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Home , Dymaxion house, Frank Cordell, Geoscope, Reyner Banham, This Is Tomorrow

Anthony Vidler

John McHale and the Bucky Fuller Revival

Since the early 20th century, the environmental impulse in architecture has waxed and waned. Anthony COPYRIGHTEDVidler considers this cyclical MATERIAL phenomenon, particularly in relation to the Independent Group in Britain during the 1950s, which culminated in John McHale’s discovery of Richard in 1955 and the full- blown Bucky Fuller revival of the 1960s.

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 2244 007/10/20107/10/2010 117:367:36 Cover of The Ecological Context by John McHale (G Braziller Inc, 1970, fi rst edition).

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 2255 007/10/20107/10/2010 117:367:36 turned-planner Patrick Geddes between the nature and art in such a way as to reveal their In the fi eld of architecture, 1890s and the First World War. It was formal and environmental conditions on behalf the question of ecology developed through the 1920s and 1930s, of an architecture yet to be discovered – was was fi rst introduced with any primarily in Germany, following the lead of to be cut short. Fuller’s ‘body of research into Ernst Haeckel, but with a decidedly the shelter needs of mankind’, and especially seriousness by the biologist unfortunate connection with the Blood and that of some of the younger members of the and educator-turned- Soil movement that led to a strong ‘ecofascist’ circle around the Institute of Contemporary planner Patrick Geddes movement in the 1930s and 1940s, led by Arts (ICA) in , were compelling means ‘Germany’s Gardener’ Alwin Seifert. But it was of destabilising the professional discourse of between the 1890s and the also in the 1920s that a new voice began to be the moment and perhaps even confronting the First World War. heard from the US – that of a young Harvard complex problems of world reconstruction and drop-out, entrepreneur and inventor, Richard development after the devastation of the war.1 Buckminster Fuller. From the mid-1920s to his We may trace three moments in the Issues of environmental conservation, death in 1983, he tirelessly promulgated his development of this tendency. The fi rst, sustainability and ecological responsibility ideas and inventions: the House of spearheaded by the artist Richard Hamilton have, in different ways and to different effects, 1929, and the , developed in with the support of sculptor and artist been present in architectural discourse since every possible iteration and technological and photographer Nigel the beginning of the 20th century. At various combination, for peace and for war. But it is Henderson, was the exhibition ‘Growth and moments they have even risen to the forefront not that aspect of Fuller that will be emphasised Form’ at the ICA in the summer of 1951, of design agendas only to recede in the face of here; rather, it is Fuller the ecologist, the the title of which signalled its affi liation with developmental pressures, fi nancial constraints prophet of one very small world with limited D’Arcy Thompson’s celebrated book On and shifts in stylistic taste. And while present resources – that ‘planet earth’ beloved by the Growth and Form2 and the intent to explore concerns over the very survival of the planet Whole Earth Catalog movement. the formal properties of nature in a way that have posed the ecological question with a While Fuller’s domes became ubiquitous was less analogical than proposed by the renewed urgency, it may be salutary to inquire in military and civilian use, and his circular abstract architects of the Modern movement, into the reasons behind the waxing and waning houses remained curiosities of technological Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe. This of apparently strong environmental movements utopianism, his approaches to the world exhibition, opening two months after the from the early 20th century on. Revived in system had held the promise of a truly Festival of Britain, was intended to redirect the 1930s, revived again in the 1950s and global awareness of ecology supported by the lens of British art criticism and practice the 1960s, and now seemingly again on the the collection and mapping of integrated away from the nostalgia of ‘eternal Britain’ agenda, these successive waves of interest information on energy, resources and and towards the future indicated by Sigfried have episodically been lost or forgotten by the population. A world of fi nite resources, imaged Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command mainstream of the architectural profession. in rocket and manned space fl ights, shaken (1947)3 with a sense of the new formal regimes Anticipating the next waning of ecological by the havoc of the war, nuclear threat, rising being uncovered by biology and physics. interest, a historical discussion of these cycles population and the explosion of metropolitan A second moment was marked by – not simply to feed nostalgia for an apparently regions, had seemed ready for news of the gradual coalition of young artists and more prescient past, not simply to repeat the environmental conditions and potential architects – the ‘lost generation’ as they forms of earlier responses, nor fi nally, out of crises. Hence the popularity of Drop City- were to call themselves (including Alison simple historical interest manifested in type experiments, and the brief enthusiasm and Peter Smithson) – who formed a loose exhibitions and monographs – might offer of architecture students and some of their collaboration that came to be known as the clues as to what we might take away in the teachers between 1960 and 1970. Young Independent Group, convened by form of approaches, contrasts and rigorous This enthusiasm, part born in London Banham in the summer of 1952. The following rethinking of our own theories and practices, before being transplanted to the US by its year, Henderson, Paolozzi and the Smithsons distinguished from the past, but precipitated by it. intellectual believers – an outgrowth of the staged ‘Parallel of Life and Art’ at the ICA. At In the fi eld of architecture, the question of collective impulse of architects, photographers, this point the question was largely aesthetic ecology was fi rst introduced with any sculptors and artists immediately after the war – the topics of the series of lectures ‘Aesthetic seriousness by the biologist and educator- to collaborate in a study of the relations of Problems of Modern Art’ and ‘Aesthetic

