EcoRedux

E c o R e d u x MATERIALS OFF THE CATALOG + DESIGN REMEDIES FOR A DYING PLANETAN ARCHIVAL & DESIGN RESOURCE FOR ECOLOGICAL MATERIAL EXPERIMENTS BY LYDIA KALLIPOLITI

Environmental architecture from “object” to “system” to “cloud”

1971: Charles Harker, founder of the TAO Design Group in Austin, Texas, juxtaposes Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” with a new concept for habitation that he coins the “soft machine.”1 The Tao Design Group—a group of architects, sculptors and artists— experiments on building without drawings, spraying urethane on a chicken wire armature based on sketches and written rules for enclosure. Every step is a fluctuating process of incremental adjustments that necessitates constant reinvention of the original plan. In his manifesto, Harker outlines an alternative definition of matter as patterns of energy that solidify in time. He writes, “We are in the midst of a Socio-Psychological, Cybernetic, Mass-media, Space Age revolution,”2 and speaks of “softness” as an expansion of environmental perception; both literally, through curvature and the use of plastic materials, and conceptually, envisioning an elastic understanding of tectonic conventions.

2005: François Roche, principal of R&Sie(n) in Paris, France exhibits a “hypnosis chamber” at the Modern Art Museum (MAM) in Paris.3 Designed with computational scripts—protocols that allow for growth of the original “seed” design—and fabricated with a five-axis milling machine, the hypnosis chamber renders an immersive space of disalientation from the social sphere, in a state between sleep and wake. A complex intrauterine vascular space, the hypnosis chamber is intended to introduce uncertainty in the individual’s environmental cognition, as a means of creative speculation and experimentation which may open up the possibility of transforming one’s environmental sphere.4

Is it the same or is it not? Are we destined to remediate unsettled memories of our recent past? Is regression a defensive reaction against future disenchantment? Or have we already imagined in the past something beyond the present of that time?

The kinship between present-day experimental design and that of the 1960s-1970s is so striking that we can speak of uncanny resemblances, eerie images of projects already seen and experienced like a déjà-vu. In psychoanalysis, déjà vu is a “disturbance of reality perception, which serves to reassure the patient against this insecurity, by divesting, through an estrangement affect, the recurrent circumstances of the impact of a new reality.”5 Déjà vu is an unconscious effort of the ego to bridge a gap between the past and the present; it is a peculiar defensive reaction against the fear of the unknown,6 manifest by projecting the future not as an entirely new course of events but as mixture of past and present stretched in time.

Déjà Vu

Above: Charles Harker Earth House, Tao Design GroupBelow: Hypnosis Chamber by François Roche


In our field, a number of critics have described concepts, forms, and approaches retrieved from the recent past as a pervasive phenomenon of media archeology.7 Is this type of regression, however, merely expressive of historical interest? Looking to the postwar period may be more than a quest to identify historical antecedents. It could be quite the opposite: that the present helps us understand this recent past and, of course, vice versa. History only survives as a relevant discourse through revivalism of the oblivious past. Leftover histories—environmental experiments with organic matter, synthetic growth, and other alternative technologies that were once esteemed as marginal and deviant—are now of core significance to architectural discourse. Displaced from the periphery to the center of deliberations, these counter-histories may account for the multiplicity and diversity of current ecological anxieties in architecture.

As such, déjà-vu might be used procreatively to rebuild future disciplinary courses. Reconstructing projects and ideas of the past through a new organizational and classificatory lens might enable us to generate a critical discourse that migrates to different terrains of thought throughout time.

For in the way we classify things bears a profound impact on disciplinary structures. The means by which we organize information emerges from and profoundly affects our social, political, intellectual, and cultural constructs. The legacy of ecological ideas in architecture evidences this effect. Post-enlightenment, environmental debates focused on assiduous observation and documentation of objects and organisms, analytically classifying the living stock of the world. In the postwar period, environment was addressed through diagrams of feedback cycles; global resources were examined as interconnected systems that could be redistributed. Today, while the environmental discourse is much more diverse than in the past, it shares an investment in local data

classification of living systems, similar to information clouds of data constellations online.

Beyond the pretext of healing the planet and the strategic relocation of finite natural resources, the present ubiquity of ecological concerns illustrates a persistent taxonomical thinking in design. Expanded materials listings, technical standards, mechanisms, natural and synthetic processes and methods assemble a rising sensibility of design agency where authorship, as a projected vision of a new reality, is replaced in favor of editorial observation and data reshuffling. The permeation of organizational tools in our discipline is not innocent. It is not merely about facilitating and managing knowledge; it also transforms the nature of design, with no return. Is it not critical that we give equal attention to reconsidering our classification systems and how they are affecting architectural discourses?

The recent invasion of ecological anxieties in architecture has many faces: from the restitution of moral values in design thinking, in revival of an archaic humanist discourse; through the substitution of “performance” for “function,” in restoration of a lost modernist and positivist ethos; to the post-structuralist denunciation of environmental improvement and the critical recognition of waste and pollution as generative potential for design. As a circular, causal form of reasoning, ecology surfaces as an inevitable salvation in architectural debates, in advocacy of unity and the common good. However, on a planet without a square inch of untouched environment, the new wave of ecological architecture cannot be explicitly directed to the ethics of the world’s salvation and the rhetoric of confinement. It rather projects a psycho-spatial or mental position, fuelling a reality of change, action, and disciplinary crossbreeding.

Déjà VuEnvironmental architecture from “object” to “system” to “cloud”


OBJECT

The term ecology is attributed to eminent German biologist, naturalist, and artist Ernst Haeckel, who identified embryonic interrelationships between living organisms and their ambient environment.8

In The General Morphology of Organisms (1866),9 a reformation of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Descent, Haeckel conceptually linked ontogeny with physiology and illustrated all known life forms in a genealogical tree. Haeckel’s work was a revolution in visual mapping compared to the Hippodamian gridded classification tables of his predecessor, Carolus Linnaeus (Systema Naturae, 1735).10 Whereas Linnaeus established the normative method of naming and numbering the

world’s living wealth in boxes, Haeckel’s genealogical tree graphically described the relationships between organisms, introducing shape and scale as decisive parameters for his classification system. Nevertheless, both maps still follow a paradigm of understanding the world through component pieces and objects, and classify the natural world as wilderness—an object of observation and conservation separate from the man-made.

SYSTEM

The post-WWII period signaled the rise of a modern environmental era, distinctly different from earlier environmental positions of wilderness preservation. In the 1960s and 1970s, ecologists instrumentalized the prevalent social and political discourse of a closed, ill-managed earth, arguing that their science provided the most faithful account of planetary values. As awareness of worldwide pollution levels mounted, environmentalism became a form of social activism calling for a redistribution of global resources. Buckminster Fuller, John McHale, and Ian McHarg played a seminal role in formulating this discourse, explaining ecosystems with parallels between the earth and human processes.11 A physiological diagnosis of planetary resources was precisely the agenda of Fuller’s “World Design Science Decade,”12 which took


Carolus Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae

Ernst Haeckel’s geneological tree


Déjà Vucognitive analytical form in McHale’s The Ecological Context.13 Through systemic management, the totality of the earth could or should serve as a stage of action, envisioning a new empire and reasoning backward to a colonial and empirical modality.14

Their work represented a significant shift in the field of ecology: from understanding the built environment as distinct from nature to understanding the built environment as embodying natural ecosystems’ cyclical behaviors. This change was deeply rooted in ecologists’ appropriation of a specific scientific language and a set of classification tools used by cyberneticians in the postwar period. Cyberneticians’ diagrams of the flow of energy in the natural world as input and output, circuits in a cybernetic ecosystem, provided ecologists with new research techniques and a biologically informed, and yet computational, theory of the world as a system of subsystems.

The work of this period forms the basis for the online archive entitled EcoRedux, which I assembled from various personal collections and archives during the past four years. The name refers to the contemporary return of ecological awareness as a phenomenon of resurgence from the 1960s and 1970s, and assembles a database of ecological material experiments as well as their ramifications in architectural design. In

this sense, the intention is to document and track an unexplored genealogy of design experimentation conducted by underground architectural groups, as a prehistory of a rising biotechnological imagery and a new social and planetary vision, throughout different design disciplines.

In curating the EcoRedux archive, I am seeking to offer a counter-history to the canonic environmental discourse of this period that was centered on the decryption of the planet as a whole ecosystem. The experiments in this archive eschew notions of a planet managed and harnessed as a whole ecosystem. Rather, all imaginable provisional structures and small-scale strategies—pneumatics from used parachutes, handmade domes from discarded materials, electronic-lawn carpets, pills, capsules and self-sufficient systems, garbage houses, foam shelters—become part of new equation in reflection of the intense socio-political concerns of the time and the collective fantasizing about new technologies as remedial tools. The collection of these experiments recounts ecological strategies as discrete fragments in defiance of a larger scheme for global harmony, like a peep show of the world, or a selective perspective that reconstructs the globe out of little pieces.

As a collection, the EcoRedux experiments suggest an alternate model for urbanism that presupposes a new form irreverent to the master plan—a form that needs to integrate the parameters of continually variable micro-environments.15 Although these improvisatory techniques only provide rudimentary shelter, they suggest a new approach, in contrast to prior geometric configurations, integrating constantly changing environmental parameters into the design and construction process. Furthermore, we witness a germinal connection between the macro-urban scale and the micro-material scale, leaving the medium scale—building—out of the equation. Peter Cook recalls how, at the end of the 1960s, “It was


John McHale, Shrinking Ecological Context (1970)


Déjà Vu

fashionable to introduce a project as ‘anti-building,’ or a conglomeration of environmental elements.”16 By looking back at this time, it is not proposed to dispense with the significance of “building” as the main edifice of architectural practice and education; but instead to interrogate extremity of scale—the focus on the micro and macro—and to inquire into this “out of focus” moment as a reflection of intense, sociopolitical upheaval.

These experimental schemes, beyond being historically informative, narrate stories, wonders, obsessions, blemishes, and personal values that haunted their authors. In many cases, the projects were very crude in form, leaving their authors unsatisfied or in anxious search of the materialized visions they could not somehow pin down. Many experiments utilized erratic material interactions and therefore defied established

definitions of representation; there was little tectonic control over their formation. This realm of impossibility, the moment when representation fails to describe the form of objects, is both magical and terrifying. As such, these architects were prisoners of their visions, openly willing to fail.

Compared to the scientific definition of experimentation, these open-ended explorations were obscure in their directions and purposes. The scientific method requires an experiment to either verify or falsify a hypothesis, or research a causal relationship between phenomena. Moreover, an experiment should be capable of replication, under certain predefined canonical conditions, and in a particular number of steps/phases. On the other hand, the fuzzy, non-linear nature of design processes makes it unfeasible for a design experiment to align to this universal clarity. One could


Earth viewed from rocket in Look magazine


Déjà Vuargue that design experiments seem “hypothesisless,” while the value of contingency—as this is mediated by the interaction of materials and their deployment tactics in varied circumstances—constitutes a key feature of design experimentation.

The model of “direct action,” that the EcoRedux projects proposed, stimulated design debates, the echoes of which still reverberate in contemporary practice. This emerging framework of critical thinking undermined the imperial significance of formalism as the distiller of value, in favor of open-ended potential in procedural design. As an effect of this discourse, alternate means of production were recovered, disengaging design from the conventions and limitations of drawings, which have for the most part governed design practice throughout the century.

Foremost, several projects documented in the EcoRedux archive do not target environmental improvement as a planetary strategy. The archived experiments are partial, small-scale, ad hoc and opportunistic; unclassified under a larger plan. In this sense, the archive documents a counter-history of ecological anxiousness. The projects are not performative agents of amelioration; rather they are, in themselves, their own ecologies, producing new worlds.

CLOUD

Today, the extensive recovery of ecological concerns broadcasts mainstream values and stands as a defense mechanism for late capitalism. Yet, at the formative stages of the green movement in the 1960s and 1970s, ecological design debates were of a very different political and ideological orientation. Ecology not only embodied an alternative route to mainstream political action, but also an inspirational model for design creativity; it embodied an evolutionary design process in several stages and lifecycles through

material experiments as analog computation tools. Looking back on this period offers an alternative elastic understanding of the term “ecology,” at a time when the term addressed not only a new kind of naturalism and techno-scientific standards, but also systems theory: a recirculatory understanding of the world and its resources. In this context, revisiting the term “ecological,” rather than “sustainable” and “green,” is of essence and may potentially contribute to a reassessment of contemporary debates. It may be in this epistemological fusion that we can ask more of architecture.

EcoRedux strives to map a history of architectural imagination, rather than a history of technological development. Through this documentation, the hope is to question current mainstream perceptions of sustainability and the LEED program (as a technical classification tool that empowers capitalist production, creating a new revenue source veiled by the ethics of environmentalism). The archive is also an educational open-source online resource (www.EcoRedux.com) with a dual function: as a tool to explore the history of the period, but also as a pedagogical tool for design. Given the open source nature of the project, architects and designers are able to actively participate in the expansion of the website by submitting their own interpretations of ecological experiments that are documented in the database. The scope is to foster the reuse and recycling of the information documented in the historical archive in order to explore innovative ecological strategies in contemporary architectural practice. It is implicitly argued here that the permission to reproduce, translate, or even “misuse” information to observe and transform existing material and ideological structures, endows architecture with its creative potential.

This organizational open source system of gathering information online in clusters, assembling ideas mixed in past and present time, might relate to our data-driven



culture and the emergence of “cloud computing.” The term “cloud computing” was coined in 1997 by Ramnath Chellappa to describe information storage

in networked online clusters, as distinct from localized storage in physical data centers. Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired magazine, argues that information is now untethered from the archive, the library, and even the organization of complex three dimensional classification systems, and instead it renders an order of “dimensionally agnostic statistics.”17 The cloud necessitates an entirely different way of understanding the world, “one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality.”18 Growing out of Google’s model of detecting correlations through applied mathematics and not through context, the cloud ranks fractional connections above holistic perceptions of phenomena. An embodiment and representation of change and self-organization, the temporal space of the cloud grows, crystallizes, and dissolves. What is essential about the cloud is the absorption and collection of data that crystallizes in a region, rather than the overall contextual interpretation of the data. In a world where complexity can no longer be decoded systematically, the cloud is a byproduct of incidental data accretion; it defies any precise definition of form and representation.

In many respects, the EcoRedux archive is like a cloud in its content and organization: seemingly unrelated characters, projects, and environments—that have little

in common phenomenally—swarm together in blurry mass. Even though they never worked together, the architects collected in EcoRedux are the protagonists of a profound transformation to amplify the main disciplinary focus from object to environment, system, and situation. This archive is not a marginal history of non-architects that needs to be written because it is left untold; it is assembled to uncover spatial and architectural concerns and ideas that have surfaced now, though they originate from a historical moment when the discipline underwent a fundamental reorientation in the deployment of normative representation tools.

The stories outlined in EcoRedux archive appear as side effects in the history of ideas, rather than being allied with the normative course of what we premeditate as of core historical significance. The experiments register retroactive moments—incomplete bubbles of events. They are manifestations of a moment between the “system” and the “cloud” that was never cognitively addressed at the time it took place.

The stories of unexpected offspring at times germinate as derailed paths from the central line of inquiry and


Feeding the masses: data visualization of agricultural crops in the US, 2007

Global Flight Patterns, 2010


more truly speak of today’s ideological diffusion, despite the fact that they are not perceived as central. They constitute a marginal practice that subconsciously informs the core, feeding history through its dross. These stories, incidental side effects produced as a discipline undergoes a transformation, may suggest an alternative reading of architectural history: not by offering actual objects and a new paradigm, but by suggesting new tools and new modes of practice.

What is essential about the cloud is the absorption and collection of data that crystallizes in a region, rather than the overall contextual interpretation of the data. Meaning is not essential for the cloud; neither is the understanding of phenomena’s complexity as a whole. Instead, the cloud evokes localized data collection and the fractional correlations between bits and pieces. In a world where complexity can no longer be decoded systematically, the cloud is a byproduct of incidental data accretion; it defies any precise definition of form and representation. It is impossible to map or draw the cloud, as there is no tectonic control over its formation. In this sense, the emerging ecology of the cloud is our contemporary obligation to translate. It feels like rain.

* This essay was originally published in Praxis: Journal of Writing+Building, No.13 (Eco-Logics) in 2012, pp.5-17.

