews with ISSN 1754-1328 print/ISSN 1754-1336 online DOI: 10.1080/17541320902909623 http://www.informaworld.com Downloaded By: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] At: 16:03 15 June 2009 98 Review essay Mike Wallace. Large architecture and engineering firms such as SOM and Ove Arup expanded during the period into global organizations closely linked to state development. As for buildings, the overt succession of style proceeded from the late modernism of Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn to pastiche postmodernism seemingly without adopting forms, images or techniques patently identified with the Sixties, akin to the Moog synthesizer in music, for example, or Robert Crumb’s comics in graphic art. The proximity between disciplinary changes that occurred in architecture and sweeping transformations that took place culturally provides the subject matter of several recent publications. In architecture, the period suitably identified as the Sixties would extend from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. It commenced with a generational shift (recognized as such by its participants) as a cohort of young architects emerging from schools perceived a widening gap between the changing circumstances of contemporary societies and modern architecture’s cognizance of those circumstances. This generational shift was installed within the discipline’s self-periodization as soon as it occurred, but has since been portrayed primarily in the closed terms of an internal discursive debate. These new histories, however, survey the transition from a wider perspective, one that takes in the technological, cultural, political, and above all social revolutions from which the architectural developments should never have been separated. Architecture, technology, and leisure Imagine, superimposed above a postcard view of Paris, an enormous metal armature holding a labyrinth of rectangular blocks, rooms, buildings, and open spaces that will float above the existing monuments and streets. An entire new city, organically conceived and unlimited in form, suspended above the old, now obsolete, city. This vision was one of dozens of images proposed by the architect Yona Friedman, a central protagonist in the experimental field of urban environments documented in Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970. As author Larry Busbea points out, such radical architectural practices emerged in several venues in Europe, the United States, and Japan during this period, and have often been presented in exhibitions and monographs as a common movement.3 While there were similarities and even some direct connections between them, the disparities of their national and economic contexts should not be disregarded because it was precisely through such contextual particularities that the practices asserted claims of agency and meaning. In the case of France, Busbea argues, facts such as the construction of large-scale housing estates on urban peripheries and a widespread unease with capitalist modernity prompted intellectuals such as Abraham Moles and Henri Lefebvre to address the pivotal significance of urban form.4 For architects, post-war European cities had already inspired new speculations on the correspondence of urban forms and social structures. By mid-century, these speculations ignited an expanding debate contrasting the urban proposals pursued by an earlier generation of modernists after the war with those now advocated by a younger generation. While Friedman produced some of the earliest representations of the new conception of ‘spatial urbanism,’ the work of several other architects and urbanists in France soon pursued parallel interests that engaged the developing fields of cybernetics, information theory, and sociology. The theories of play articulated by Johan Huizinga and Roger Callois were also influential, because many of the works of Downloaded By: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] At: 16:03 15 June 2009 The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 99 spatial urbanism presumed the imminent affordance of leisure and choice. As physical spaces relived of rigid constraints, these environments offered a vision of social freedom, variation, and responsiveness commensurate to new social orders that seemed about to emerge from technological and cultural transformations. None of these speculative cities were ever realized at an urban scale, but the numerous representations of them put into circulation by Friedman, Paul Maymont, Nicolas Schöffer, and others offered a vivid formal language. Space frames – lightweight metal armatures – provided the primary structural support, which could then be filled with enclosures to produce rooms and buildings and urban spaces in variable, contingent arrangements. Busbea contrasts these designs with those proposed by Architecture Principe, a collaborative that included the architect Claude Parent and the theorist Paul Virilio, who advocated a phenomenological rather than structuralist basis for future inhabitations. The sharp contrast allows Busbea to propose the works of spatial urbanism as a concluding attempt by modernism to embrace and manage the elastic contingencies emerging from social upheavals. Changing social configurations were central also to