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 2266 007/10/20107/10/2010 17:3617:36 ‘Man’s Increasing Vertical Mobility’, The Ecological Context, Plate 11, p 32.

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 2277 007/10/20107/10/2010 117:367:36 below: ‘Shrinking of Our Planet by Man’s opposite: ‘Photosynthetic Energy Increased Travel and Communication Conversion’, The Ecological Context, Speeds Around the Globe’, The Ecological Plate 13, p 34. Context, Plate 30, p 71.

Problems of Contemporary Architecture’ at It was at this moment, just when the Perhaps the most telling image of the ICA with Banham, Hamilton, William preliminary discussions over an exhibition all, however, could be found in the small Turnbull, and Toni del to be entitled ‘This is Tomorrow’ had taken mock-up for the exhibition’s poster, Renzio ranged from ‘New Sources of Form’ off after a year of debate, that McHale was entitled ‘Just what is it that makes today’s (Hamilton) and ‘Proportion and Symmetry’ offered a fellowship at Yale to study under homes so different, so appealing?’, with (Wilson) to ‘Non-Formal Painting’ (del Josef Albers. The year was decisive for its London townhouse setting (the living Renzio). The culmination, in architectural McHale, if not entirely for the Independent room of Magda and ’s house terms, of these aesthetic questions was to be Group. At Yale, McHale discovered diners, occupied by a collaged naked bodybuilder Banham’s 1955 article consecrating the ‘New freeways, glossy American magazines and, and a lounging, equally naked housewife Brutalism’ as a new aesthetic of the image.4 in the fl esh, Buckminster Fuller. Returning surrounded by all the mechanical household It was, however, in 1954 that a major from the US in July, he was just in time to objects of the new consumption culture – shift could be seen in the organisation and join Group 2 in preparing ‘This is Tomorrow’ taperecorder, vacuum cleaner, television and the themes of the Young Independent Group. with Hamilton and John Voelcker. The a can of Spam – all taken from the carton Banham had withdrawn from the position exhibition was set up as the sequel to Theo of magazines brought back from the US by of convener, citing the pressures of his thesis Crosby’s vestibule with its Fuller-like lattice McHale. The collage was, in this sense, a work under at the Courtauld ceiling: it was fi lled with blow-ups of popular reprise of McHale’s earlier collage-book of Institute of Art in London. John McHale, who images – Marilyn Monroe, Robbie the Robot 1954, Why I Took to the Washers in Luxury had exhibited his at the ‘Man versus (who welcomed visitors ‘in person’), and Flats,6 also an encomium to his apartment in Machine’ exhibition at the Building Centre giant beer bottles within optical illusionary Frank Cordell’s house, but with one critical and in the ‘Collages and Objects’ exhibition spaces. While Richard Hamilton, assisted difference: in a grand gesture demonstrating at the ICA, joined with by the painter Magda Cordell and Terry McHale’s newfound sense of the social and to reconvene the group. McHale (1922–78), Hamilton (Richard Hamilton’s wife), did natural world, he placed on the ceiling of a sociologist who had turned to art after a much of the preparatory work, the fi nal result ‘Just what it is that makes today’s homes stay in Paris, producing Constructivist two- was a conjunction of Voelcker’s interest in so different’ a cutting from Look magazine w and three-dimensional collages, had become optical illusion and McHale’s fascination with illustrating the fi rst photograph of the half p fascinated by the infl uence of technology and popular imagery.5 earth from a mile-high rocket, an image that advertising on mass culture. The focus of the b IG discourse changed almost immediately. p A discussion on the work of Buckminster 1 Fuller was held in March of that year, marking w McHale’s newfound interest in the inventor. w The next year, following McHale’s own w PhD studies in sociology, the discussions ar were staged around the machine and popular w culture: ‘Probability and Information Theory’ cl (EW Meyer), ‘Advertising’ (McHale et al), ch ‘Sociology and the Popular Arts’ (McHale ra et al), ‘Fashion and Fashion Magazines’ (del th Renzio) – all indications of McHale’s interest w in the sociology of art. Even then these lectures si and discussions were not popular among artists ci and architects – between 14 and 20 made up st the audience of each session – but they were o just the backdrop for another exhibition, ‘Man, tr Machine, and Motion’, organised once more by F Hamilton, this time with Banham’s help, which im opened in June of 1955. M