End Notes

1 Charles Harker, “Supramorphics,”(2006). See http://web.mac.com/charker/TAO_Design_Group/Tao_Design_Group.html (accessed September 25, 2011).2 Ibid.3 Hypnosis Chamber credits: François Roche, Stephanie Lavaux, and Jean Navarro, R&Sie(n), with Benoit Durandin; seats shell designer, Mathieu Lehanneur; hypnosis specialist, François Roustang. See http://www.new-territories.com/hypnosisroom.htm (accessed September 25, 2011).4 Ibid.


5 C.P Oberndorf. “Erroneous Recognition (Fausse Reconnaissance),” Psychiatric Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1941): 316.6 See Oberndorf, 316. See also R.W. Pickford. “Déjà Vu in Proust and Tolstoy,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis Review 35:188-201 (1948): 200.7 Ethel Baraona Pohl, “A Design Report from Barcelona,” Domus Online (March 31, 2011): on the exhibition “EcoRedux 02: Design Manuals for a Dying Planet” curated and designed by Lydia Kallipoliti with Anna Pla Català at the Disseny Hub of Barcelona (D-Hub). See http://www.domusweb.it/en/design/EcoRedux-02-design-manuals-for-a-dying-planet/ (accessed June 11, 2011). 8 See Frederic Migayrou, “Extensions of the Oikos,” in Archilab’s Earth Buildings: Radical Experiments in Earth Architecture, ed. Marie-Ange Brayer & Beatrice Simonot (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003), 20.9 Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen: Allgemeine Grundzuge der Organischen Formen-Wissenschaft; mechanisch begrundet durch die von Charles Darwin reformirte Descendenz-Theorie (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1866).10 Caroli Linnæi, Systema Naturae, Sive, Regna tria naturæ systematice proposita per classes, ordines, genera, & species (Lugduni Batavorum: Apud Theodorum Haak, Ex typographia Joannis Wilhelmi de Groot, 1735).11 This is clearly described by Ian McHarg when he writes, “This model contains the possibility for an inventory of all ecosystems to determine their relative creativity in the biosphere. The same conception can be applied to human processes.” See Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: Natural History Press, 1969).12 The “World Design Science Decade” was a research program that originated with Buckminster Fuller’s proposal to the International Union of Architects (I.U.A.) at their VIIth Congress in London, England, July, 1961. Fuller proposed that architectural schools around the world should be encouraged by the I.U.A. to invest the next ten years in a continuing problem of how to make the total world’s resources serve 100% of humanity, through competent design, despite a continuing decrease of metal resources per capita. In 1961, the total of the world’s resources served only 40% of humanity. See the Buckminster Fuller Institute at http://www.bfi.org/ 13 John McHale, The Ecological Context (New York: George Braziller, 1970).14 Denis Cosgrove argues that the representations of the whole earth have established a repertoire of sacred, secular, colonial, and empirical meanings. See Denis Cosgrove, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, no. 2, (June 1994): 270-294.15 Excerpt from Migayrou, “Extensions of the Oikos,” 20. 16 Peter Cook, “The Electric Decade: An Atmosphere at the AA School 1963-73,” in A Continuing Experiment: Learning and Teaching at the Architectural Association, ed. James Gowan (London: Architectural Press, 1975), 142. 17 Ibid.18 Ibid.

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ON “Inflatables”, “Truck-in inflatable University”, Buckminster Fuller, “Air- Breath Bags”, “The House of the Century”, instruction manuals, architectural cookbooks, the Inflatocookbook and the beginning of the green movement.

Interview with ANTFARM by Lydia KallipolitiCHIP LORD & CURTIS SCHREIER


SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, USSeptember 17, 2007

ANTFARM


CL: For the “little magazine” exhibition, did you consider the Inflatocookbook as a magazine despite the fact that it was a “one-off” publication?

LK: We had an expanded understanding of the “little magazine” and we also included catalogues, pamphlets, manuals, as well as professional magazines that momentarily experienced “moments of littleness.” If not a magazine though, what was the Inflatocookbook for you?

CL: A “how-to” manual. A cookbook.CS: Who makes cookbooks? People that are connoisseurs of certain types of cuisine and like to assemble things. They like to hack. The word “hacker” was not common at the time, so there were no hackers in the late 1960s; there were cooks.

LK: Did you get a chance to read Fred Turner’s recent book From Counterculture to Cyberculture? There is a similar hypothesis there from cooks to hackers.

CS: I heard him on the radio. He basically suggested that Apple is based on LSD and that whole idea of inventing the computer simulated a drug induced opening experience. You would have a device that would do it on a screen rather than in your brain. For me, drugs would organize the “inside” of the mind, but you had the ability to organize the “outside” of your mind with radical architecture. Architecture was a substitute.

CL: It is also worth mentioning that there was a strong sense of networking in the counterculture. We had one foot in the alternative video network, while we also were in contact with other communes and did mail art. Mail art was a strong network at the time, especially supported by artists who rejected the art gallery commercial system and claimed that, “Anybody can make art; you just do it on the envelope.” This way you would become at the same time a collector of art by simply going to the post office.

LK: Speaking of networks, were you in contact with other publishers of “how-to manuals,” like Lloyd Khan and Stewart Brand before the Inflatocookbook?

CS: Yes. We have heard of Stewart Brand and the Pacific High School, but the first time we all met in person was in Lompoc, California. There was a weekend conference held there, right on the coast, called “Paradigm” in the fall of 1970. It was organized by David Evans. Many West Coast groups gathered at this event, like the Yoga Institute and Liferaft Earth, to figure out “what was going on.” People had to explain what they were doing, and we eventually found out that there was a common consensus between groups researching on yoga and groups researching on vehicles and biodigesters. Everyone was there at this gathering. Stewart Brand and Jay Baldwin were there from the Whole Earth Catalog, as well as Lloyd Khan with people from the Pacific High School. During the conference, we built an inflatable environment, our own contribution to the conference. Its shape was like a Klein Bottle where people would go in and wind. Inside there was a light sculpture, oil and massage spaces, electronics and projections of moonlanding movies.

Curtis Schreier’s sketches from his archive notebooks.

LK: Was this gathering before the Freestone conference?

Lydia Kallipoliti in conversation with Chip Lord & Curtis Shreier

ANTFARM


CS: Yes. Freestone was maybe a year later. CL: Let me go back a minute. Antfarm was founded in 1968 in San Francisco by Doug Michels and myself, and in January of 1969 Doug and I went to Houston to teach. We were then doing experiments with cargo parachutes, airport surplus. In one of them, we were laying on a parachute fabric with a number of people, floating in the air in the Houston astrodome, supported by helium balloons. In this sense, these were air-supported structures, but not yet inflatables.

LK: Was the floating real?

CL: It was real, but it was enhanced in the print. At that point and up to the summer of 1969, when we watched the moonlanding on TV, we were simply consumers of the Whole Earth Catalog. It was an important resource, but we did not personally know Stewart Brand.

LK: How did you come up with the idea to produce a cookbook?

CS: People always asked us questions on how to make inflatables. For a period of six months to a year after we produced the “Giant Pillow” inflatable, we concentrated on different techniques to make inflatables and on developing an alternative language of architecture. The inflatable does not really have a shape, but resembles a “bubble diagram”; it illustrates how relationships are formed. We thought that this way of thinking might illuminate the planning and building process.

CL: At the same time, there were many conferences on inflatables that we would go [to] and put up an inflatable in different contexts. From the fall of 1969 and for a year, we did various experiments, prototypes and a couple commissions on inflatables. In the conferences, we would start making an inflatable from scratch with a group of people, so gradually we were gathering more information on materials, hardware and fans. Everything was off the shelf.

So, the scope of the Inflatocookbook was to put all the information in one place. Another major influence to produce the Whole Earth Catalog’s axiom “access to tools.”

CS: We never thought of selling the inflatables we were making. We did not conceptualize them as the architect’s final product. We could have been the Bill Gates of inflatables, but instead we wanted to provide all the information to the people.

CL: Yes, we sold each for a dollar. One of the first inflatables we built for a conference that became part of the Inflatocookbook was at Pacific High School. Then, for the first Earth Day in May 1970, we built a clean air pod at Berkeley, where people would enter to get out of the smoggy atmosphere, get a sample of clean air and breathe.

LK: This event was published in the Oakland Tribune and in the Inflatocookbook. Right?

CL: Yes, but then we managed to confuse the date and made the event look like it is in the future. It actually took place in May 1970, but we dated it as if it happened in 1972. Besides, the Inflatocookbook was published in 1971.

LK: It is clear that in contrast to other experiments with inflatables in the Inflatocookbook, the clean air pod in Berkeley had political implications. What were the sources you were looking at to make this statement that we will soon be out of oxygen?

CS: LA was very smoggy back then. The weather report would very often say, “It will be a smoggy day tomorrow.”

CL: They had air alerts and the TV would advise elderly people to stay home.Bad air was a reality in 1969. You could see the brown air. So, it was not a matter of reading technical journals; it was “in the air.” In this sense, we considered our inflatable pod to breathe clean air a realistic project.

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CS: In Japan, they had public air freshener systems, like vending machines for air. Tokyo was very polluted in the late 1960s.

LK: How did you come up with the title for the Inflatocookbook? Were you influenced by Steve Baer’s Dome Cookbook that was the earliest of the West Coast cookbooks?

CS: Yes absolutely, but at the time producing cookbooks on integrated systems and spreading the knowledge to the people was a type of practice.

LK: Cookbooks indicate a playful way of putting together information, but at the same time they signal a different modality of practice. A cookbook, by displaying precise rules and sets of instructions rather than drawings, essentially negates the traditional means of representation an architect usually uses.

CS: Yes, a cookbook does not provide specific designs, but rather representations or directions of where the design process might go. The point is that a cookbook negates the notion of an “expert” by handing the information to the hands of the people, empowering them to build their own shelter. Philosophically, the cookbook negates the author. Rather than suggesting one solution, the cookbook produces a range of possible solutions that are all equally valuable. Reading a cookbook, you should be able to stand by for updates!

CL: Updating is very much related to the supplements of the Whole Earth Catalog. If you initially put the information out there, you open a channel of feedback and communication.

CS: Besides, professional magazines, like Architectural Forum, started publishing supplements to their “planned issues;” things were changing so fast that they realized they needed to update immediately their published material.

CL: We never published a supplement though to

the Inflatocookbook.

LK: Were the loose pages of the Inflatocookbook’s first edition intended as a feedback mechanism? That you would, for example, use one page, send the next one to your friends for comments, and so forth?

CS: One of the things that I was inspired by was the McBee Keysort system. It was a set of cards. I think they still sell them. They published these cards that were like computer cards, with numbers all around, and they gave you a little punch. The idea was that you develop a system of categorizing information by punching different kinds of notches on the numbers. You then had a stack of cards and if, for example, you wanted to search a topic like “authors on the East Coast,” you would insert a knitting needle to a certain notch and the right cards would fall out of the stack. Along these lines, the Inflatocookbook was designed to never be bound, but rather to be stackable and perhaps indexed. The numbers around the pages in the first edition were intended for this purpose.

McBee Keysort System

CL: It was also a philosophical attitude. Binding a certain number of pages in a volume was too established. We did not know how many pages we were going to have, and we thought we might even add a couple of pages as the manual was being simultaneously written and distributed. But

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I like the idea that you are suggesting of sending pages to friends and receiving them back with comments. There was this sense of sharing.CS: There were also the “energy credits.” They were double-sided symbols, like dollar bills—you can actually fit a dollar bill on the energy credit. It was designed to be exactly the same size. The idea was that you would cut them out from the page of the Inflatocookbook and have “energy money.” This was inspired by Dana Ashley’s 8th Space Atlas, where he invited artists to contribute and mail a hundred copies of a piece in letter size paper. He then collated all the copies, bound them, and mailed the books back to the artists. We considered this publishing method of sharing information unique. He also created “Dana Ashley money.” By cutting the “money pieces,” you would get certain art pages in the mail. Your money could be worth anything you wanted it to be.

Enviromoney

LK: So, in the second edition of the Inflatocookbook, the numbers got cut off because the issue was bound?

CS: Since the second edition was bound, the McBee Keysort system with numbers and notches did not have any meaning. The stacking was no longer relevant.

LK: What were the major influences in writing the Inflatocookbook as a manual? Were you familiar with 19th century homesteading manuals in utopic communities, or post-war military operation manuals?

CS: A major influence for me was Disney. I thought he could do anything, create TV shows, draw mice, model railroads et-al. One day, Doug Michels and I went down there to the WD enterprises and had a long discussion, out of which we thought of positing architecture first as entertainment, rather than a solution: something like the “city of tomorrow.” You can produce more radical ideas and mark new directions by thinking of architecture as entertainment. It is possible to avoid any legal dimensions, as well as fall into fixed spatial categories. Architecture is a creation of fantasy, not of reality.

CL: I will try to answer your question on technical and utopian manuals in regards to the Whole Earth Catalog. In the 1960s, something entirely new was happening in the culture, a collective repudiation of authority. We were not really looking for historical models at a time when the culture was reinventing itself. In this sense, the Whole Earth Catalog was seminal. It was a complete account of not only products and tools, but of information current at a specific historic time. It gave you a religion, a philosophy, and then very specific tools to realize daily life, to be an architect, a farmer or a cybernetic pioneer.

CS: All information was handed in a cosmic appreciation of the world.

LK: Most manuals and cookbooks of that time were a product of communes, and in fact of communes located in hard to reach destinations: in the deserts and the woods, accompanied with a “back to nature” regressive and in many cases “anti-technological” ideology. However, your case is different. You were living in an urban context, San Francisco, and did not have a commune. How did you relate yourselves to these other communities? Did you think of yourselves as a mobile commune?

CL: We were a “semi-commune.” In fact, we were a commune, a collective and a collaborative.

CS: A commune meant that everyone would live

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together, share their money and one meal per day.

CL: We did that in our warehouse in Sausalito in 1970 and 1971. All people working on the Inflatocookbook lived there as well as their partners. Some people would also come from Houston to work with us on a project and remained in residence for weeks. At the time when we were building the House of the Century, we also lived on the site.

LK: However, you did not repudiate technology and you did use certain materials, like polyethylene for instance, that could have been criticized by Pacific High School when they entered their “retreat to nature” phase.

CL: We were indeed criticized for these choices.

CS: We figured, however, it was a spectrum of options we had available. There were better materials for temporary events, different than the ones we used for more permanent solutions. We used the same design techniques for either case, ranging from inflatable vent diagrams to ferrocement shell diagrams that we developed for the House of the Century…. I find great value in the idea of modifying nature and producing intelligent, living designs, structures that can assemble themselves based on the design of a process. And, even the people that repudiated technology needed it.

CL: It is important to realize that this time reflected the development of green architecture in the counterculture. Sim Van der Ryn…was a major influence at the Freestone Conference. There was a debate opened by Lloyd Khan for reusable materials and indigenous methods. Others like Steve Baer built houses out of aluminum foam panels for solar heating. He was also chopping out cartops. Because it was just the beginning, they embraced technology, but often in simple ways; they often used what was “off the shelf.” Now the story is much more complicated, but it is important to recall that for mainstream architecture of the time, “greening” was in no

case in the radar.

LK: Would you relate the emergence of ecological architecture with the space program and the idea of self-sufficiency?

CS: Well, to go to the moon you had to take your entire environment with you. You could not forget anything.

CL: The space effort was a combination of computers, technology and architecture. It was a very interesting design problem and in effect it was very successful. It was highly influential on us in an iconic way mostly: hardware, mobility, and minimal living units.

CS: Also, the idea to rollout an environment out of trucks, that led us to Truck-In University. The technical idea was pipes and a cloth of inflatable that would freeze with fiberglass.

LK: Talking of the moonlanding, I am assuming that the general enthusiasm with technology and the idea that with technology we could conquer the universe was vital to the 1960s culture. How did “futurology” as a field of study migrate from the hard sciences to popular culture, and how did it affect your work?

CL: Growing back in the 1950s, in the immediate postwar period, there was a general sense in America that, “we are now entering the future.” The sense of the future existed everywhere in popular advertising and popular culture, simultaneously with the threat of nuclear annihilation and bomb shelters. Also, the 1939 World’s Fair was a milestone in the 20th century. A corporate utopia of the future emerged at this exposition. They would promote ideas that “you would not have to work that much anymore, because machines would do the work of humans and therefore everyone would have more leisure time.” This was a fairly accurate prediction of what America would be in 1960. The Russians put up Sputnik first and Americans rushed to put up their own satellites right after.

