Growing the Wobbly Dome: Whole Earth Visions Counterculture Domes

____________________________________ GROWING THE WOBBLY DOME_________21 Growing the Wobbly Dome: Whole Earth Visions and Their Oxymoronic Materializations in the 70s Counterculture Domes LYDIA KALLIPOLITI Princeton University Dropped in the desert: The American southwest exodus and the catastrophic city Little can be said about the open communes that spilled over the wild American Southwest at the end of the 60s. “Drop City is not more than a dropping,”1 claimed its droppers, there is nothing else to it. “It fell out of a window in Kansas five years ago with a mattress and a balloon and landed in a goat pasture neat Trinidad… It is impossible to define Drop City.”2 Sustaining a blur around the commune’s purposes, avoiding making any statements was a kind of proactive protest, a constructive negation. Besides, what could be said in the founders’ support when looking Fig.1. Chrono-map of US communes in the back, one can hardly overcome the common Southwest presumption that a commune was a bizarre grass-root community made by people All who went commonly agree on the innate obviously out of their right minds, wearing obscurity of pinning down a definition for weird graphic outfits or nothing at all, communes. Yet, if one thing can be said about smoking marihuana above their unshaved such “perversely ectoplasmic Zeitgeists”6, it beards and envisioning the universe put can be asserted that they were “an differently, looking at the sky still for days. experiment in living”7. In this sense, their Still, despite the derogative commentary space was that of a laboratory, where every “dirty-hippie-drug-addicted-sex-orgy-crash- effort was made to reinvent habitation and the pads”3, a line of criticism that originated from complex interrelationships between the what the counter culture has defined as the individual and its milieu. The depiction of the establishment media4, the urban exodus was city as a catastrophic place entailed in parallel quite massive5. This was partially due to a its own reinvention, the duplication of its novel demographic synthesis across America complex networks, services and infrastructure of a largely growing young population at the in different terms. This living laboratory inception of the 60s, accentuated by complex needed to be a self-sufficient one, an socio-political predicaments that posited the autonomous unity that would be able to city as a catastrophic environment that sustain itself, cut off from the main urban restrains the imagination and the freedom of networks. The shelters of such communities the individual. would be able to recycle their waste, produce _________22 FRESH AIR ______________________________________________________ and distribute energy and achieve a degree of sense of humor. This was a bizarre autonomy in a new equilibrium with nature. It convergence from antithetical social streams would also produce its own language, a that led to entirely different sets of actions, building language, recorded in manuals, which yet it should be noted that the concerns would assume the responsibility of distributing sprout from a common point of departure that the laboratory’s findings. marked the dawn of the age of ecology as a gallant political and religious position. This utter shift to issues of immediate survival -the indulgence into beginning life from zero Yet despite much evidence to the contrary, and creating anew the basic foundations of the youthful exodus to the Southwest and the habitation- was not an uncanny occurrence for initiative to create communities cannot be Americans. In fact, it transmigrated in an exclusively interpreted as a deeply disturbed alternated format the eschatological drama of retort instrument to fear. The young cold war politics and the unreserved fear of generation simply rejected the urban survival after a nuclear holocaust. After the environment and its conventions. Under the second world war, America has for decades assumption that they have the right to start lived under the sinister canopy of a double- from scratch, they took on a proactive stance sided menace, originating both from potential and ‘dropped out’. Take note that ‘dropping’ assaults from exterior enemies and from has a double significance. The first meaning is interior governmental agents that initiated a literal, referring to the discontent that urges massive inquisition in search for patriotic one to abandon a place or a conventional loyalty8. Many critics, who consider cold war institution. The second meaning though, which politics as the seedbed for the sixties counter correlated to the common understanding culture, support that the eschatological between droppers, adjoins a spatial narration paranoia, latent in the distressed reflex to this previous action; something or someone mechanisms of survival that communal being dropped from above, like a drip, a shelters embody, has been nurtured in the driblet or a splotch. The manner in which the psychology of a long bearing “world-wide droppers envisioned their relocation in nervous breakdown.”9 Additionally, this abscond lands was similar to a ‘drop’ from the aching holocaust trepidation was renewed in sky that lands and creates a thin-skinned the face of an exceedingly alarming membrane, an inhabitable environment that environmental crisis, which by the end of the does nothing to disturb the ground and the 60s was by no means an ethical concern, but milieu on which it was positioned. merely an issue of sustaining life against a new omnipotent hazard: pollution. The Whatever the principles might have been, the suffocating air, the dirty water, sudden making of communes could not possibly flee climatic changes, toxic lands became topics of the criticism of a nostalgic ‘return to the land’. primary significance, on the basis of It was in fact an utter regression to previous distressing ecological incidents that fell out forms of habitation, almost primitive ones. throughout the decade. Hand crafting your own shelter, intentionally un-arrogated lands and ‘off-the service grid’ Curiously enough, fighting pollution became a premises all advocated a primordial drive to unanimous task for all sides that composed reinvent the wheel, which has neither the political scenery of the 60s. The motivated favorable criticism, nor has allowed politicians, representing the establishment, for looking beyond what could lie beneath the have signed act after act with the scope of surface of the so-called ‘grass-root’ protecting the environment, especially since movement. As Peter Murray11 has mentioned Johnson’s administration, which has been regarding the open communes of the patently active on the issue10. From the other Southwest, “these guys took it too far. I side, the counter culture, independently of all visited the Pacific High School in 1972 and it their disputes with the establishment shared was quite an experience. We12 believed in the similar concerns on the development of a same principles, but the techniques were proactive ecological stance. Directly reflecting different. We did not believe that hand the suffocating air pollution incidents, crafting could provide any solutions to real Antfarm, in 1972, performed an architectural world problems.”13 activist performance entitled “Breathing – That’s your Bag”, veiled by an idiosyncratic ____________________________________ GROWING THE WOBBLY DOME_________23 Evaluating such statements, one can argue channel for architectural cookbooks – that the innate nostalgia of regressing to Domebook 1 & 2, Shelter, Inflatocookbook, wilderness and “reinventing civilization,”14 ZomePrimer, Farallones Scrapbook etc. was an impossible enterprise in regards to the Throughout the pages of these manuals, provision of resolutions to the urban impasse, architecture was staged as a ‘cooking’ against which it so ardently protested. discipline, in a comprehensive set of Assuming that the droppers were quite well necessary numerical steps that would spring aware of such impossibilities, the exodus an end built product. By proclaiming mostly designated a sincerely sad moment for themselves as educational resources and a thousands of young intellectuals who in a collective written landscape of gathered and dramatic search of a ‘home’ were on the spot organized information on building, the ready to live in truncated rhombic-icosahedra. cookbooks have marked a significant shift To them, these complex polyhedral structures from determining final designs to procedural embodied a more fitting representation of a design expressions, techniques of production ‘home’ that was nowhere to be found, and construction methods. precisely as Roszak argues: “A radical discontent and innovation can be found that The significant contribution that the authors of might transform this disoriented civilization of these manuals have provided us is the ours into something a human being can scrupulous recording of their processes and identify as home.”15 Moreover, one can only the comprehension of their practice as a question the validity of the claim to live ‘off heuristic device and an accessible piece of the grid’16, when in fact the functions of the knowledge. To write methodically on building ‘urban establishment’ were duplicated in new and eventually disseminate their manuscripts independent infrastructure systems and was a serious undertaking for the groups, who habitats, retaining to a great extent traditional have created their own Californian-based principles of habitation.17 The shift from the publishing houses, all non-profit corporations,

Load more