architectural debate in Great Britain. The post-war context of loosening class structures, the politics of social welfare, and the expansion of consumerism contributed to a widespread presumption that the nation was entering a period in which leisure would be widely and easily afforded by all social classes. This presumption underwrote some of the most significant work of the architect Cedric Price, whose career and major projects are the subject of From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price, by Stanley Matthews. In contrast to the advocates of spatial urbanism, Price concentrated upon the design of individual buildings rather than urban networks. But the new types of building he anticipated would, Price believed, produce a dense concentration of urban activity. Price began to explore this possibility after meeting the theater director Joan Littlewood in 1962 and learning of her intention to construct a participatory “people’s theatre.” He became Littlewood’s collaborator for a project they called the Fun Palace, a center for gathering, loitering, eating, learning, performing, and more vaguely defined social activities. Price’s design consisted of several vertical towers evenly spaced alongside large open spaces and platforms. The towers supported gantry cranes that would allow for the constant assembly, modification, and disassembly of the different parts of the building. Price thought an indeterminate architecture that never settled into a fixed configuration would continually be altered and adapted in response to the activities and demands that emerged from its use over time. This design would correspond to Littlewood’s intention that the Fun Palace encourage in its visitors a conscious sense of interaction and engagement. Their leisure time – whether spent dancing, watching films or performances, playing games – would parallel educational activities in classes, workshops and spontaneous participatory events. The problem Price faced was in overcoming architecture’s predisposition toward static, permanent configurations. The necessity of achieving a new architectural capacity for inconstancy led him to a study of variable environments and to the new science of cybernetics. The team of expert collaborators Price and Littlewood recruited for the project included the cybernetician Gordon Pask, who took on the task of “programming” the Fun Palace, devising computational strategies to regulate an interactive relationship between the building and its users.5 These and other aspects of the Fun Palace were developed in great detail, with a practical attention to structural and technological criteria. But despite determined efforts to acquire a site in East Downloaded By: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] At: 16:03 15 June 2009 100 Review essay London and patient negotiations with the government agencies to assist its realization, the Fun Palace project was abandoned in 1965. Price and Littlewood struggled throughout to make their project recognizable to bureaucratic reviewers and legible to the working class audience for whom it was proposed. Matthews, with a careful reconstruction of their attempts, reveals the irony of the Fun Palace. Its supposed freedom of participation would be produced through Pask’s science of control, so that this ruthlessly unsentimental architecture, which appeared eagerly to anticipate its own obsolescence, might have been not the initiation of a new social organization, but the apotheosis of an existing one. Concurrent with the Fun Palace and Price’s other experimental projects, the appearance of a new architectural journal catalyzed a wider attentiveness to change and flexibility. Archigram was the name of the journal and also of the group that produced it, a loose collaborative of six architects. The first issue, which appeared in 1961, was only two sheets of paper with a crude collage and a handwritten text announcing a turn away from established modernism. But by 1970, when the considerably more polished ninth and final issue came out, Archigram had established a reputation for radical architectural ideas that propagated through architecture schools and professional journals. In Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation, Hadas Steiner examines the growth and the significance of this influence by approaching Archigram as an intellectual project that sought not a real but a possible architecture, responsive to the rapid change that characterized technological societies. The Archigram group believed that the continued presence of architecture in the emerging technological culture of the Sixties was by no means guaranteed. It faced challenges from systems of electronic communication, from the fast-paced production and obsolescence cycles of consumer capitalism, and from the increasing nomadism of urban populations. Archigram focused upon architecture’s relationship to infrastructures, first the hard infrastructure of the city, but then increasingly the soft infrastructure of networks and media. The members of Archigram developed strategic responses that ranged from the Plug-In City, a vast city assembled entirely of plug-in components, to the Suitaloon, a plastic suit that could be inflated to create a small portable shelter for its nomadic wearer. Steiner argues