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CS: However, NASA was positioning itself as the promoter of a civilian future, not of a military future related to war. They even had a civilian space station.

CL: This is true. The conquest of outer space was endorsed as a civilian and humanistic accomplishment since the Kennedy era.

LK: Did NASA donate to you a lunar module for a show? How did that happen?

CL: We were doing an exhibition in the Houston Contemporary Art Museum and someone in the museum requested to borrow the lunar module. NASA was also based in Houston and they said, “Sure, we will send it over.” They delivered it on a big truck. At the time of the exhibition, there was a space station in orbit, Skylab, and they gave us a video feed with direct transmission of what was happening in the space station. To me, this was the most amazing part of the 2020 Vision exhibition. You would go to the museum and a small living room that we set up, and you could see unedited, live video feed from the space station, exactly the same as the mission control at NASA.

LK: Whose idea was this?

CL: It was our idea.

CS: Going back to the rise of small publications, one of the things that interests me the most is that this phenomenon emerged simply because “you could do it.” The print world had gone through an incredible revolution between small offsets, instant printing and Xeroxing in the 1950s, replacing the mimeograph stencils from the 1940s. A lot of small publications were done with the barest of means, with low-end printing processes. We used iron press for spot color. I collected the iron press from when I was a kid. Color was one hundred percent letterpress; it was not an offset technique.

LK: The first issue of the Inflatocookbook had

2,000 copies. Did you reproduce these at a local printer?

CL: Yes, we went to a place called “Rip-off Press.” The people that ran it were supportive of your work and gave up discounts.

CS: Also, every project was like a manifesto. Every time we started a project we designed a letterhead, make rubber stamps, a logo and design its own graphics.

LK: Was the title in the Inflatocookbook not printed, but stamped with a rubber stamp?

CL: Yes it was. We would make a drawing and send it out to get a rubber stamp, like a photograph engraving, in order to personalize our projects.

LK: This sort of announcement of a project before it actually exists is an avant-garde strategy.

CS: Yes, suddenly everything would become real if it was in print. Look at it! It is on a postcard. Back then only legitimate tourist attractions were on postcards.

CL: Personalized graphics, logos, rubber stamps and letterheads would make a project real. The project had its own stationery.

Chip Lord holding the Inflatocookbook. San Francisco 2007.

ON ““Snow Moulding”, “The inflatable shower” and the beginning of the green movement.

Interview with DAVID SELLERS by Lydia Kallipoliti


WARREN, VERMONT, USMay 6, 2008

DAVID SELLERS


LK: In 1973, you published in the Cosmorama section of Architectural Design your experiments with snow molding. On the phone, you referred to it as “the ice failure.” Why is that?

DS: This long research started from my interest in experimental houses using available resources as scaffolds for concrete formwork or even as structure. I was here in Vermont in the middle of the winter. I had nothing to do at night, so I thought this would be a perfect time to work on my idea, putting concrete on ice. My first attempt was to use weather balloons.

LK: Do you mean spraying the water balloons with water and watching it instantly crystallize in the normal below-zero temperature of winter Warren, Vermont?

DS: Well, I started off with putting concrete on ice. Then, I thought, “How am I going to make ice?” Water would not take any shape. So I decided to do it the simplest possible way. I knew that a shell structure was stronger than a flat structure; a flat curve in a vault is not as strong as an eggshell. A weather balloon would be perfect for this test, so I got some. I put them outside and I had to mount snow up so the wind would not blow them away; actually, so that the snow would mount on the weather balloon.

LK: So, first you got the weather balloon and then mounted snow on top of it?

DS: Ideally that was the plan, though in reality I could only keep the snow in the bottom from blowing away; the top would not hold. Imagine your balloon sitting there, rolling around; if you spray water on it, it blows away just from the force of the spray. It cannot hold any shape. This method really did not work. It was very complicated, because I had to set off one side of a chunk of ice and the other side would slide off. Then, I tried to meld the two parts together by throwing more snow. A snowstorm was ideal for this experiment. Finally, I got weather balloons. They looked cool, I put a light bulb underneath and they were glowing. It was

terrific, but it did not last; the whole thing dropped out off that idea. I thought there had to be a better way. It took a couple of years and long winters in Vermont until I came up with the idea of using snow. I said, “I’ll just use snow, forget the ice.” I could mound the snow in any shape I wanted: a snowball, a snowman, a snow fortress or anything else. I remember that in Yale, I won the award in a snow sculpture competition, because I was the judge (laughing).

LK: That must have been very helpful. (Laughing)

David Sellers in his house in Warren, Vermont, 2008

DS: I organized the competition and there were only three entries. There was me and two other guys. I decided mine was the best. No kidding though, using snow and compression was an idea that was circulating in my mind for a while. I had worked on a range of snow shapes and the whole process dawned on me. Since I could make so many different moulds out of snow in one afternoon, using only a shovel, I thought this was a perfect idea. I needed funding to work on this project so I wrote a proposal for the National Endowment of Arts. The slogan of the proposal was: “Build it with a shovel and heat it with a candle.” It was going to be so well insulated.

LK: So what happened?

DS: I got the grant. I needed to have a big mound of snow, so I built it in my driveway that I shared

DAVID SELLERS


with someone else. I thought it would take a weekend. I did not presume it would take very long. Imagine an enormous mound of snow; it was a huge pile that was dumped in the yard by the town’s truck. I started carving the top of the mound with a shovel and smoothened it all off with a big trowel which I found for cutting hay. You could slice the snow in any shape you wanted to mound. It was really exciting. I shaped the mound with saws and shovels until it was the shape I wanted, but turns out it was really hard. Part of the problem was that I was aspiring to not only shape a dome, but also columns, stairways, windows and special partitions.

LK: An ambitious snow house!

DS: In order to have a column, I had to have a funnel in this structure so I was digging a hole on the top of this pile of snow that would go way deep and try to smooth it all with a big rake. I thought I would build stairways this way; but then I realized at that point that one of the premises was wrong. This whole process could not be used as a methodology for the average person to build their own house. The material was abundant but the process was highly complicated. My original intention for getting involved in this project was politically motivated, so that anyone could build their own house. However I ended up spending all my time thinking and drawing three-dimensionally in order to understand how to go forward and complete the structure. It was very hard for me, so I assumed it would be even harder for a person who was never involved in construction. I then tried to locate the steps of the process that made this methodology so hard to turn it into a repeatable system, and I thought at one point that “I was building inside out.” I am standing on negative space. Basically, I was on top of what was going to be the interior and literally of what was going to be the ceiling. The more I molded it the more I thought it would be ok. I poured a little chunk of concrete over the snow and it turned out it did not set. It needed to be warmer.

LK: Concrete would not set on snow?

DS: Now, I probably know how to make concrete set on ice. But the stuff I had then would not work. I needed to protect the concrete from the snow, so I put burlap over the snow. I took a lot of bags, punched in a bunch of nails and pushed them through burlap, so that everything would be all wrapped up in burlap. Then, I could pour concrete on top of this protective shell. Then, I realized it wasn’t that good of an idea, because then I had to insulate the whole structure. Insulation from the inside would be very hard to shape because there would be all sorts of funny shapes, so I thought of placing insulation on top of the burlap. A friend of mine owned a spray foam company, called Pierre’s. Spray foam would form in many clouds. We placed little sticks on the domes snow mound and put it a certain number of inches over the burlap. We stacked 3/8’’ of foam on top of the burlap; we sprayed until the foam reached the sticks. Then it was perfect. It was exactly the right thing. The project was completed, and it was towards the end of the winter that I could not move the structure to its final location; it was still in the driveway. If you get the picture, the building was planned to go over here, but I had the snow pile over here, and eventually I thought that was even better. You could move the building anywhere you want to. Pile the snow somewhere, spray the foam, which is a very lightweight layer, and then move the foam mold anywhere else where you can pour concrete on it. I thought that after all the disasters it was a fabulous solution.

LK: So, basically, you have a pile of snow in one random location, like an experimental backyard, and then you move the insulation under-layer to the building’s final location? What happens to the pile of snow?

DS: The snow melts. I don’t transfer the snow; I transfer the foam.

LK: Once the foam is sprayed, is it rigidified?

DS: It is rigid and then you can spray concrete on the insulation. The concrete cures on the insulation. We used a gun spray system, which was very

DAVID SELLERS


user-friendly. The whole imagery of this process though was very funny and quite disturbing to the neighbors. Imagine my house, the house next door, and my driveway with a giant mound of snow equal to the size of the houses. Moreover, the mound of snow was covered with orange foam. The orange gigantic mound makes me laugh, though the idea fascinates me. You can manufacture a structure anywhere, in your parking, your backyard, your basement, and then just move it to another location. You can also cut the foam layer in pieces, because it is all glued together, stack the pieces and then put them back together. You rebuild the whole thing and then spray concrete on it. Excellent! Despite the fact that the neighbors did not find it such a good idea.

Seller’s fabrication studio in Vermont, 2008.

LK: Sounds ingenious in the drawing, but you spoke of unpredictable catastrophes in the materialization of these ideas. Did this separation of layers, cutting in pieces, rebuilding the puzzle and spraying the concrete work smoothly?

DS: There were many disasters, but each one of them was so interesting to witness! First of all, we could not get the foam layer off the snow. It was so well insulated! I could have kept that snow there for two or three years. It would not even melt in the summer because it was insulated too well! The volume of snow was the size of this house with a huge volume of foam over it and there was no heat source to melt it. It was an amazing kind of

cool mass of cold snow and ice, all trapped below the foam. I actually think that people could start in this way a new kind of air conditioning for the summer, by getting amounts of snow and wrapping them with insulating blankets; then, you could put refrigeration tubes in it. Those are all ideas that might have worked, but at that point in time, I never thought of alternatives and the offsprings of this experiment. I was convinced that I was right; that the ice would eventually melt away. It did not, however. The neighbors had to walk around this thing, about a foot or two of mud, to get to their front door.

LK: Was the pile oozing?

DS: Yes. All around this thing, there was a huge mud pile. The dogs ran in it and lay down—then they ran back in your house. It got really annoying. So we finally said, “We are going to slice the thing up.” Essentially, slice it in pieces and haul it down. This was probably around June or July.

LK: So, originally you thought that the snow pile would melt around the seasons. However, the pile was not melting because the foam insulated the ice too well so that the heat could not penetrate the foam and get to the ice. It was like a perfectly sealed system! For some unknown reason, the snow pile was insulated everywhere, except for the bottom; so then you had this little trickle of water, melting bit by bit.

DS: We didn’t think of that in advance; then it dawned on me that I had to dig a small underground channel to introduce some heat to the ice pile.

LK: Basically, you created a hermetically closed environment.

DS: I remember fishing in Canada with my dad as a kid. He had ice houses to keep the fish. You would hire people in the winter at the lake to collect giant piles of ice. Initially it would thaw out on a table, but then you would cover it with two or three pieces of sawdust and it would stay all summer long. This is the same kind of problem, but I thought I

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would deal with that later because it’s not that big of a deal. Eventually, we sliced “the thing” in pieces. Imagine twenty to thirty people carrying giant curved pieces of foam down the hill. Then we forgot to number them!

LK: Oh, no!

DS: We should have numbered which piece was which. Now they are down the hill; huge amounts of curved sides of foam, each bigger than this room, all stacked up by my friends who volunteered to help me. And so I said, “OK, this is simple. We should put these things back together again.” But imagine each piece, at the size of a Volkswagen, with a curve on it. There was no strategic logic; I was hoping that this piece probably goes next to that piece and so forth. It took me a week to put “the thing” together again. Then I numbered everything with little sticks. Finally, I had this back together again.

LK: I think now I understand the “disaster aspect” of snow molding.

DS: These were all good lessons though, of which I am really proud. The whole experience was really good. At the end, I put a sky hole on the south side to heat the whole thing. I put in three reinforcement rods in the foam, got a spray gun and sprayed it with concrete, like in a thin shell. It was actually a shelter, smaller than I original planned because I threw some pieces away. The size though did not really matter; it was no longer a proof of the concept. It honestly looked really cool. A friend of mine moved in.

LK: You said before, that concrete is like jell-o and that it takes the shape of the container?

DS: Yes, this was a happy ending to the experiment with “the thing.” Concrete gave an end to the experiment and I thanked the National Endowment for it.

LK: Were they pleased?

DS: They never sent me any comments. I did prove, however, that you can make use of the molds for pouring concrete with $3,000 bucks and many volunteers. That was the cost for the foam. But still, once you add it all up it is about $8,000-9,000 in creating a final shell. I figure that if people could do these things in the backwoods of Vermont, they would populate the land with funny-looking shaped shelters.

LK: Among the trees?

DS: Yes, but thinking it over, you have to really try hard to make it look beautiful.

LK: But you said before, it looked cool.

DS: I thought it was beautiful, but could have no sense of control. It was very unpredictable. It is hard to make something beautiful, when you are standing on top of it and predict that it is going to look like something special.

Snow molding photo from Seller’s personal archives

LK: Did you ever climb down, back up and say, “OK, I need to do something here and then climb all the way back up and get your saw out to fix it”?

DS: Every morning I came down and looked at it. From a distance it looked good, but when I got closer, it was not so good. It kind of looked like a grid castle which was quite interesting, so I still think the concept was nevertheless valuable, but I had to cover it up with concrete. Then I came up

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with a different idea, inspired by a friend of mine, who sculpted sinks out of heated plexiglass. He basically heated plexiglass and put air pressure into it, similar to glass blowing; then he would put a drain in it and made a sink. The sink was a countertop with a bulge. I thought this method might have extraordinary effects if transferred to a different scale. So I made a mold for a winding stair out of plaster using an old stove. I heated up ¼” of polyethylene plastic to a dish rag at 300 degrees [Fahrenheit], draped it over the top of the stair and put a vacuum on it. It became a vacuum mold exactly the shape of the stair. Turn it over and pour concrete in it and bingo—we had a mold for a precast concrete stair. It was a lot faster.

LK: Was speed of construction an important parameter to you?

DS: Yes, absolutely. This method was very efficient. You can make a stair, once you have the mold to make a stair. Pour the concrete into the gelatinous mold, so to speak.

LK: I can only imagine how magical it would be if the woods of Vermont would be populated by these structures. You would want them to be all different colors.

DS: Oh yes, you can make them in all different colors. That would not be a problem; there are so many options. But to go back to the vacuum molding machine, it was a great a way to make house components out of concrete. We made a dozen of these molds and you could produce as many stairs as you want. Overall though, I think I barely scratched the surface of the potential for low temperature design.

LK: What other projects did you work on relevant to material experimentation, such as low temperature design and gelatinous molds?

DS: Another project that required a few full-size prototypes and material experimentation was the inflatable disposable shower. It took three full-size prototypes before we could actually fabricate one

with a blowgun. This type of shower is perfect for submarines and spaceships, or even for New York City offices, where there is limited space.

LK: Were you influenced by space program research? I understand that at the time, this line of thinking on contained spaces and enclosed environments deeply influenced architects.

DS: Well, the inflatable shower was part of a design project for an interplanetary module for NASA. I remember that NASA launched a competition for designers for a planetary module, where two people could fly around to all the planets. My problem with living in very compact spaces is unused space in relationship to the time you spend in each space. Now, how many times do you take a shower a day?

LK: One, if I am lucky.

DS: Let’s assume you have one shower a day for 20 minutes. Basically, for 23 hours and 40 minutes that room is empty; still it is the most expensive room in your whole house per square foot. You might use the kitchen for four or five hours a day, the bedroom for eight hours a day and the dining room for three to four hours a day. It is the shower however that has the highest construction cost. The shower needs waterproofing, plumbing, ventilation, tiles and so forth. So, I decided to tackle this issue. I wanted to have a shower as big as my bedroom! If only the shower space were a balloon that could be stored in the doorway, it could be any size! I thought of a three-feet wide and high doorway, with fiberglass mold on its back part, a shower knob, a hole, a valve, and a drain, thick enough to store a shower balloon. Inside the thickness of the door, I attached the shower balloon; it then stretched like a balloon bag.

LK: Are you talking about a big plastic bag that then folds back into the wall?

DS: There is also a fan in there. You turn on the fan and the balloon blows up. We worked a lot on inflatables in the 1970s; there were a lot of conferences back then on the topic and we traveled

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and presented papers in a few. We also had an inflatable “peace pipe” for a 4th of July parade one time.

LK: What exactly is an inflatable peace pipe?