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 2288 007/10/20107/10/2010 117:367:36 would be completed by NASA’s ‘whole earth’ Thoreau’s basic shelter for a dollar (a railroad was forged, as represented most powerfully in photograph from the Apollo, 16 years later.7 worker’s 6 × 3 toolbox) as an antecedent to his last two books: The Future of the Future Confi rming McHale’s new vision, his long Fuller’s grain-bin-inspired deployment units (1969), and especially The Ecological Context biographical article on Buckminster Fuller, – a transposition of the balloon frame to the (1970).13 Both books read as if written today, published in the Architectural Review in July generic steel structure. McHale continued the carefully tracing the implications of global 1956, claimed that Fuller was neither ‘the man article with an exposition of Fuller’s energy warming, of the exhaustion of resources, of the with the dome-house bug’ nor simply a ‘man principles and a defi nition of synergy, relating mapping of energy use, population spread and with a tidier mind’. He was ‘a phenomenon Fuller’s energy equation to the principles of the fate of the world. which lies outside the customary canons of Gestalt perception where ‘in the simplest The Future of the Future was in fact architectural judgment’.8 For McHale, Fuller sense-perception no analysis of the separate developed out of a special issue of 1 on 2000+ was representative of a radical ‘change in the percepts can account for the total experience’.10 in February 1967. It comprised material climate of ideas, not only in design. This If Fuller described the problem in the compiled by McHale (then the Executive change employs, on the one hand, the Occam’s binary form of his celebrated statement ‘Utopia Director and Research Associate of the World razor of concept economy, and, on the other, or Oblivion’,11 McHale, with sociological and Resources Inventory at Southern Illinois the idea that any formulation is acceptable mathematical precision, wrote out the equations University), and was introduced by his article which serves this economy, or identifi es a and tracked down the statistics to prove the entitled, not surprisingly, ‘The Future of the situation in which action is possible,’ and he point. His work on the design and fabrication Future’.14 In it, he asserted that he was cites Fuller’s maxim: ‘A problem adequately of the , as it was erected at Cornell, concerned not with prediction, but with a stated is a problem solved.9 McHale traced the Princeton and elsewhere in the early 1960s, is ‘futures-orientation’ that will guide the present; origins of this philosophy to Fuller’s inherited recorded in the archives of the Geoscope and in not with the mastery of nature as in 19th-century transcendentalism. In this vein, he compared the reports of the Inventory of World Resources utopias of progress, culminating in HG Wells’ Fuller to Henry David Thoreau, and by (found on the Buckminster Fuller challenge Mind at the End of its Tether,15 but with a implication Thoreau’s hut in Walden Pond, site).12 But it was in the gradual cataloguing of sensible collaboration with nature. In 1967 Massachusetts, to the , seeing world resources that his interest in global ecology McHale, in a decade that was marked by the

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 2299 007/10/20107/10/2010 117:367:36 below: ‘Stages of Technology’, The opposite: ‘Energy Systems’, The Ecological Ecological Context, Plate 35, p 82. Context, Plate 61, p 33.