that the relevance of these projects lay in their projection of an image of architecture – or architecture as an image – fully embedded within the pressures and potentials of its contexts. By proposing radically new ways to imagine and to recognize the presence of architecture within seemingly non-architectural endeavors, Archigram contributed to an accelerating pull away from the conventional constraints embedded within the discipline. The Instant City project developed by the group from 1968 to 1970 illustrates the point. A fleet of dirigibles would carry a set of components – structural, audio-visual, graphical – to provincial towns around Britain; the components would be used to extend, reconfigure, or appropriate existing elements of the town, transforming them into platforms for cosmopolitan culture, for parties, classes, concerts, or films: an Instant City. Once the town had been seeded in this way, the dirigible could continue on to the next town, removing some components but still leaving the city behind. The analogy to the function of hardware and software was evident, and pointed to Archigram’s view that architecture should be a mode of infrastructure used to produce the settings for future social configurations. For all their particular differences – and there were significant aesthetic and political differences – the experimental architectural practices in France and Great The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 101 Downloaded By: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] At: 16:03 15 June 2009 Britain shared the view that architecture would envision and enable the development of future social settlements in new urban configurations. They moved deliberately away from the convictions of an architecture of buildings and toward the beliefs of an architecture of organization. Systems appeared to these architects as a parallel to the social potentials glimpsed in the transformative ruptures being provoked by technological change. In 1963, Archigram had already succinctly framed the threat to architecture, with the observation that “When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more important than the rain.” But if architecture itself could be re-conceived and imagined to exist as a constellation of other media outside or beyond the presence of individual buildings or urban formations, then the discipline of architecture could be opened as a venue for the Sixties. Architecture and counterculture Stroboscopic lighting, inflatable furniture, and neon colors; communes, primitive huts, and geodesic domes – these distinctive symbols of the counterculture pulled away from the institutional and conventional predilections of design. They resulted from a reaction against the established tendencies of modernism: its ascetic functionalism, its confident embrace of technology, its high regard for expertise. In the counterculture and the radical politics with which it emerged, the concept of environment gained an instrumental position of diagnosis and prescription that sustained, among other positions, the critical perspective of Edward Abbey, the new pioneer sensibility of Stewart Brand, and Timothy Leary’s consciousness-raising. Architecture’s concern for the design of social settings was readily diffused into the counterculture as the design of environment, and the objects and techniques of architecture became potent instruments of culture. In Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties, Alastair Gordon compiles vivid evidence of the physical settings of the counterculture: drawings and photographs of hallucinogenic rooms contrived to improve acid trips; soft biomorphic interiors filled with bubble furniture; junkyard geodesic domes, wood sheds and adobe grottos at self-built communes. These “monuments of the psychedelic revolution” were the architecture of the counterculture, designed to organize and foster the social and political desires of its participants. Some of these interiors were intended to intensify and alter states of perception. Vibrations, an installation at the Architecture League in New York, used reflective surfaces, labyrinthine arrangement, and coordinated sound and light to produce jarring disorientations. At the Electric Circus downtown, similar techniques accompanied the performances of the Velvet Underground for a paying audience. Leary’s followers employed them too at the colony in Millbrook for their experiments in transcendental art. Gordon describes these and other radical environments of seekers, hippies, and drop-outs in narrative fashion, drawing associations between their physical and experiential qualities and the motives and needs of the counterculture as recalled in contemporaneous and retrospective anecdotes. The narrative employs a familiar arc – the Sixties as an unfulfilled promise – that avoids a further, much-warranted examination of connections between mainstream sources and their countercultural variants to discern important reciprocities between the discipline of architecture and its cultural surroundings. For example, Gordon discusses informal building practices used at the Morning Star commune and other outposts of the hippie movement. Dropping out required at least a minimum of skill Downloaded By: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] At: 