DS: Well, the Indians and the American Indians made pipes, regular pipes and there was a ceremony where they had to physically celebrate peace before two people, two nations, whatever; so they would smoke this pipe and they would share it with the people that they wanted to form peace with. Anyway, we built a “peace pipe” in the size of a Volkswagen! It was about 30 feet long. After this inflatable, we realized that we can experiment with inflatables in domestic environments. If you just turn the fan on, your inflatable blows up and it is waterproofed. It can be the size of your room or any size and could be shaped like Donald Duck; it doesn’t make any difference.

Seller’s inflatable shower in his house in Vermont

LK: Were not showers similarly manufactured for spaceships?

DS: Yes! The idea is to put this in a spaceship. In a spaceship, you cannot afford to have a whole shower room empty. There is no room there, so the whole thing folds up flat in the wall. You just get inside it and it is totally waterproof and you don’t care! You are in outer space! Who cares if it goes down misting all over the place? I think that this idea can work fabulously in a regular house. Say you have a small apartment in NYC somewhere and you would like to have a great big shower, so you could do it. I made three inflatable showers in my house. One came down from the ceiling all of the sudden—this thing would drop down.

LK: So, not tiles or anything like that? Was it like a huge shower cap, like the ones you put on your head, but instead put your whole body in it?

DS: I never thought of it this way, but I guess you could. One of the features of the inflatable shower is that it becomes entertainment in your living room. It is not totally transparent; it is a misty bubble in a strange shape.

LK: Very interesting project! Was the inflatable shower part of your interplanetary module scheme for NASA? Did you ever send it to them?

DS: Actually, I went down to NASA in person.

LK: To Houston?

DS: It was in Washington. At that time, we were working on windmills with a window company. We received a book that the government published. It was a full handbook with requests for proposals for many military applications. One day, we were looking at the handbook out of curiosity, like a joke, and found a call for proposals for an interplanetary module to be built in a full-scale model. They were looking for two people to go run all over the planets. It was a design and ideas competition. A lot of people were submitting, so I thought it was a perfect match, because we had already fabricated the inflatable

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shower. So, I went down to see the Director of the Interplanetary Module Competition in Washington. I was wearing a coat and a tie.

LK: Did you first submit your project and were then asked for an interview?

DS: No, I just went with my project. I remember I designed 20’ long x 8’ in diameter space. The dimensions were given to us and were non-negotiable, because the module had to fit in the space cabin—the rocket, in other words. Proportionally, the space was smaller than a trailer house. I was imagining that it would probably cost us $75,000 to build a mock-up of that size, though I discussed this budget with people from the industry and my estimate was probably too low. We needed to do a lot more research. We bumped the budget to $150,000. Then I thought that we needed to test out the wall systems, work out the bugs for the shower and do research work on a lot of other components, so eventually we buffered and got the cost to around $600,000. Nobody could believe we were going to charge $600,000 for this little thing, at the size of a camper trailer.

LK: What do you suppose a space module costs?

DS: It was a mock-up. It is made for testing. They actually make people live in it for a week or so, to make sure everything is working right. So I went down to Washington, D.C. with this idea, some sketch drawings, my estimate, and so on, to talk to the competition director. At the time, I was on the faculty of Goddard College in Vermont. Goddard College is a very liberal arts college with maybe 300 students and was renowned for a net of dropouts and drug addicts, kids who could not get into college. I was teaching a design and construction campus class there between 1970 and 1973. I got in front of this guy and I told him what I was doing and he said, “What is your educational background?” So I said, “Well, I have two degrees from Yale University and I am on the Faculty at Goddard College.” And his eyes just lit up! Because John Goddard invented the rocket!

LK: Ah!!

DS: Goddard was the first man to set a rocket into orbit. So, for people in the space world, he’s like an icon like Picasso! He said, “You are actually teaching at Goddard? Well, let’s see your idea.” I explained to him my idea on the invisible wall, the inflatable shower, and other inventions. He seemed thrilled with the ideas, but these are just the tip of the iceberg. Then he asked, “What do you think your budget is? Because as you might know, Westinghouse is bidding on it; so is American Rockwell, Boeing Standard and Grumman Corporation.”

LK: Did you have a company name for the proposal that you submitted?

DS: I had to invent a name and a whole new company called National State.

LK: Why? When? How?

DS: Well, if we wanted to find funding for experimental purposes I could not just name the company “Dave Architectural Company.” So, instead I suggested how about the “State’s National Research Institute?” I remember mentioning to the director of the NASA competition that “I am the Research Director for the National State Research Institute,” which is also based at Goddard College. Goddard plus Yale were huge credentials. So then he would talk about my laser wall, and he was really excited about this—everything until we started talking about my budget. He said, “What kind of range are we talking about?” Maybe we would be way over the budget. I had my mind fixed on $600,000, but looking at the room, the people in suits inside the room and pictures of rockets on the wall, I bumped the budget up to $1.2 million on the spot. So I said, “We are looking at $1.2 million for the module” and the guy’s jaw dropped! He said, “Oh my God… You should not have said that, because now I know that you guys have no idea what you are doing. It is really around $650- 850 million!”

LK: I guess then this meeting sums up your

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experience with space agencies! How about offspring space program research for wind generators and solar collectors? Have you ever collaborated with Stewart Brand, Sim van der Ryn or Peter Calthorpe? DS: I know Peter Calthorpe very well; we are friends up to this day and occasionally we go on vacations. Peter went to California and got his degree at Berkeley. The year after he graduated he called me up and said, “Would you come to San Francisco and help me design a square block in Sacramento to mix housing with solar heating and natural air conditioning?”… I said great, and I flew to California, in Sacramento. We spent about a month working on this project. At this time, I think Peter had decided that he was going to split his partnership with Sim van der Ryn. Now they both head their office in what is called Gate 5 Road in Sausalito. Have you heard about Sausalito?

LK: I have heard about it, but I have never been there. Was this the place where the headquarters of the Whole Earth Catalog were located?

DS: Yes, exactly. Sausalito is across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and it is a bunk of piers that go into the bay. On the piers, there are a whole bunch of houseboats. There are also many little houses when you get off the piers, one of which was the Whole Earth Catalog truck store; another one was Peter’s office. Peter’s boathouse was the last one out and we spent a lot of time in this boat house; we are such great friends. I would go out there and hang out, so that is how that whole thing came about: the connection between all of us.

LK: Since you were in such proximity, did you ever send your work to the Domebooks edited by Lloyd Khan?

DS: No.

LK: Why not? Did you read the Domebooks?

DS: Yes, I did read them. Though, I did not actually

get excited about domes in general.

LK: That is interesting; tell me why.

DS: Well, I thought a dome has no scale. It is more like a beehive; it does not have scale. And also, it is too much of an impersonal engineering idea, for me. This is the way I looked at this issue. It did not interest me that much. Plus, there is no way to get inside a dome. How do you make a door into the space? A dome is almost entirely an interior; there is no natural space. If you try to put a door on a dome, it is really ugly.

LK: You know, Peter Eisenman made the exact same comment in a lecture a while ago. He was attacking the architectural intelligence of Buckminster Fuller.

DS: Well, yes I agree. It is not an appropriate solution. Maybe for extreme weather circumstances domes serve a purpose, like protection from storms, though overall it is just not a good solution. If you see it from an engineering perspective, like how to minimize construction components and make a very lightweight structure, it serves a purpose on structural efficiency. But once you have to insulate a dome and make it waterproof, domes are simply not conducive to being insulated.

LK: However, was not your snow molding shelter a kind of dome?

DS: In a way it was, but it was certainly not a regular dome. Like the top of a sphere, it would take whatever shape I wanted it to take, because it did not need to be a sphere. So, it could take a shape related to various environmental circumstances.

If we take an example, like the Sydney Opera House, it is simply a symmetrical shell, but not really a dome. Each one of the shells is structural and you take that to the next step and the next step and so forth. You could make these skins in any shape you want, though their shape is relative; each shape depends on the shape of the previous shape, one over another. So in some ways one theory is that the shape a form takes is always relative and is approximated in time

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during the course of the construction process; a form can take any shape so that it has a particular function.

Sellers and Kallipoliti in his office in Warren, Vermont, 2008

If we take another example like Frank Gehry’s, in most cases, the glass and aluminum entranceways, with all these incomprehensible curves, are like a K-Mart shopping center. Do you know who did exactly the opposite in his work? Gaudi, in my opinion. In Gaudi’s buildings in Barcelona, door and structure are all part of the same family. They are all connected, visually, proportionally and even structurally, because they are produced from the same logic and through similar processes. I think that this is a “higher order” of design in general. Domes look dropped, like they are on top of something. Bucky’s dome in Montreal almost looks like a radar dome on top of a boat. It still does not look like it holds people, and you can even say that it is not a person-friendly idea. Frank Gehry believes that they set a lot of people free because they can use so proficiently computer capability to design shapes that normally would

take forever to figure out.

But now the computer can do it and make it any shape you want from this crumpled piece of paper and hand it to someone and they can make it for you. So, now what do you make? Now that it comes down to anything, what do I make? And so, then, the question is how to make something that lasts, how to make something that is beautiful? And in my opinion, this is now a responsibility with the rare amount of materials that we have on our only planet. It is the only planet we’ve got. And most of its easily accessible materials have already been taken: the big gold mines, silver mines, aluminum, iron have already been extracted. Most architects have used destructible materials for buildings. That was pretty good for the last couple hundred years, but let’s go a thousand years into the future. I think you have to make things last. So I asked myself, when was the last time anything lasted a long time? And I said; let’s take a look at the Pantheon. Why did the Pantheon last throughout the centuries? It has been a church, a convent, a school, offices, military space, governmental building, and so forth. To my understanding, the reason why it lasts is because it’s so beautiful; it is such a compelling space. Somebody has endowed that space with enough higher skilled human effort so that people see it as a work of art. People will do anything to save it. And so, we will use it as a school for a while and with the changes, you have this corner saying “I’ll do it”; “I’ll do it”, because that is what you get. I think that is the highest order of the human endeavor with materials: to make something that lasts, and it only lasts because it is so beautiful. So many people think, “Let me look at the material” and then ask “What do I do with it?” This is what Gehry is trying to do, and you understand that you can make any shape you want. So what shape should we make? How do we make it so it lasts a long time? In my opinion, what makes it last is the artistic creative endeavor of the people who are making it, which one could argue is almost independent from cost.

LK: Interesting theory. Most people connect the large umbrella of “sustainable design” with

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machinic intelligence, but your position on duration through aesthetic value is quite extraordinary. On a different topic, from the Pantheon to outer and inner space, I was wondering if you ever worked with Jacques Cousteau.

DS: Yes. I got hired by the Jacques Cousteau Society to do some work with them on the Caribbean at a place called Mosquito Island. I did some teaching and coordinated a project called Project Ocean Search (POS), for which I designed a research station that never got built. Then they wanted to add private headquarters on a different island off Santa Barbara, so we flew out there and looked at this island. It was quite exotic and cool with submarines.

LK: So you were involved with the underwater scene?

DS: You could say that. It was a fun project. What was mostly interesting is that Jacques Cousteau wanted to create something which would be influential to all the business leaders in the world, so that they would stop withdrawing the resources of the planet. And he figured the best way to do this is to create an “entertainment ride” along with the science research. Basically, he wanted to impress people with the beauty of the ocean and explain how important the underwater world is to life on the planet. Everything is critically interconnected. The second part of his plan was to exhibit the exhaustive research and countless drawings the foundation did of the underwater world. And then the third part was to figure out how to solve the problem.

LK: The stories of the underworld are almost the mirror image of the stories of space exploration. The ways to inhabit a spaceship and a submarine, both closed systems, are almost the sides of the same coin.

ON “The Ecological House”,the “Street Farmers”, digesters, self-sufficient systems, squatting in London and the whole earth movement.

Interview with GRAHAME CAINE by Lydia Kallipoliti


RONDA, SPAINJanuary 9, 2008

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LK: In the unpublished addendum for Street Farmer 2, there is a tractor that is indicated in handwriting as a “spaceship.” What does this imply?

GC: Tractors were the future for us, like rockets were for others. That is kind of where we were. I mean none of us spoke of the future as in getting in a spaceship and going off to colonize and disturb yet another planet.

LK: Could not one argue though that the obsession for self-sufficient systems originated from the research of the space program?

GC: No, the self-sufficient system originated from planet Earth.

LK: However, the attempt to reproduce anew a self-sufficient system in its entirety was first put in effect for the purposes of the space program: so that a human being, with its given biological structure, can carry its environment.

GC: Supposedly. But I would still argue that the logic behind recycling infers to the biosphere and the way the world functions. It is all the same thing. I also think that I coined the phrase Eco-house.

LK: How did you coin it? How did you think of this term?

GC: Well, I believe I actually built an ecological house. I thought of the house as an ecological system. It is! I looked at water recycling and how it naturally goes on by clouds; you see the clouds pick up water without salt, come over the mountain, elevate, the temperature bursts and the water falls as rain: that is water recycling. Of course, you can dispose of sewage in the sea, but I would not recommend it. It is not the right thing to be doing, and yet this is how we still recycle water, by dumping sewage in the city and the sea. This is how the world works.

LK: That is true. Yet, this natural process operates

in a completely different scale. If you transfer it to the scale of a house, it becomes a metaphor. First of all, did you conceive the house as a closed system? Because in order to make an inhabitable unit for one or several persons, supported on its own, it should necessarily perform like a closed system, right?

GC: Yes, but I never saw the house as being entirely isolated from the world. I never thought I could live off exclusively the stuff I grew in the garden or the greenhouse; I only used part of it. By monitoring what I ate, I have to say that the human body fascinates me about how much energy it can derive from a boiled egg.

LK: From what?

GC: An egg. One egg. How long does it keep you, as an animal, going? It is really amazing.

Grahame Caine drawing the Eco-house in the 1970s.

LK: Absolutely. I mean in order to assemble the Eco-house, you had to study diligently the physiological cycles of humans, organisms and machines, right? Otherwise, you could not have possibly calculated the logistics of injection and excretion. How important were numbers and statistics to you in assembling the Eco-House?

GC: They were very important. I did the homework. I knew all that. I knew how many calories and how much energy was being used up by the human body; it was actually proved that thinking used

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very few calories. I was in fact thinking all day and getting paid very little money, if any at all! It was a kind of gestural thinking, like what do you daily as a single person, or as a tiny group of minded people. Breaking down daily activity into components was an important part of the Eco-house. What’s more is that I used to believe, in the fear of losing the plot of land to the state, that it was not us that would lose the plot; the planet lost this plot of land.

LK: Did you also believe that we had already lost the planet?

GC: Not in that way. There is an absolute desperation in this line of thinking. When the land was to be returned to the state, we were losing the plot as a planet. You cannot save the planet all at once, but what you can do is just try to do your bit.

LK: Why did you change the title of the house from “Eco-house” to “Street Farmhouse”? The renaming happened rather quickly.

GC: Well, the change was not effective for me, but more for the people; so that people could see it more for what is was. I called it an ecological house when it was on the drawing board. I brought it together into a project and got funding for it. My students’ grants disappeared the first day trying to pay a timber bill. Then, it was good old Alvin Boyarsky that paid for it.

LK: What exactly did Alvin Boyarsky pay for?

GC: He paid for the timber of the Eco-house.

LK: So, he failed you in your final diploma examinations at the AA, but paid nevertheless for the timber of the house?

GC: Of course! This was normal at the time. They could give you funding for a project they believed in, but they could not risk giving a degree to someone like me, interested more in biology than in drawings. A degree to me would devaluate

the AA standards. Most likely it would have been devaluating.

LK: But Peter Crump and Bruce Haggart received their degrees from the AA.

GC: Peter and Bruce had already gotten their degree at that time. They were a year ahead of me. They were also on the edge; their final review went badly. Though, honestly it did not matter to me. I was convinced at that point that I was never going to be an architect. As I said to you earlier, I think architecture is immoral.

Grahame Caine and Bruce Haggart in the 1970s.

LK: Immoral?

GC: Yes!

LK: And you do not do any drawings ever?

GC: Not really. I do paintings and diagrams for light waves.

LK: Can you talk about the motto “From here we grow”? It recurs in your drawings in Street Farmer and other writings of the Street Farmers. What does it mean for you?

GC: It is lots of things. First it means “power to the people.”