re 2 th w Banham’s celebrated conclusion to Theories and Design, where u Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House is posed against Le Corbusier’s o Villa Savoye (Poissy, France, 1929) – in his terms the fully acknowledged W response to the Machine Age as opposed to the appearance of b v mechanisation – was dismissed by the majority of architects. re p d re B F an so M g b n 1 fo th ‘f ar so th an o D B

‘W su 1 p – B li to o co o ar ‘a

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 3300 007/10/20107/10/2010 117:367:36 revival of the utopianism of the 19th and early was for a ‘language’ that would begin to express peripheral radicals, whose ideas call the whole 20th centuries, saw a fundamental split between the new ‘nature’ described by Moholy Nagy or professional apparatus into question’, but that those still trying to make the old paradigms by biophysicists; that is, a formal expression of if Fuller was accepted, it was rather for his work, and those who were working with the natural knowledge rather than one that sought structures and as a ‘form-giver’ than for his unprecedented conditions of the present. this language in the already clearly understood body of theory and research into the shelter- The recent, no doubt momentary revival determinants of environmental balance. And, needs of mankind.18 of interest in Bucky Fuller – the show at the as Banham aptly put it, the neo-Corbusian This resistance was reaffi rmed in the 1980s Whitney Museum of American Art curated tradition developed by Rowe was far too and 1990s by the resurgence of a wholehearted by Michael Hays and Dana Miller16 and indebted to academicism to even comprehend historicism, anticipated by Pevsner in 1961, but various reviews in Art Forum – no doubt the importance of the technological and transformed into the ‘languages’ of responds to a general interest in the postwar environmental conditions of late 20th-century Postmodernism by the advocates of that period, characterised by magazines like Dwell, life to architecture. movement. This was compounded by design shops like Design within Reach, and Banham’s celebrated conclusion to historians of Modern architecture who, if they revisionist histories from scholars including Theories and Design,17 where Buckminster mentioned Fuller at all, simply remarked on his Beatriz Colomina (who started the movement), Fuller’s Dymaxion House is posed against (mostly pernicious) effects on Archigram. Felicity Scott, Reinhold Martin, Larry Busbea Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (Poissy, France, According to my, admittedly cursory, and many others. The period, which saw 1929) – in his terms the fully acknowledged inspection, only two major monographs so much vitriolic debate over the nature of response to the Machine Age as opposed to the published after 1960 illustrated the Dymaxion Modern architecture within the fi rst postwar appearance of mechanisation – was dismissed House, and one other the proposal for a dome generation is, after all, suffi ciently distant to by the majority of architects. When Fuller over Manhattan (1960).19 Only the infl uence of be safe for history. It is also relatively safe was invited to give an RIBA lecture in 1958, Stewart Brand, and the publication of his now to remember the political struggles of Sir Hugh Casson was perplexed as to how to Whole Earth Catalog, seemed to resurrect Fuller 1968, the clash of the technologists with the introduce him, settling on ‘so outstanding and from the dust heap of 1920s ‘technotopias’, but formalists, the collagists with the townscapists, remarkable a phenomenon’. Banham himself now on behalf of drop-out communities in the the programmers with the social activists, the concluded that ‘the profession tolerates a few West. Caught between hippie and architecture ‘for architecture enthusiasts’ with the ‘against architecture nay-sayers’. It is even, in this so-called ‘post-critical’ era, safe to historicise, that is to neutralise, the discursive political and philosophical texts of the 1960s – those of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, not to mention Jean Baudrillard and Pierre Bourdieu. In order to approach the question ‘Whatever happened to ecology?’, we must survey the battlegrounds of the 1950s and 1960s and the resulting lines drawn between programmers, techno-futurists and formalists – say, between John Summerson, and Colin Rowe – who were the fi rst line of defence for an architecture determined to resist the implications of ecology in favour of representation. Despite Summerson’s conclusion that ‘programme’ would be the only remaining source of unity for Modern architecture (1957), and Banham’s call for an ‘autre architecture’ (1955), their common call

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 3311 007/10/20107/10/2010 117:367:36 below: Cover of the 2000+ issue of 1, opposite: Richard Hamilton, ‘Just what is it February 1967, edited by John McHale. that makes today’s homes so different, so Photo courtesy of Cutler-Hammer appealing?’, 1956. (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), originally used in one of their advertisements.