16:03 15 June 2009 102 Review essay for self-preservation, and self-building, along with the use of wood and stone or the detritus of consumer society, assumed a strong political valence as an instrument of individual independence. In 1968, the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog accelerated this trend, with its brew of technology, self-reliance, and primitivism providing ready “access to tools.” The discipline, and profession, of architecture was hardly unaffected by these developments. Architecture Without Architects, an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1964, offered a challenge to the prevailing technological conceits of modernism, with its photographs of vernacular buildings and settlements suggesting that such traditional or provisional practices had an equal claim to be designated as architecture. As the spaces of the counterculture were realized, their new architectures included some characteristic forms, but the legible geometry of the dome and the angled timbers of vernacular sheds and the organic curves of adobe structures were not proposed as the architecture of a future society; they were the evidence of techniques that might enable the freedoms of that society. Such artifacts suggest the emergence of a challenge to prevailing definitions of architecture, and perhaps even sharp revisions to those definitions. Architecture or Techno-utopia: Politics after Modernism and the related publication, Living Archive 7: Ant Farm, focus on the late movement into the 1970s, when several architectural practices that had absorbed the ambitions of groups like Archigram found themselves navigating culture and politics after 1968. In these two books, Felicity Scott examines actors and events that bridged institutional and countercultural settings from a rigorous historical perspective in order to draw out such larger implications. The Museum of Modern Art, for example, appears as a pivotal location for a confrontation between architecture and the media technologies of communication staged in exhibitions of a series of speculative postures. Scott poses her question concisely: what were the political strategies and implications of these practices, which were, after the Sixties, suppressed by a dominant narrative of architectural disciplinarity? In the case of Drop City in Colorado, Scott reveals the ways in which the seemingly outlaw commune was cannily inserted within the overlooked margins of the mainstream society that had provoked it. The founders of Drop City appropriated the technological capacities of Buckminster Fuller’s dome research and converted it with a scrap-collecting technique. Attending one of his lectures convinced them that the geodesic and other triangulated domes would be the only suitable accommodation of their experimental society; but they developed their own process of cladding the domes with scrap metal chopped from the roofs of junked cars. Scott explains that Drop City’s complex embrace of technology was highly self-conscious. The building of the commune was documented on film from the start, and the elaborate domes of Drop City became a venue for experimental performances and art. Drop City was less a proposition for a new society than an invention for a new media. This transition into media represented a crucial turn in experimental architecture, as Scott argues in discussing Ant Farm, another collaborative of architects whose work was equal parts discourse and lifestyle. Their two best-known works, Cadillac Ranch and Media Burn, already occupy a place in art historical discourse. Architectural discourse has assimilated their projects less readily, leaving Scott to demonstrate their relevance to changes within the discipline in the last years of the Sixties. With strong connections to architecture schools around the US, Ant Farm found (or created) an audience intent on opening the cultural potentials of architecture. Many Ant Farm Downloaded By: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] At: 16:03 15 June 2009 The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 103 projects outlined scenarios for events that might or might not take place, with elaborate performances using designed objects set within deliberately contrived contexts. Inflatable structures – plastic sheets filled with compressed air to create enormous pillow-like rooms – often provided the settings, as in the Air Emergency they staged at Berkeley in 1970. First an air raid siren, then an announcement that pollution had reached deadly levels, advised passers-by to take shelter in the inflatable Clean Air Pod. Ant Farm members wearing white jumpsuits and gas masks distributed negative census forms and other mortality-tracking devices to the crowd. That same year, Ant Farm published the Inflatocookbook, a how-to guide for making inflatables. Stewart Brand used an Ant Farm inflatable as the production office of the Whole Earth Catalog in the Outlaw Area of the California desert, and another served as the medical tent at Altamont. Like the creators of Drop City, the members of Ant Farm understood their work as a media production. They used still photography and, almost as soon as it became available, portable video as means not only to document but actually to produce their work. Their projects were