LK: I found a magazine in Peter Crump’s archives that was called Anarchy. A similar drawing was

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published on the cover of this magazine. Peter showed it to me, referring to it as “a beautiful and insightful image” for the Street Farmers. It actually was a beautiful cover; there was a root sprouting in all directions accompanied with the same phrase: “From here we grow.” How does this phrase apply to the Eco-house?

GC: Well… OK; so you grow stuff in the Eco-house. In a certain way, you are starting a revolution. It feels as though you are initiating and are part of a revolution that is about to happen in the way we live. Of course, I did not go through all this trouble solely for this reason. Let me be flippant to a certain extent; there were several easier ways to get housing, other than actually building that thing! I don’t mean to sound immodest, yet I could not simply believe that people could not think of the Eco-house as relevant to architecture. Before the Eco-house I submitted my “Grow your own bamboo” project to a housing competition, and it was excluded as irrelevant to reality! It is very dismissive.

LK: Architectural Design, however, published the Eco-House in 1972. AD, plus a lot of magazines at the time, published projects in this line of thinking: “non- architecture” in the spirit of it being what architecture was all about. Look at this article for example: “The Trick Recyclist” by Rupert Spade; this is Martin Pawley’s pseudonym.

GC: Oh, is it?

LK: Yes it is; or at least this is what Robin Middleton claims. Pawley analyzes here how the space program analyzed human beings in terms of input and output. The person is all about numerical flows and the ways in which they can be monitored and reorganized.

GC: It is an obvious problem for astronauts, isn’t it? I mean, how do they urinate? What happens to their urine?

LK: Yes, but somehow, there are contemporary researchers who argue that ecology—or the

notion of ecology in architecture—originates from the ecology of the space cabin. Peder Anker for instance, who is a historian of science, claims that ecological design is based, for the most part if not exclusively, on the ecology of the space cabin and the function of closed systems.

GC: Really? Not on life itself? I did look closely at space stuff; except for the fact I thought all along I was looking at life. Overall, I disagree with this argument. Planet Earth is what “spaceship earth” touches on.

LK: No question. But from the historian’s perspective, there are several connections between ecological thinking, the earth vision—the first photographs of the earth—and the space program. Think of Buckminster Fuller and Paul R. Ehrlich’s Population Bomb.

GC: Yes, the earth really is round. (Laughs)

LK: Is that all? Allow me to interrogate you further. (Laughs) Did you read or were you aware of the presence of Ian McHarg and his major book Design With Nature, John Todd and The New Alchemist Group or the Grumman Corporation?

GC: Yes and no. I will tell you what: tell me how planet Earth works and you will come up with all these diagrams. You will come up with the space program. Tell me how biological life works; how the sun shines in and you get heat. You get heat which can go in and out, or you can use that heat and sunlight for things to grow and to heat houses. The whole of life on Earth is dependent on the sun. It does everything; it purifies our water and puts the wind in the clouds. It is not a massive deal to come up with an ecological system or an ecological diagram. It comes from spaceship Earth, that is planet Earth. I think this was the phrase everyone was using around that time.

LK: I bet. It was allegedly used first by Buckminster Fuller and there was also an important book by the British economist Barbara

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Ward that was entitled Spaceship Earth.

GC: I found it really difficult to convince people that 2 plus 2 equals 4. Ecological principles are so obvious, but strangely enough they are not applied. Only recently, there is a growing interest on matters of sustainable development and this is only due to the fact that ecology has become an advantage to capitalism; it was taken on board. In the past, linear processes of production worked efficiently because they were cheap. You just made your product and did not have to care about pollution; you did not have to care about people. The only purpose of keeping people alive is to have them as consumers. Basically, capitalism gets workforce to extract the wealth of the planet and put it into certain pockets in order to construct ruling power over others. Money is power, in this world. LK: So, are you implying that the reciprocal, cyclical process of recycling that is in effect in the Eco-House represents an alternative political system?

GC: Probably yes; a kind of liberal anarchy. The cyclical system certainly cares; it is a caring system. I don’t think it necessarily represents a political party, but perhaps an alternative social consciousness. I forget names, but there was a guy who used to lecture at large-scale business and conferences; he would say: “Here you all are, all nicely manicured in your posh suits, but how many of you are the dirtiest people in the world? All of you are!” And that is what big wealthy businesses are. They are the polluters of the planet and they rely on capitalism to put all this right. Throw money at the problem. Oh yeah, that would work. I thought that was what the problem was. It is foul, Lydia. Now, I could be completely wrong, but the only way of sorting this out is through politics. It all sounds like a religion, doesn’t it?

LK: It is. This is exactly where I was getting. You are describing a phenomenon from your perspective that is driven by an emerging

sociopolitical environmental consciousness that migrates to design. At the same time, nevertheless, this same phenomenon was expressed in the Cold War framework of America driven by fear: fear that the planet was going to vanish because of an imminent doomsday. In the face of a nuclear holocaust, you’d better do your duty as a scientist, designer or thinker. This attitude is based on fear, not social responsibility, and in many respects it goes back to the religious dictum of Noah’s Ark carrying capacity. A lot of projects ask the same with space colonies: How many people can you fit here? How many people can we support? Because we are soon all about to die. On the other hand, from my discussions with you and Peter Crump, I did not get the impression that you were in any way driven by the belief that the world was coming to an end. It was a subversive position against political conditions.

GC: You are right with that. I was never convinced with the hope to colonize space. Space colonies give people the liberty to continue mishandling the planet, rather than encouraging people to be resourceful with solutions for here and now.

LK: There was a special CoEvolution Quarterly issue for “Space Colonies” in 1977, which published a series of letters from several scientists, biologists, researchers and philosophers that invested in the idea of space colonization. I remember John Todd, the head of the New Alchemist group and a close friend of Stewart Brand, was surprisingly not supportive of space colonization, despite the fact that he devoted more than a decade researching on closed ecosystems. Todd observed that artificial ecosystems are almost impossible to predict in their evolution. Unanticipated events may happen because of minor changes in the way that you feed nutrients, or the way that you dissolve substances. Did you also encounter unpredictability in the performance of the Eco-house? Did you find that things went off wrong at certain points? Did anything change unexpectedly, like the way in which different biotechnical systems would communicate with

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each other?

GC: Yes, it was all unpredictable. I made this solar collector that hardly anybody else has done before, other than NASA probably; NASA seems to have done everything. The collector was out of wax. Basically it was like a satchel on a window, that you opened up and the wax melted. Then you closed it so it would be into the room and as it went back to wax. This was due to the change of state from liquid to solid. Wax’s change of state gives out a lot more energy than just cooling down. Change of state was absolutely marvelous. You go out for the morning and come back. It’s amazing, isn’t it? The container of wax was pink, actually the wax was pink; and then I put red paint in it, just so that it can look wacky. Then one day, the expansion and contraction of the material got out of control and it burst into the whole wall. Its performance was like a picture on your wall. Just like that, suddenly, there was all this wax all over the room.

LK: How did that happen?

GC: I don’t know. I assume it got so hot that it inflated and burst the container. But, there is always unpredictability in any kind of system. I would not call this a failure. It never occurred to me that just because the system did not work, it failed. I have never thought this way.

LK: No. It is not failure. I don’t think unpredictability stands for failure. Though, was the idea of producing a closed system worth researching for you?

GC: Yes, it is definitely worth researching, because there is so much about life itself that you can learn from. But as an idea the closed system is totally undesirable. It becomes too much like “I’m alright, Jack.” Have you not heard that expression?

LK: No.

GC: It means, “I’m alright, but could not care less

about you.” I have my little eco-spaceship with a machine gun on the top. You cannot come in, because if you do, we are all going to drown. It is my ark. I am persuaded that the rich people, the ones that are liable for ecological disaster, would all hide away from the maddening of the crowd when the crops start failing and there is a food shortage. They have fortified islands in ideal locations. Moreover the consumption of material for packaging and construction is unethical. I used a lot of cement and plywood to make the Eco-house. Generally, my way of making stuff was to consciously consume as little as possible in the construction process. This is one of the reasons that I think architecture is immoral, simply because of the amount of consumption that goes into architecture. It must be the most consuming business in terms of resources that exists.

LK: I hesitate though to take this discussion into an ethical and moral dimension, because I think one of the important parameters at that time when the green movement was being shaped was the stimulation of the collective imagination. The discussion now revolves around ethics; however back then it revolved around a collective imagination and refiguring life. I am more interested in this direction, because it can mobilize the discipline; it can mobilize people and thought, rather than induce morals. Architects always like to do cool things somehow.

GC: If they are lucky.

LK: Sure, but even if they are not lucky, they somehow make their luck. I mean, you do cool things and the Eco-house is an amazing project. There is another side to your work that has nothing to do with how well the house functioned, and my guess is that this is the reason you were receiving twenty letters per day.

GC: People were a lot more political at that time.

LK: Were you also more connected to, let’s say, a cosmological imagination? Was that relevant? Was the Earth, the images of the Earth that

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were just released in 1968 significant to the sociopolitical environmental awareness that you are referring to?

GC: Yes. I never thought of that as being a connection but you might be right. But I do feel like at that time, people were more concerned, more politically aware.

LK: Is it true that a detergent company funded your research for the Eco-house? What was this company called?

GC: Leverhulme. It was a soap bubble company.

LK: Why do you think it is the case that a soap bubble company funded you? Did Leverhulme as a corporation have anything to do contextually with your project?

GC: Well, all the big multi-national companies, it could have been Shell or anybody really, put aside a certain amount for charity.

LK: It is really conspicuous nevertheless that soap bubble companies funded experimental architectural projects. Don’t you think? I know of other examples.

GC: So did chocolate bubble companies.

LK: Did a chocolate bubble company fund you as well?

GC: Yes. Later on, when the Leverhulme money ran out, we got some money from Baldville Trust. Baldville is part of Cadbury, the chocolate company, which is also a Quaker company. In fact, I met this guy called Mr. Cadbury. He was a smashing bloke. His job was to give out money to charities and good causes, like scholarships. Every big company gives 0.00001 percent of their profits to donations. You should also try big companies to get funding for your research. They will believe you if you tell them that some aspect of your work has something to do with soap or chocolate.

LK: Well, they might be interested in methods to separate water flows, like sewage, grey water, other flows.

GC: I don’t know. You make up a case, and they pick and choose. Funny enough, I could not use detergent in that house; it was prohibited for the bacteria growth. We did our laundry in the laundry place around the corner. We never set out to be self-sufficient and live in a space capsule.

LK: What was your interpretation of life support?

GC: Well, you cannot attribute the term “life support” to the space program. I bet life support has been used throughout history. Food supports life.

LK: Can you comment on this diagram? It is a recirculatory house by the Grumman Corporation as an offspring of the space capsule.

GC: There is a woman in this diagram. Women were not part of the revolution.

LK: What? Why not?

GC: I am just joking.

LK: This house shares similarities with the Eco-house, but addresses a different audience: the domestic interior space in the United States, rather than the British counterculture.

GC: There are too many filters here. Why would you have to use filtered water to flush the toilet? You can use the water that you use in the hand basin and the bath directly to flush the toilet. If you mix different water streams together it can become a problem. I believe that the main problem with my digester was it was too liquid. I did some small-scale experiments, shitting in buckets. It was awful; I don’t want go into details. I mixed feces with liquids in different levels, like solid to liquid ratio. It turned out that the more solid feces were, the more gas they produced.

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If they were too liquid, they produced no gas. My digester was also anaerobic, same as the Grumman’s digester. An anaerobic digester operates without air.

LK: So composting systems are aerobic digesters, while the series of processing tanks are anaerobic digesters?

GC: You are picking up an example of it. Anaerobic is without, aerobic is with air. There are different bacteria at work. We used to have quite heated discussions at the pub with strangers about which system was better system.

LK: Really? So, there was a wide interest in these matters?

GC: Yes; at least in our circle of friends.

LK: What were the different arguments?

GC: I claimed that anaerobic digesters produced methane, which in aerobic systems is lost. Aerobic digesters have to be open to the air, so there is methane released into the air. In fact, the reason why aerobic digestion produces methane is because it’s out in the open. Basically I was saying that you lose all that methane, and methane released in the atmosphere is not very good. You can use methane as a gas for cooking, for running cars or whatever else; it is a by-product. On the other hand, aerobic digestion produces an acceptable fertilizer, whereas anaerobic digestion needs a lot more work for the fertilizer to be publicly acceptable. In my opinion, nevertheless, it is much better to have an unacceptable or less acceptable fertilizer and methane than acceptable fertilizer.

LK: There was another idea that was circulating in England at the time: fish farming. Peter Crump mentioned that it was an easy way to produce protein.

GC: Probably yes. Using sewage to feed fish dates back to monks and monasteries and castles and

moats. There was water around the moat where all the shit went into; the carp ate the shit and then the inhabitants ate the carp, set it back into the moat. It is somehow a closed cycle.

LK: Have you ever been in contact with Robert and Brenda Vale?

GC: Yes, I know Brenda and Robert Vale from Cambridge University. They were my students who later went on to teach. They designed stuff; I doubt they ever built anything. They studied my papers. I generously donated to Cambridge University all my research papers, because they thought I had not done enough research.

LK: Why is that?

GC: They thought I was dilettantish. I come off as a quite amateurish type of person rather than a world expert, don’t I? I remember there was a lecturer from Cambridge who invited me to give a talk. I don’t remember the chronology, but at the time everybody there was doing purely academic research; they were all academics. After my talk, I got involved in the process of building a greenhouse up there for one of the professors of the architecture department—I think his name was Jimmy Hicks. I certainly designed it, because it took me two years from the design stage to find a location and actually start building. I built this greenhouse to live in; I was really interested in that. It was a kind of ongoing experiment; people touching on stuff. Hicks might claim that he did the first ecological house. He did not name it as such; he called it “living under glass,” I think. Hicks must have thought I was totally incredulous, no degree, no credit whatsoever. He used to talk about things like telegraph poles for half an hour; it was so boring. Everybody was extremely bored, yet his talk was supposed to demonstrate that I had not studied because I didn’t know how many telegraph poles per acre there were. It was really bizarre. Why do you really care? This group never talked to me.

LK: But they read all your papers?

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GC: I guess.

LK: Why do you think that these are the people now that are eagerly promoting ecological ideals?

GC: Because it is a big business. I mean, you have to say these things to gain credibility in the new state of capitalism we found ourselves in.

The Eco-house in Survival Scrapbook 5, 1975

LK: What happened to the alternative technologies movement from the 1970s?

GC: Long story; we evaporated or turned into capitalism. Most people I respected came outside of architecture, like Peter Harper and Stephan Szcelkun who wrote the Survival Scrapbooks. Peter Harper wrote a book called Radical Technology with Godfrey Boyle. Bruce Haggart and I were published in this book. Boyle was great.

I am sorry he came to the AA before I started working on the Eco-house; I was then in the process of working on another project. All three of them were not architects, but heavily involved with architects as part of the alternative technology movement in England. Peter Harper used to do these lectures at the AA circa 1969, and he used to talk about Russian roulette: planetary Russian roulette. On the other hand, there were still non-architects involved in similar issues that I did not like. I cannot remember the name of a Scottish guy that lectured at the AA as well, and he would always come up with statistics to prove that the world was doomed. He had loads of graphs with statistics. Such total negativity!

LK: Just to compare different attitudes on ecological issues at that time, I will read to you a quote by a historian of science, and you can comment on it. “This is a telling image of what ecological architecture came to be in the 1970s: a way of designing which fed on its own ideas and gradually closed itself off from developments in the rest of the architectural community. Its followers’ sense of self-sufficiency resulted in a sect-design for the believers whose recycling of resources and ideas led to a lack of interest in an outside world simply described as ‘industrial’ and thus not worth listening to. As a consequence, many environmentally concerned designers came to function as astronauts living intellectually within their own ecological capsules. Their somewhat narrow focus on the circulation of energy and efficiency of buildings came at the expense of a wider cultural, aesthetic and social understanding of architecture and the human condition. As William McDonough and Michael Braggart, two recent environmental architects, have noted about previous ecological buildings: ‘Efficiency isn’t much fun. In a world dominated by efficiency, each development would serve only narrow and practical purposes. Beauty, creativity, fantasy, enjoyment, inspiration, and poetry would fall by the wayside, creating an unappealing world indeed.’”

GC: This quote is really annoying me. To me, it

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is architects, and in fact “straight architects,” who are not into fun. Ecology is just an aspect of architecture. What percentage of buildings are joy and fun for the architects that produce them? Maybe half of a half of half percent.

LK: I agree with that.

GC: Most architects don’t have fun and joy.