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 3322 007/10/20107/10/2010 117:367:36 culture, Fuller seemed doomed to be forgotten. We should now be able to build on this and ask and documents, see David Robbins (ed), The Independent Group: Postwar Britain and the Aesthetics Until, that is, some 30 years later when ANY our own questions as to the nature of an of Plenty, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1990. magazine published a special issue, guest- architecture that truly incorporates the issues of 2. Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and edited by Reinhold Martin, with the cover title ecology – human and biological – and that, at Form, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge), 1917. 3. , Mechanization Takes Command, Forget Fuller? All of which meant that the brief the same time, draws on these issues for its forms Oxford University Press (New York), 1948. revival of Fuller-thought in Britain and the US and technologies. At the very least a rereading 4. See Reyner Banham, ‘The New Brutalism; Architectural between 1955 and 1970 was to be cut short, of the work of those, who, like McHale, Review, Vol 118, December 1955, pp 354–61. 5. In his review of the exhibition, Banham found Group leaving what had become by the mid-1970s the attempted to assemble the scientifi c evidence 2’s installation the most interesting: ‘Voelcker, Hamilton foundations of an ecological imagination for a previous era’s environmental concerns and McHale … employed optical illusions, scale suspended and external to mainstream might provide a foundation and a comparative reversions, oblique structures and fragmented images to disrupt stock responses, and put the viewer back on architectural theory and practice. archive for the development of the even more a tabula rasa of individual responsibility for his own However, the revisionist histories of the sophisticated analyses demanded today. 1 atomized sensory awareness of images of only local ecological movement currently being constructed and contemporary signifi cance. [Relying on] concrete images – images that can carry the mass of tradition by a host of scholars should be seen as the Notes 1. The ICA was founded under the aegis of Roland and association, or the energy of novelty and technology, intimations of a real and present interest in Penrose and Herbert Read and held its fi rst exhibition in but resist classifi cation by the geometrical disciplines reincorporating it into architectural discourse. 1948. For a complete history, with valuable recollections by which most other exhibits were dominated.’ See Architectural Review, September 1956, p 188. 6. Collage-book by John McHale in 1952. Collection of Magda Cordell McHale. 7. For the Look magazine image, see Robbins, The Independent Group, op cit, p 58; for the NASA Apollo 17 image, and its analysis, see Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination, The Johns Hopkins Press (Baltimore, MD), 2001, pp 257–62. 8. John McHale, ‘Buckminster Fuller’, in Architectural Review, Vol 120, No 714, July 1956, pp 12–20. 9. Ibid, p 13. 10. Ibid, p 20. 11. See Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity, Bantam Books (New York), 1969. 12. See Mark Wigley, ‘Planetary Homeboy’, in ANY, No 17, 1997, pp 16–23. See also the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Site at http://challenge.bfi .org/. 13 John McHale, The Future of the Future, George Braziller (New York), 1969, and The Ecological Context, George Braziller (New York), 1970). 14. John McHale, ‘The Future of the Future’, 1, February 1967, pp 65–6. 15. See Herbert George Wells, Mind at the End of its Tether, W. Heinemann Ltd (London), 1945. 16. The exhibition ‘Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe’ was curated by Michael Hays and Dana Miller at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 26 June to 21 September 2008. 17. Reyner Banham, Theories and Design in the First Machine Age, Praeger (New York), 1960. 18. Reyner Banham on ‘Technology’ in the ‘Stocktaking’ series of 1960. See Reyner Banham, ‘Stocktaking’, Architectural Review, Vol 127, February 1960, pp 93–100. 19. I have checked Leonardo Benevolo, , Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco dal Co, Kenneth Frampton, William Curtis and Alan Colquhoun.

Text © 2010 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 25, 27, 28-9, 30-1 © Courtesy of George Braziller, Inc. From The Ecological Context by John McHale (1970, fi rst edition); p 32 © Courtesy of John Wiley & Sons Ltd; p 33 © Richard Hamilton. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2010. Kunsthalle Tübingen, Collection Zundel

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0024-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd24-033-c01(ObscurePics).indd 3333 007/10/20107/10/2010 117:367:36