media events, and it is this aspect that has seemed to distance them from architecture despite their repeated self-identification as architects. That distance may be bridged, though, if one follows Scott’s demonstration of Ant Farm’s awareness of the cultural situation that encompassed their projects. Their work, and that of the other experimental practices Scott addresses, revealed compelling anachronisms that arose out of the displacement between prior and subsequent technological forms; and that awareness should be acknowledged as the implication of architecture because it produced such settings, resonantly discontinuous with their present moment. And while the architectural products of the counterculture – Leary’s psychedelic rooms, cosmopolitan soft rooms, and rural shacks – did contain the hope of realizable futures, their contribution to architecture, their presence within the discipline, may exist precisely in the continued impossibility of those futures. The medium of architecture Dear Sirs, I read with consummate interest your spell-binding literature about changing lifestyles. I have at this moment an old lifestyle I would like to trade in … Please forward under plain cover your BumPak with hippie-extras. I wait in anticipation. D. Greene (Letter to Ant Farm from David Greene of Archigram, 1970) 6 To look for an architectural expression of the Sixties is to mistake the consequence of the period; look instead for an expression of the Sixties within architecture. The experimental work surveyed and interpreted in these publications consists of such intrusions and manifestations of the cultural forces of the Sixties inside the disciplinary limits of architecture. In these detailed histories, experimentation in architecture is considered inseparable from the specific cultural contexts of its production. The prerogatives of the counterculture necessitated the elaboration of groovy spaces and non-conformist enclaves; the political program of the new left called for urban configurations suited Downloaded By: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] At: 16:03 15 June 2009 104 Review essay to a level society; the twin trends of consumption and media technology fostered a new dialect of representation. Together with the growing historiography of the period produced from the perspective of architectural history, these publications offer evidence for a critical dynamic between architecture and the cultural and technology context of the Sixties. Quite simply, the Sixties did indeed happen in architecture and in a profound manner that compelled a (still insufficiently recognized) new conceptualization of the medium of architecture. With hindsight, primary mediums in art – a painting, for example – or in politics – the delegation of power – can readily be seen to be susceptible to the Sixties; hence the cultural potency of a Lichtenstein or Warhol and the Democratic convention in Chicago. But the presumed medium of architecture, material form, was not similarly susceptible. Though the temptation has been to categorize the architectural practices recounted here as alternative practices, these histories demonstrate quite convincingly that they were not alternatives, but rather revolutions in the disciplinary conception of the medium of architecture. Not architecture as material form, then, but architecture as systems and scenarios, events and environments. By pushing recklessly ahead with technology, and by pulling at the loosening social fabric; by recognizing the degree to which culture was already architecture, they produced a series of proliferating effects that remain inescapably present, yet still in architecture’s future. Notes 1. “LSD: A Design Tool?,” 153. 2. Quoted in Blau, Architecture or Revolution. 3. Examples include Burns, Arthropods; Dessauce, Inflatable Moment; van Schaik and Máčel, Exit Utopia. coa[rn] 4. In the French context, urban form, cultural theory, and political action were most power- fully conjoined by the Situationists. See Sadler, Situationist City. 5. On this aspect of the Fun Palace, see also Lobsinger, “Cybernetic Theory.” 6. “Ant Farm,” 9. Notes on contributor Timothy Hyde is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is an historian of 20th century architecture and architecture theory. Bibliography “Ant Farm,” Design Quarterly: Conceptual Architecture 77/78 (1970): 9. “LSD: A Design Tool?” Progressive Architecture, August (1966): 147–53. Blau, Eve. Architecture or Revolution: Charles Moore and Yale in the late 1960s. Exhibition catalog, Yale University School of Architecture, 29 October 2000–1 February 2001. Burns, Jim. Arthropods: New Design Futures. New York: Praeger, 1972. Dessauce, Marc. The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. Lobsinger, Mary Louise. “Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price’s Fun Palace.” In Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault, 119–39. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture 105 Von Schaik, Martin, and Otakar Máčel. Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations, 1956–1976. Munich: Prestel, 2005 co[arn] Downloaded By: [Cox, Hannah][informa internal users] At: 16:03 15 June 2009 Timothy Hyde Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA thyde@gsd.harvard.edu © 2009, Timothy Hyde