LK: I believe though that you had fun working on the Eco-house and still I believe that the 1960s and 1970s was a time when certain architects that worked on these issues had fun. Perhaps you and The New Alchemist Group, even though they were not architects?

GC: Spot on there. The New Alchemists, spot on. I am absolutely certain that The New Alchemists had fun; they were like really good and competent and they knew how to experiment. They produced brilliant stuff. Can you have better fun in life than realize through experimentation what is possible and what is not?

LK: Previously though throughout our discussion, you presented the same arguments from a moral perspective with intense social concerns for equality and justice. I do not think this discussion can be confined to ethics versus fun. There is another perspective perhaps that has to do with a more multidimensional and multi-leveled understanding of architecture. Architecture was not simply understood at the time through volumes, shapes, forms and geometry, but also by manipulating matter and growth in touch with a biological understanding of the body and materials: how materials interact and evolve, as in chemical processes. That was also part of the game.

GC: Personally, I never felt restricted by thinking architecturally. To me then, as a fifth year student at the AA, I was a politician as much as anything else. Maybe to confine the discussion to architecture actually excludes a lot. People were politicized at the time. Whatever you did, you

thought of it in a political way. I am certain that there were students of architecture that viewed the discipline as a political process.

LK: Speaking of politics and architecture, were you involved with the production of the magazine Street Farmer?

GC: A bit. Bruce and Peter were the intellectuals, although I wrote the Eco-house article myself. When I met Bruce and Peter, it was like a marriage in heaven. I have not been able to verbalize it in my brain, but what Peter and Bruce designed and came up with in Street Farmer was exactly the manifestation of their political thoughts.

LK: Are you familiar with this diagram Juliette de Bairach Levy in Street Farmer? It shows how animal behavior and ground fertility is affected by moon cycles.

GC: If you live in this village, you cannot think of anything else. The full moon gets all the dogs barking and the rabbits lurking and yapping.

LK: Have you ever heard of sick buildings? When I was studying at MIT, there was a huge basement full of laboratories; plenty of them were sick. They did not get enough air. Lack of air is not the only cause for sick buildings; actually the definition of a sick building is quite complex. In America, however, the majority of buildings are heavily air-conditioned and a big percentage of big buildings, corporations and such, turn sick.

GC: Well, if everything is recycled, it builds up somehow with toxins. Never have a closed system unless it’s a planet. Closed recycling systems build up toxicity.

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The Street Farmers in front of the Eco-house while it was being built in the 1970s.

LK: Was the Eco-house a closed system in this sense?

GC: It was never intended to be. I don’t want to cut myself off from society, although I am making a good job of it living here, I must say. I just never saw the Eco-house as a rocket ship. The Eco-house was first a house for me, Fran and then Rosie, my daughter. The point was never to isolate yourself from society, rather to demonstrate ways of reducing dependency. The Eco-house was not the big deal that the media made it out to be. It was an attempt to incorporate certain natural elements in the operation of the house in order to reduce one’s dependence; it was a kind of liberation. I never thought of it as being totally closed. We used to go out and buy fish and chips; we used to go to the pub. Now, however I ended up being quite cut off living here in this village. I moved here deliberately to be isolated to live simply despite what I am saying against closed systems. But in the end, who wants a closed system?

I remember that the neighbors of the Eco-house, at the corner of Thames playing field Polytechnic, used to complain that the house was an eyesore. They were really upset about it. They kept complaining that the Eco-house was an “eyesore,” right in front of their home and wanted it

removed. Honestly, they accelerated the process of pulling the house down.

LK: What happened to the cultivated land after the demolition? How long were the plants grown for?

GC: After the demolition, the land returned to its normal state, producing nothing. While the Eco-house was running, food would start to produce in the early year and it was a quick turnover. Everything was grown hydroponically. Hydroponics is a special technique of producing food and plants without soil inspired by James Sholto Douglas…. The basic idea behind hydroponics is that you can grow food even where there is no soil, because you do not need soil for food.

LK: So, where do the roots go?

GC: There are two basic necessities for plants to grow, sunshine and earth. All that earth provides is structure and nutrients. So, if you can get small pebbles for example, that provide structure for the roots to grow on and then you can provide nutrients in a liquid form, you get the rest. I had a system of washing and filling up a shallow tank for the nutrients, which drained out to the plants. The tank contained fluid nutrients and treated sewage that is used as vermiculite (hydro-heated clay) for the plants. For structure, I applied lightweight pebbles that were regularly used for lightweight concrete; the roots would cling on to the pebbles and receive their nutrients. The sewage was just “shit” by the way. My shit.

LK: So, the shit was not only used to produce methane, but also as the main nutrient for the plants.

GC: Yes, though it needed to be transformed, broken down into the anaerobic digester. For lack of a better word, shit had virtually all the nutrients necessary for plants to grow.

LK: Really? So basically, you shitted and tomatoes grew?

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GC: Yes, although it is a process of many steps. I remember that Cornell University did an amazing study on pissing and shitting. They actually investigated the amount of labor that goes into man’s urine, like how often urine turns around before it hits the urinal and splashes back on it. We are talking about everyday life, you know. I have never had any reservations talking about these issues. This is exactly the research that you would have to make in order to build a spaceship, although many people had difficulty discussing these matters. They did a study of muscle movement during evacuation, like what happens around the anal sphincter muscle. They looked at different toilet seat designs and concluded that the western toilet is oversized, just to make sure you do not miss the hole. It is actually a terrible design, because when you sit, it actually clamps the buttocks rather than opening it up. They claimed that the optimal posture is squatting, but what is better than squatting. So I settled the design of the toilet seat in the Eco-house based upon this information.

LK: Had you ever seen before anything similar?

GC: No, I am afraid not. In order to make it, I had to plum my bum down in sand and took a plaster cast of my ass.

LK: You plastered your ass? (Laughs)

GC: Yes, I plastered my ass, but in the nicest possible way. (Laughs)

LK: It seems to me that you had an obsessive relationship with that toilet, because all of your diagrams of the Eco-house are based on the act of defecation. It is the key to the function of the house.

GC: Yes, I am the next best shitter.

LK: Well, the Eco-house is an amazing experiment! Just to be the devil’s advocate though, do you believe that the idea of perpetual

regeneration and cycling evolution of matter and energy is factual?

GC: Until 200 years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, this is how the world ran for hundreds of years. People were more in tune with nature. Up until then, I think it was a cycle that was changing, but it was still a cycling process. But we have ridden a sustainable cycle and broken its sustainability. We have moved into an era that is unsustainable. It is way out of control. Now, that there is no choice whatsoever, eventually even powerful people may think about sustainability.

LK: At the time that you were working on the Eco-house, all these ideas emerged as a political reaction and as a defining an alternative system to capitalism that as you said opposed linearity in production processes. Now, however, most advocates of sustainability in the world of architects and designers are wearing suits and ties. They are not the people like you that wanted to change the world. They are people that present marvelous arguments about the ethics of design, which is entirely irrelevant to me.

GC: Absolutely.

LK: I am just wondering how we can critically analyze the concept of sustainability. At that time, you saw it as part of a political agenda, but simultaneously the US government was making environmental campaigns from the 1960s. Therefore, how can we view these concepts firmly as a political action, since you claim this, when all parties defended similar arguments viewed from a different perspective? How can we trace the idea of sustainability in a critical way given this reversal of political action?

GC: It is very complicated to answer this question. This is just my theory. In 1968, the ecological movement was about changing the world and how people love and what they think. It was certainly not about “this is a bit of technology that you put on your ass.” But now, it has turned into a fashion. Hippie people cared deeply about social issues

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and they did not smoke dope despite all odds. At least, I never did until I was old. The hippies I knew worked really hard. They worked like mad. They put an incredible amount of energy in their work. They were deeply conscientious. And then the fashion people took it over and made it a style. And once something becomes a fashion, you can simply drop it. Nobody wants last year’s fashion. It is very disappointing, and it was much harder back then. You know everybody needs to make a living; it is hard being out on the edge. I did not have any money until I was 40.

LK: What do you think of the new Eco-house in Bristol, the one that was documented in the DVD?

GC: It lacks any kind of innovation; there is no daring in it. It is another kind of waste. It is a house just sitting there with no body living in it. For me, you build a house to live in; otherwise it is a waste of the planet’s resources. The architect probably lives in a nice Georgian house. LK: Can you talk about the bamboo house that grows? The project you worked on before the Eco-house? GC: The project was designed for an architectural housing competition in Bracknell, London. I was in my fourth year. LK: Did you win a prize? GC: Me? No. I won nothing at all. They were after boxes. The jury report mentioned that “it would take a social revolution for my proposal to become a reality.” LK: What was the concept in your scheme? GC: The basic idea was to use poly-tunnels, like the ones used in greenhouses to grow things inside…and then put plastic above. LK: The plastic would make a shell? Like a mold?

GC: I used sheets of polythene that would make a chute. Then, within, you would have a covered pod, so you would have survival—initial survival. The pod would be connected to a hydroponic system and sewage treatment, and then from there, people would build out from the tunnel. The idea was to design self-built houses, for people of lower income to have houses. People just can’t afford houses in England. LK: Dennis Crompton also spoke of the housing crisis in England as a major social concern. He said that everybody, no matter their differences, would agree to the fact that every individual should have housing, and that everybody was working towards this cause. Martin Pawley was also deeply concerned with the housing crisis, right? GC: I felt that Martin Pawley was a middle class person with working class ideals. And he felt I was a working class person with middle class ideas. Pawley thought that ecological concerns were middle class. I went to a couple of his lectures at the AA and got the impression that he was concerned about saving the environment, but not by the “self-built” aspect, but by technology and solar collectors and scrap. He had a middle- class attitude to the housing crisis, suggesting that “we should get out and make houses.” LK: But that is what you did as well. GC: Yes, but the houses I did were not the sort of houses he thought we should be making. I guess I was quite misunderstood at that time. My emphasis was on building an ecological house. In actual fact it was a house. I did make a house, and I made a house that could be lived in. I lived there for three years, although I expected it to last longer. LK: How did you get your Eco-house published in AD? GC: AD used to be “the go ahead” magazine. I had a friend, Colin Moorcraft, who used to write

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for AD. He was also at the AA, when we were both students. He actually helped in putting up the windmill in the Eco-house. LK: Colin Moorcraft was responsible for the “Recycling” section of AD. He wrote a lot of articles on digesters, and generating methane, and fish farming and all the ecological concerns…. Where is he now? GC: He is in Brussels. I don’t really know what he is doing, but I heard he was working on computers. LK: How did you come up with the idea to make an Eco-house as a biological life support system with you living in it? Was there someone else at the AA that was working on similar issues? GC: No, nobody was working on these things. The only related project I can come up with was on “squat housing” in Greece. I was quite interested in it at the onset. LK: Was that Aristides Romanos? GC: Yes. I took it on; I became quite obsessed really. I presented in his studio a mountainside that was in road and then you just had these little digesters and recycling boxes spread all over. Everybody at the AA knew what I was doing. I am not a self-publicist, but they did know what I was up to. I was working on this project and then adapted my thoughts to the housing competition and then the Eco-house. The recycling thoughts emerged from the Greek squatting houses, so that people would not have to pay for water. I started looking at recycling from there onwards. LK: How did you acquire the technical skills and knowledge on recycling issues? Was that outside of the AA? GC: I was going to the Chancery Lane Patent Library, and looked at life support systems. I spent five years working for architects just around this area. This library was full of architects back

then. There were papers on the space program at that library. I think they used algae in the space program, although it all seemed really high-tech and not really applicable to housing. They also used a lot of expensive materials in manufacturing spaceships. LK: Is that where the reference from the tractor to the spaceship comes from, in the addendum of Street Farmer 2? GC: Yes, the tractor was about to take off. This is also on the DVD. In the animation, offices are burned down, the cows come out from the farm age, eat the buildings, little men get on the tracks, drive across the field, and their hair flaps in the back because of the blast off. LK: Did you know The New Alchemists? GC: Yes, though not personally. They contacted me. They were proper scientists, like biologists and genetic engineers. I never pretended that my work was like that. I always thought of my work as “semi-scientific.” We had some knowledge; we did look at biological papers to treat sewage, but in our head we were doing something “semi-scientific.” I did gradually move out of architecture, though, and into a sort of science. I remember that Maurice Wilkins, the Nobel Prize winner, checked my facts and wrote a letter to endorse my fund from Leverhulme Soap. It was Maurice Wilkins that endorsed the fund for the Eco-house. LK: How much money did they give you? GC: 2,000 pounds. LK: And how much money did the house cost in total? GC: I have not a clue. I scrounged a radiator and the material for the roof. I scrounged almost everything and the rest was made from funds, just by writing to companies. I had this letter from CJ Davis, who was the Principal Scientific Officer of

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the Department of the Environment in London. I remember that I had an appointment with him, but he was ill and needed to cancel. But since I didn’t have a phone, he could not ring me up and cancel our appointment, so he decided to cancel all his other appointments for the day and came in just to see me. He spent the whole morning with me and then he took me out to lunch. We started talking, and eventually he felt better throughout the day. He was really fascinated by what I was doing and all the background scientific research. In the end, he wrote me this letter which mentioned that the Eco-house may seem like an eccentric idea, but it had been thoroughly researched and that the Ministry, or whatever it was, would encourage anybody who could help this scheme to receive any funds possible. Once I got that letter, I enclosed a copy of it in any funds that I applied to and received loads of funds. LK: And the land? GC: The land was borrowed as temporary planning permission from the Borough of Woolwich District Surveyor. It was owned by Queens Polytechnic. It was just the most awful lot of housing. One of my Indian friends used to teach near there and she had a nervous breakdown. It was not designing the house that took a long time, it was trying to find a bit of land to build it on. LK: So the house was there from 1972 to 1975? Did you take daily care of the house and its machines? Did they need special care? GC: The dates are correct. For the machines, I had monitors all over the house, monitoring temperatures, the amount of sunlight that came in, the efficiency of the solar heaters, rainfall, outside air temperature outside and all that sort of stuff. I had the slow sand for rainfall, because I got checked out for the chemical consistency of the water produced. LK: So if you wanted to, could you leave the house to go on vacation, or did someone have to be

there to monitor? GC: Nobody needed to be there really, but I was concerned. LK: Robin Middleton mentioned that you were there all the time, because you had to take care of the house; you had to monitor it and do special things for the house like feed the tanks and check them and feed certain amounts of wood and whatever have you. Then he said, at some point your mother got sick and you had to leave, but you could not just leave the house alone, because you never left the house alone. So, you took your best student at the AA and trained him to monitor and take care of the house, while you were gone for two or three weeks. During that time the student got sick and needed to take antibiotics. So, the student got sick, went to the doctor and he had to take antibiotics. Then the antibiotics killed the bacteria and ruined the whole system. When you returned you had to fix it all over again. GC: That would be brilliant. Good old Robin. I wish that was true. I really wish that was true! LK: It makes a captivating story, doesn’t it? Middleton said, “It was amazing, the antibiotics killed the house!” GC: Yes, exactly! It was a germ warfare! Then I will stick with that story. It is brilliant. Yes, I will not deny it! Of course I needed to abandon the house! LK: Middleton said that this story circulated at the AA. GC: I didn’t know that anyone was interested in it. LK: What were you teaching at the AA? GC: How not to be an architect. LK: Can you be a little bit more explanatory? GC: I was trying to get architects to get their hands dirty. I was based in the workshop in the

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basement and I would try to get people to come down and make things with their hands. LK: How about growing tomatoes? GC: Well, there were always some students that wanted to build digesters. I was really into getting potential architects to discover what the building materials were about. Because I think the division between manual workers and professionals is irrelevant. I think it is really healthy for professionals to experience manual work. I remember I got an urban permission to build a greenhouse with a group of students; it had a bit of solar conservation. We were also looking at forms of energy and the actual “hands on stuff”. The group was so chaotic… LK: I see that there was wide interest in your work at the time both from inside and outside the AA. GC: When I was building the house, I used to get about 20 letters per day from all over the world. This lasted for three years. I used to stack the letters and I would try to respond to people. They all wanted all details possible. In the end, you know what I came up with? Getting a fact sheet together to post out. LK: A fact sheet? So that everybody could do it themselves? GC: So that they could have some information. For about six months, I tried manually writing replies to everybody, before I realized that I should set out a standard thing. LK: It was very noble of you that you tried to answer everyone. GC: Somebody who had read about what I was doing contacted my brother, who was living in Jamaica. It was on the front page of the paper. This article from the Observer just went around the world. That piece of old newspaper! I was just overwhelmed by it. There I am, quite the

incompetent carpenter, trying to build the house. That was the first thing I had ever made! It was really hard. LK: From the AA, who came to see the Eco-house? GC: Martin Pawley was the only one who came over and chatted with me for half an hour. That was the only thing he ever did with me. I call him an “armchair revolutionist.” It was half an hour from the AA. I wonder, did they ever see what it was about? I mean, it is not like I thought it was a big deal, but it was really disappointing that Pawley was the only person who kind of got it together to come and see it. Actually, he was a fantastic person; such a smart man. I have very little in common with him, obviously. The truth is that I was obsessive with that house, and I still am with other things. LK: It is interesting that all your diagrams for the Eco-house have a man inside. Everything circulated around the shitting man. GC: Well… I was absolutely obsessed with the Eco-house.

Grahame Caine in his house outside Ronda, Spain, 2007.

ON “Transmogrification”, “The Tree House”, “Street Farming”, self-sufficient systems and the whole earth movement

Interview with PETER CRUMP by Lydia Kallipoliti

BRISTOL, UKJuly 11, 2007


PETER CRUMP


LK: Based on the radical political action that Street Farmer propagated, was it a modality of practice for the editors as well as printed matter?

PC: Street Farmer was a way of living. Bruce Haggart, Graham Caine and I lived and worked together with my wife and two children while studying at the AA; we basically lived out of each other’s pockets. Our house was a commune. We hitchhiked to Amsterdam and traveled, we were in contact with the squatters’ group in London and approximately two years after we graduated from the AA, we tried to organize a commune in Wales and move there. But even technically speaking, Street Farmer was a magazine and a slide show; it was a sound and light performance; it was more than drawing.

LK: Did you engage with other media during Street Farmer parallel to producing magazines?

PC: Yes. It was around 1972 that we presented a small show in television, in the Open Door programme. It was called “Street Farmer’s Open Door Programme,” in the framework of a whole series of access to television that BBC2 organized. We applied to it and we sent off a synopsis.

LK: Do you have the tapes of your show?

PC: No. One [reason] is because we were far too ambitious with it. It was the time of the Monty Pythons and we were making cartoons out of bits of torn paper. It was very hard to get the BBC technicians to work with such techniques. We basically ran out of time and the time to broadcast arrived faster than we expected. We spent a long time working on a specific shot with Bruce digging a motorway in London. We went and photographed the motorway and Bruce in a tractor from the same angle, in order to overlap the two images in one for the broadcast; then we returned to the studio and put the two images together and it worked. But when they broadcasted, BBC just ran the shot of the motorway, without Bruce digging. The whole point

of it was lost.

LK: They showed just one layer?

PC: Just the motorway, a meaningless shot with Bruce’s voice. I think it was one of the manifesto quotes in Street Farmer 1 with Bruce saying: “To realize the human potential of cooperation and kindness not by dispersal of the city into the country but by a change in the quality of both urbanity and rurality to support an indefinable lifestyle based on the distribution of cultural and physical resources–microtechnology, folk lore, multi-way media communication, social and natural karma.”

Opening page of Street Farmer featuring a dialogue between Crump and Haggart

LK: How many copies of Street Farmer did you produce?

PC: I think it was around seven hundred copies for Street Farmer 2 and about twice as less for Street Farmer 1. Street Farmer 2 was a much more collaborative effort…. There was also an unpublished addendum to Street Farmer 2. It featured the construction phase of the house that

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Graham designed and then built in Elton. It is the same house described in Street Farmer 1 as a project and a theory, the Eco-house.

Peter Crump’s garden door in his house in Bristol, designed and fabricated by Graham Caine.

LK: I would argue that this house is clearly representative of an entire genealogy of households conceived as closed systems, with all materials being cycled in the shape of the earth and in portrayal of a cosmological understanding of domestic space as we can see in the addendum. In Street Farmer 2 you also published the contact information of an organization from Manchester—Murray Carden, John Wood, Anthony Eastman—asking you to collaborate on the development of a closed self-sufficient, life support system in Fort Garden. Was this directive crucial to Street Farmer’s agenda?

PC: Graham would be the one to answer this question. The house and the theory is really Graham’s baby. He is the one who got

enthusiastic with the technology of making this vision a reality; I mean we have all gotten into the technology, but I was mostly interested in getting people to adopt a more ecological pattern of living in the city, imagining ideally a city that could operate off the service grid.

LK: Did the house actually work?

PC: It sort of worked. Like a lot of things at the beginning, they work in theory quite easily, but in practice everything is different. The digestive system did not ever really work, but the windows did; it got hot inside and Graham lived in it for quite a long time, maybe eighteen months. The house definitely worked as an enclosure.

LK: Closed, self-sufficient systems were at the same time a cultural obsession in the United States adopted both by counterculture groups and by governmental programs like NASA and the military. What would you say the political basis was for this understanding of domestic space?

PC: Obviously, we all wanted to live more cheaply. Graham used to say that if he could spend all his money on Guinness, rather than electricity, gas and water, he would be much happier. But I think that was his kind of brute motivation. There was a lot of talk about it being possible, at least theoretically possible. There was a lot of talk about generating methane out of bio-waste and all that information was all coming out of India. There were English people experimenting in India with human and animal—mostly cow—waste, mixed together to produce methane. They got quite a long way on the road to developing a methane generator, which is basically a digester. So, you put shit in the front end and you have got a product that you can use as a fertilizer on the other end, while in the meantime you have got methane that you can use for cooking. All this fit very well into Gandhi’s ideas that Indian culture should go back to the villages and that they should be self-sufficient. Instead of sewage being a problem, it was going to be an asset. And unlike the Chinese system, which took time, the

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conversions would be relatively quick, because with the use of the digesters, you could get in a year a product that you could use in the field.

LK: Independent of the economy of means, was another kind of motivation related to these recycling enterprises?

PC: There was an idea that if you could withdraw from the tentacles of the state, the electricity and gas suppliers, you might have more freedom of action. A lot of our ideas came from the Situationists.

LK: How important was to Street Farmer the image of the whole earth?

PC: It was amazing to see it for the first time. I remember the shot of the earth rising out of the moon in black and white television and it was absolutely incredible. Nobody could quite get that.

LK: There are images in Street Farmer that evidently portray an enhanced perception of outer space, with sketches of the earth, the stars and the planets. Even the drawings for Graham Caine’s ecological house in the addendum are very much indicative of a cosmological understanding of space and I was wondering what was underlying this motivation for this line of thinking.

PC: Well, we did meet some very strange people like Juliet de Bairach Levy, who thought that if you planted plants at the right time of the moon’s cycle, it would radically affect their fertility. We were very close to her and she was a main influence for this course of thinking; we published one of her diagrams in Street Farmer 2 showing the influence of the moon cycle on the fertility of plants. She was a brilliant herbalist and specialized in organic remedies for animals, like cows, horses and dogs. My other owned a farm and she knew her quite well. Juliette had an alternative way of treating cows. She took them very seriously and handled them with the utmost

respect, while eventually she found out that if she was persistent with their treatment, it worked, and the animals did not suffer. There is a kind of cosmological connection right there; we did have that information right in our heads. It was the beginning of the organic food movement and the understanding that you could farm in a slightly different way. It was an exciting time to live in, and at the same time America was going to the moon.

LK: Did these ideas transmigrate into the projects? At the manifesto discussion of Street Farmer 1, you talk of an organic revolution of architecture and organic materials taking over the inorganic space of built cities.

PC: Of course, there are direct links there.

LK: In the same spirit of city’s seizure by the Street Farmers, one could even claim that the group members were aspiring themselves to attain the characteristics of comic heroes fighting in an imminent upheaval against the establishment. Was that part of the group’s agenda?

PC: Absolutely. One of our great heroes was an American novelist called Kurt Vonnegut, who introduced the concept that society, as an idea, is entirely artificial. In his novels, there are always two main characters: a bad and a punished person that everybody loves and supports, and a dictator that everybody hates. The two characters know each other and are each other’s antipode in the stage of global balance. Their relationship is quite complicated. At one point, Beckenham, a revolutionary prophet and the main character in one of the novels said: “What an ugly city every city is.” We really believed that; we actually thought that every city was ugly. That line became a dictum for us and was directly copied in Street Farmer in the introductory manifesto discussion between Bruce and myself.

LK: Were there other direct excerpts from Vonnegut’s literature?

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PC: Yes, another quote we directly copied was from Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. It was used as an introductory phrase in Street Farmer 2, voiced by a dinosaur in the first page. The dinosaur said: “Goodness me, the clock has struck alack-a day and fuck my luck.” Slaughterhouse-Five was basically autobiographical. It is the story of Vonnegut being captured by the Germans in war and imprisoned in this slaughterhouse in Dresden, right at the very bottom. Because of this, he survived the major fire that destroyed Dresden, while the people right above asphyxiated to death: there was no oxygen, it was sucked out of the air. When Vonnegut arrived at the war camp with other prisoners, he was welcomed by a bunch of very strange English men, who mentioned a satiric version of Cinderella’s story retrofitted for the war camp. At the appropriate point, Cinderella would say: “Goodness me, the clock has struck alack-a day and fuck my luck.”Basically, the whole point is that it is too late. You can change if you want to, but it is too late to make a difference.

LK: As a direct metaphor, it was too late for the salvation of the city?

PC: It was too late even for the salvation of the world, in reality. There was a very important paper published by the European Economic Community, probably. It wasn’t a treaty, but a founding document announcing where the world was in terms of pollution. This document was very influential on people like us, who were not content, and did not believe that there were going to be technological solutions for the problems of the world, starvation, overpopulation and pollution. We did not read the paper, but we read about it and it definitely affected our attitude.

LK: In your mind at the time, were cities obsolete?

PC: We definitely thought that cities were finished. We firmly believed that cities were obsolete and that with modern technologies, we did not need to live in cities anymore. The only reason to live

in the city was to communicate face-to-face and not over a distance, but we thought that this was simply not true. You could talk on the telephone and use other technologies. We published a photograph in Street Farmer with Bruce sitting in a park with telephone wires plugged into the lawn and earphones plugged into a tree. That was all part of that.

LK: Then, did you imagine the communication network as a physical structure underlying cities?

PC: In a sense, yes we did. Stuart Lever extended the whole idea of a kind of net of power and communication. He thought the Internet would be in the ground as a grid, and his “Tree House” project in Street Farmer 2 was part of this agenda. Stuart was at the AA with us and he was a wizard with technological stuff; he had the best sound system in London. We spent quite a lot of time with Stuart and to our delight we found out that he was in tune with our line of thinking. His first project at the AA, one of the best things I have seen there, was a space completely covered with leaves and photographs of trees, accompanied by a really long tape with sounds of winds from the trees. Stuart was a very bizarre mixture of a very high-tech guy with a desire to get back to nature.

LK: Were you familiar with David Greene’s “Logplug” project? It seems very tightly linked to this line of thinking. Also, were you related to Archigram?

PC: No, not really. I am not aware of this project, and we did not have very much to do with Archigram. They did not like us. They thought of us as “anti-technology.” And although this is not entirely true, in the bucolic sense, we were mostly involved in politics. Technology for us was incidental. On the contrary, they were interested in the kind of technology of building complex systems and equipped houses and cities. At the same time, a lot of us from the AA went over to Archigram to knock out their drawings for competitions. They employed many AA people;

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Stuart was one of them. I did not ever go there. My drawings were not good enough.

LK: What was your thesis at the AA?

PC: It was Street Farmer, as a collaborative project with Bruce Haggart. Peter Cook was the year master and he was Bruce’s tutor. Fred Scott was my supervisor. He was excessively encouraging. Sometimes I wished he would say, “This is all rubbish.” He never did though, not once. He is a great friend. Bruce and I met at the AA and arrived there after the third year. We were all new boys. I did not get to know Bruce very well at the first term. I met Graham at the first day and we were both sitting at the back, completely blown out of the water. I came from the Polytechnic of North London and I was working part time. There, it was much more of an apprenticeship. You were given a project and you were told what to do, so you did it. It was very strange to come to a school where you were expected to come up with your own idea of what your project would be. After a while, I met Bruce at the history lectures because we were the only ones attending them in the morning. Nobody else would come in until midday. So, we started to talk to each other in the lavatory. He soon moved into our house and rented one of the rooms. I was living there with my wife and our two kids. Bruce and I were living and working together, all the time. This is how we did our thesis.

LK: Then, the magazine is a product of your thesis drawings?

PC: The first one, entirely. We also made two films for our thesis. Essentially, we were trying to think about utopias.

LK: How was the thesis received by the jury?

PC: With mixed feelings, I would say. The straight architectural world got quite upset that we had not produced any architecture. The external examiners were not happy about it. One of the things that upset them the most was the

manifesto, which is the dialogue coming out of our mouths in Street Farmer 1. It was hanging on toilet paper, next to our colored collages. The toilet paper was just words. We did not really have any drawings and in this sense there was no demonstration of any technical ability whatsoever. We spent the whole year just thinking about it and making films.

LK: So basically, the thesis was the manifesto of Street Farmer as a theoretical project.

PC: Yes. One of the visiting examiners was so irritated that he got hold of the manifesto on the toilet paper and tore it apart. It was very dramatic. There was a lot of angry shouting. We were completely taken by surprise; we had no idea that peoples’ reaction would be so violent.

LK: Was is the vision itself—“street farming” and destroying the city as part of a creative set of actions—or the lack of technical expertise that infuriated the jury to this extent?

PC: It was the choice of words, but also in terms of context Street Farmer was destructive architecture. The built environment was not seen as a thing of beauty and light, but as a thing of oppression and darkness.

LK: Then building was equalized to the idea of the state and destruction was a creative vision as a reversal of the state? Was the anti-building approach an anti-state approach?

PC: Yes. Yes to all.

LK: Is that where your ideas of land ownership originate? I am referring to coop sharing and appropriating land as a pirate in Street Farmer 2.

PC: Yes. We were involved with the squatting movement in London, to some extent. We lived very close to an enormous area, almost entirely squatted. It was North of Camden Town and called Kentish Town; all that big area was full of derelict Victorian houses and Camden Council

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owned most of it. The council’s plan was to knock it all down and build housing, while at the same time all kinds of young people were moving to them with nothing at all, constructing wonderful rooms turning this area into a very exciting urban development; not at all like a city though.

LK: Did you read Architectural Design (AD)?

PC: Yes. We published stuff in AD. They wanted us to do work for them and I think that Bruce may have actually worked for them for a while. Yet, we neither read it fanatically, nor were not fanatic about it. We were very much fascinated with other magazines coming from London anarchist groups, like Anarchy magazine. We were coming from the politics of it, really.

LK: In Street Farmer 2, there is section entitled “un-catalogue,” using the same font of AD’s “catalogue” section. Was that directly cut out from AD?

PC: Yes, that is exactly right; so you made the connection.

LK: If so, was “un-catalogue” an anti-AD strategy directed to the cataloguing tactics of AD, directly hinting to the absence of a political position from the perspective of the magazine? At the time, AD was clearly uninterested in constructing a political agenda and enthusiastic in classifying pieces of information, especially as related to technological experiments coming from other fields. Near the turn of the 1970s, AD contained less articles and more catalogue sections within each issue, like “Cosmorama,” “Sector,” “Recycling,” “Catalogue,” “News” and others. Was “un-catalogue” attempting to undo this publication strategy as a collection of information?

PC: Yes, you are right. This is true of AD, but for us “un-catalogue” was primarily a key to “un-building:” a building being unbuilt. We were looking at the Swedish System Building Catalogue, which displayed the construction process from zero to building; we just ripped

out and turned it around into a process of un-building. The un-catalogue is in the same spirit. As for AD, we were very unaggressive. We were making stuff any way we could. This is all we were doing.

LK: Practically, how were you producing and distributing copies of Street Farmer?

PC: I thought you might ask me that. We went to IRAT—the community printer—and asked them to turn our presentation boards into letter-size prints. We could copy them in lots of colors, but of course we could not afford it. After we received the prints, we mailed Street Farmer to many architectural magazines, like the Architect’s Journal and all the posh magazines that were publishing buildings, in order to get a review from them. Few of them reviewed us in the end. At the same time, we also did a slide show with music and tape and toured in various architectural schools. I just found a receipt from one the schools we visited, the Welsh School of Architecture in Cardiff. They asked us to do the show for them for 20 quid in one night. I cannot remember if that was a little money or a lot of money, but we spent the whole night there and that got us some publicity to sell Street Farmer. It was very cheap: only 20 pennies. We received requests in writing for Street Farmer from all kinds of strange places. While selling the magazine, we were most interested in being on the road like a rock n’ roll band more than anything else. It was fun. We went to Holland, and hitched to Italy.

LK: Since the magazine germinated out of your thesis project and the magazine came in the aftermath, whose idea was it to produce a publication?

PC: Making a magazine was Bruce Haggart’s idea, but the manifesto and the thesis was our joint project so we were both equally involved in the production of it. We got help from lots of other people. We never intended Street Farmer to be just us.

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LK: How did you come up with the title?

PC: We were listening to a lot of Rolling Stones at the time, and one of their songs was called “Street Fighting Man.” We also had somebody record one version of a Pink Fairies song, called “Street Farming Man.” In any case, Street Farmer, as a title, encapsulated what we were trying to do, which was to humanize the urban environment. It combined the word “street,” definitely an urban element, with “farming,” something you exclusively do in the country.

Peter Crump’s original collages for Street Farmer in the 1970s.

LK: However, reading your manifesto in Street Farmer 1, you did not conceptualize your ideas as bucolic, and you not once romantically propagate “a return to the land.” Then how was the strategy of un-building not motivated by a bucolic rural vision?

PC: I have no idea. This inherent contradiction is one of the reasons we were definitely weary of firmly proposing any conclusions. We had a wish list of urban dreams and we set out on doing a series of actions on our wish list. Our list was very different from the wish list of others and we hoped that various lists would organically grow together, rather than one group, us for instance, suggesting a solution.

One of the other things we strongly believed in is that nothing should last very long; everything should be very temporary so that organizations could grow, mesh, and then come apart again. Individuals that would form an organization, like us getting the magazine out, would not transform themselves into permanent publishers. That would be it. We could see from our own experience that permanent publishing was very hard work, and it got contained and rigidified with rules and regulations, which we did not particularly want. For us it did not work.

Part of that comes from what was happening at the AA, because at that time the AA was about to be absorbed by Imperial College, which was a very straight university. Not all grants would give you money to go to the AA, and in this sense the school was very short of money and desperate of students. If this merging would actually happen, a set of rules would have been imposed to the AA, in order to fit in with Imperial College regulations. It was then that the students said, “No way—this is not acceptable.” It the students that stopped the merging, while the school was run by a very loose body of people. The people who were hierarchically powerless and should normally “do as they are told,” actually took charge of the school, in cahoots with the academic body and most of the staff; they did not want to become Imperial College either. As a result, the school survived as an independent organization with all its quirkiness. Precisely this kind of anti-authoritarian belief was driving Street Farmer.

LK: Did your read the Whole Earth Catalog? Were you influenced by it?

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PC: Yes. The WEC is mainly about technology and it was of major interest to us, but we were more driven by its political agenda and its “drop-out” aspect. It was by all means a bucolic idea, and indeed after Street Farmer, we even tried to do it in reality. But I think it is a mistake to separate yourself out from society and put a wall around yourself, because you eventually stop being able to communicate with society; you no longer speak the same language and are unable to influence. We did not want that.

LK: Along the same lines, were you also in tune with the Domebooks and the Dome Cookbook?

PC: Yes. I still have both of them. We were designing domes based on the Dome Cookbook; I designed one for a cousin of mine up in Northampton.

LK: So you were actually using these publications as instruction manuals?

PC: Yes, of course. We were picking it from anywhere, stealing ideas from anywhere we could.

LK: Were you familiar with Stefan Szcelkun’s Survival Scrapbooks?

PC: He and I were in the same group to set up a rural commune in Wales, after we did Street Farmer. There were quite a lot of people trying to form communal groups in London and we were part of a group with eight people. I was intending to sell the house I lived in with my family in London, in order to set up the commune and it was worth quite a lot of money. We eventually bought a big piece of land and a house in Wales and everyone else except me moved out there. However, the whole scheme was completely naïve; you cannot get any jobs in the middle of rural Wales and the commune could not survive.

LK: Have you ever come to contact with the New Alchemy Institute at Cape Cod, MA? They shared

many similar aspirations and were likewise deeply involved in agricultural experiments in the scope of realizing the reverie of self-sufficient communities.

PC: Yes, here is one of their digesters, a “Do-It-Yourself” wind generator. We were in correspondence with them at the time that they were trying to set up this commune. In essence, their publication was technical. Although we were fairly interested in technology, its application was more important to us than the precision of technical functions.

LK: Based on the common agenda of communal living, did you conceptualize yourselves as the urban version of the communes in the US Southwest?

PC: Other people have made this connection, but we were not conscious of such a link at the time. We had a load of theoretical ideas about how society should be organized or disorganized, but we were very wary of isolating ourselves and making ourselves really strange. We were strange enough anyway, and so we tried to maintain a balance of strangeness to be able to communicate our ideas to other people.

LK: My favorite strange strategy in Street Farmer is the idea of “transmogrification”: natural forces being digitized and consumed by the grid of buildings and vice versa. How did you invent it?

PC: With large quantities of dope, to be frank. In fact, the idea was that you could transform the city, if you allowed nature back into it and one should allow this to happen in various ways. We were thinking of this flow as a defiance of the control mechanisms of the state. We wanted to destroy these mechanisms: the establishment and the state. What do you have to do if you think the state is not necessary? You have to steal back the bits of the environment that the state has captured. If you occupy the street, you steal it back from the state. Then state in return, attacks the squatters and evicts them. We planned to

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pinch the electricity out of the telephone lines and street lamps and drill the ground to recover water.

LK: In parallel to publishing, did you practice these guerilla strategies?

PC: We were doing them with other people in the squatting movement in London. It was unpleasant and quite frightening. For example, we were part of an occupation of Oxford Street by a tiny little group of people. We were all wearing paper bags as gas masks. We published one of the events in Street Farmer 1. Basically, we stood in the middle of the street stopping traffic and this was supposed to happen every Saturday for months.

LK: How long did the Street Farmer phase last after the AA?

PC: For as long as it lasted, Street Farmer was like going off to play music in reality. This is how we thought of it and it lasted for about two years. During this time we were traveling, writing and experimenting.

Superstudio and 999 came to our degree show at the end of the year exhibit at the AA. They liked our stuff and invited us to visit the nightclub that 999 were running in Florence. It was extraordinary, with shiny floors and glitzy bits and pieces, promoting a bizarre architecture. After all, we discovered that they really did not agree with us, although they liked our drawings in London.

LK: In what respect was there a conflict?

PC: They were mostly enamored with the presence of strange objects in the middle of nowhere, like in the midst of open fields and landscapes represented by grids. We were getting along really well, but we were not really working under the same premises. When we went to Florence, we had somebody translate our manifesto in Italian in order to do public action slide show. I remember we were doing

the show, in our green suits, and at the end of the presentation, the lights came on and there was nobody left in the audience. Everyone had left. Only the two people that invited us were still sitting in the front row. It was completely dark and we had lots of music in our presentation that we did not really understand what was going on. At the beginning the room was packed, and then we were thinking that everything was going on really well. Shocking! We had no idea what we had done wrong. It was a very odd experience, but we remained in contact with Superstudio for years. We really liked each other.

Besides Florence, we also traveled to Eindhoven University in Holland. We are on the back cover of their exhibition catalogue, entitled Utopie and edited by Hans Hoffman, who was a visiting tutor at the AA. Hans organized an exhibition of utopias in 1973, including modern utopian vision as part of a historic lineage of utopias beginning from the 19th century.

LK: While assembling your Street Farmer manifesto, were you consciously positioning yourselves as successors of 19th century utopian movements?

PC: At least for me, the answer is yes. I was and still am a science fiction fan, especially a fan of science fiction utopias. “News from Nowhere” is a kind of science fiction utopia. At the same time, we were properly educated in proper architectural schools in the modern tradition, as part of the arts and crafts movement.

LK: Were you at the same time influenced by London’s underground press, particularly as related to a graphic modality in the sketches of Street Farmer?

PC: Alternative magazines and their graphic layouts were a ubiquitous culture at the time, and certainly one can argue that we were influenced by a number of publications. We were definitely looking at cartoons and English comic versions of Donald J. Crump, as well as London underground

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press like Oz, Ink and the International Times, a black and white magazine published in Kensington. There were also a couple of influential publications that were coming out of Amsterdam, like Provo, and a Canadian publication, Woodbutcher’s Art, published in Vancouver by Bo Haliwell.

LK: What did you think of Buckminster Fuller? He was the muse of the counterculture movement in the United States, but I am wondering if the London counterculture shared this fervent enthusiasm?

PC: Well, needless to say that he was an architectural icon, but I thought he was a bit overrated. We saw him as somebody who had brilliant structural ideas, and despite the fact that he fascinated me as an intellectual, his discourse was overwhelmingly formal. It was precisely this formal obsession that Street Farmer was trying to fight against. Street Farmer never suggested archetypal structures and forms; we tried to avoid that at all costs. We were much more in tune with squatter encounters in South America and Greece, and there were a couple of very interesting Greek tutors at the AA at the time, like Aristidis Romanos who wrote on unauthorized buildings. The diversity of the buildings that were produced in a certain set of given conditions was compelling for us. You only needed infrastructure, not form; form was anathema. This is what Street Farmer was all about: a set of strategies to reconstruct society as a system. There should be no archetypes in architecture, and unlike fellow Londoners in a time of technological supremacy, we disbelieved that technology would solve the problems of society.

ON “Pneu World”, “The Clivus Composting Toilet”, “Air Walls”, Reyner Banham, AD’s Cosmorama, recycling and the domes of reused materials in the communes of the US Southwest.

Interview with by Lydia KallipolitiPETER MURRAY


London, UKNovember 25, 2005

PETER MURRAY


LK: My first very basic question is about Cosmorama, the introductory section of AD. Who was responsible for Cosmorama, its experimental character on issues of shelter, new lifestyles and new materials? Also, who was selecting the material published in this division of AD? The protagonists of Cosmorama were mostly obscure figures and adventurous experiments, rather than established architects.

PM: Initially it was Robin Middleton and I that were responsible for Cosmorama. Over time, Cosmorama became what I would do most of my time. But even so, there would be other people who would propose items for publication. We saw Cosmorama very much like a collage of things that were going on. But, it was my primary responsibility to put all these things together. A lot of material arrived in our office by post; we were a very international office and various people just dropped by. We had correspondence with people from all around the world, like Antfarm in California, Peter Cook and Ron Herron from Archigram and quite a few AA students who had gone to UCLA either to study or teach. We were very much interested in the whole idea of technology transfer and the use of materials from other industries.

About the obscure figures, in those days, we were not quite so obsessed by names of architects as everyone is now. The idea of “celebrity architects” is a new idea. We believed that the traditional way of making buildings had come to an end, yet nobody in the existing construction industry was looking seriously at new methods of shelter. In this sense, we were looking at other industries seeking ways to enclose space warmly and keep the rain out. I remember us looking at football stadiums that instead of being covered with physical structures, the weather was being kept off with air vents. That was for us the ideal piece of architecture, something you didn’t see but actually carried out the functions a structure would perform. We were always interested in “less is more,” not in a Miesian sense and the reduction of details, but in lightweight materials.

In many occasions, we were looking at the space program for interesting new materials, like mylar which was incredibly thin and strong; one could easily make inflatable shelters out of mylar. Architecture was there to solve physical, physiological and psychological situations, and therefore it was not necessary to design heavy buildings to solve those problems.

It was quite different when Robin Middleton was there. Robin was very much interested in place and complexity. His partner was the sister of Denise Scott-Brown. So, he had a connection with the whole discussion that lead on to postmodernism. There was a contrast within the office, and to a certain extent Robin was very far-sighted in that, more than the more simplistic technological mission that I pursued.

LK: Was the technological mission connected with the fact that AD was owned by the Standard Catalog?

PM: There was no real connection there, although they were the other side of the building, with the accounting department in between. That was the case earlier on in the history of AD. But by the time I arrived, they were quite disillusioned with the magazine because it was not producing enough income from advertising. Although it had quite a healthy circulation, about 15,000 copies a month, it was not making them any money. So, the Standard Catalog was really looking at ways to reduce all costs and sell it. Monica then came up with the idea that Papadakis later followed of a “book economy,” that is, a magazine funded by subscriptions and [that] would not require any advertisements. It was at that point that we started investigating different methods of printing, different sorts of paper, which changed essentially the magazine. The big shift was when we moved from letterpress printing, basically metal typesetting and copper plates with a very rigid way of laying out pages in a very specific grid, to litho-printing, which allows much more freedom, such as to cut out things from other magazines and print straight from pictures you

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have cut out. So we started developing this collage idea of things. We borrowed unashamedly from any magazine we could get our hands on.

LK: I remember there were issues of Cosmorama advising the readers to cut out its pages and at the same time Cosmorama was populated by advice on new living styles, “how-to” advice on how to auto-grow your own garden, for instance, and “do’s” and “don’t’s”. In this sense one can identify a connection between Cosmorama and the Whole Earth Catalog. Was the Whole Earth Catalog a major influence for Cosmorama, or was it simply a way of thinking that was predominant at the time?

PM: Yes, there are quite a few similarities. I do not remember when we first got the Whole Earth Catalog, but certainly when it arrived it made a great impression on us, and we thought it was operating along the same lines of thinking. We did not even know Stewart Brand when we received the catalog, but were in touch with Lloyd Khan who had sent photographs to AD when he was putting together the Domebooks. I kept corresponding with him and later on went to visit him in California. We were thinking in a strikingly similar way in terms of publications, although clearly there was a dichotomy between our high-tech approach and their commune-oriented low-tech, hand-built approach. We did not think that handcrafted houses and the hippie movement could possibly provide any solutions to real-world problems. Having said that, we were more in tune with their way of thinking than the vast majority of the architectural world.

LK: Could you talk about AD’s decision to expand Cosmorama at the beginning of the 1970s and at the same time introduce transdisciplinary sections in the magazine of a similar format, such as “Recycling,”“Sector,” “Odds,” “Catalogue” and “Exhibitions”? It seems that Cosmorama’s expansion to 16 pages per issue, along with the inauguration of new “Cosmorama-clone” divisions, was celebrated by AD as both events, were featured in the cover of the January

1970 issue. Was his structural shift a conscious editorial decision, and if so, what did it designate to reduce the pages of the contents and radically increase the “little sections” of a cataloguing format?

Clivus waste system 1971

PM: This was a decision to clarify the various parts of the magazine that were already at play, using the same methodology and graphics as in Cosmorama. In other words, it was an attempt to make the contents more intelligible, since editorially, there was a particular “slot” –a reader’s interest- for each of the subject matters that we wanted to cover. For example, recycling was seen as one of the “big answers”

PETER MURRAY


to everything at the time and the only consistent recycling experiments that I knew of were being conducted in the West Coast of the United States, where the communes had set up recycling centers. Recycling was a very “hippie” thing to do, although it required a sober understanding of scientific principles. In any case, it certainly did not have at the time the epistemological validity that it currently has as a means of saving the planet.

LK: At the same time, you were publishing recycling articles related to the space program, and I am wondering if you have identified at the time a direct link between the crafted experiments of the West Coast and the scientifically grounded experiments of NASA.

PM: There certainly were such connections, but in general, there were no prescribed answers and links; we would look at a whole series of ways of approaching emergent themes of interest, such as recycling. For instance, I remember along these lines, we were looking at the “Clyvus composting toilet,” which was a huge box you built behind your house and after a period of months or years, you would dig out a clean-smelling compost from the back of your house. But then, as you say, we would be very happy if the space program came up with a more high-tech system of converting waste into reusable matter; we would look at that as well. Basically, there was no single route. We were quite happy to dip into a wide variety of options.

I remember going to Pacific High School, somewhere south of San Francisco, and there was a dome that they built out of foamed PVC. Nobody would use this dome, because everyone said, “This stuff has really bad vibes, man,” as in “bad vibrations.” “Vibes” was a very commonly used word at the time and reflecting all sorts of unpleasant situations.

LK: Were the “bad vibes” a psychological or a physiological problem?

PM: This is a very interesting question; it is hard to say, I guess it was both. Perhaps, it was bad “karma.” It could be a physical problem; this specific dome gave off gas at a certain time after construction. I think, though, that the disapproval of the commune dwellers was based on the fact that the PVC dome was a technological solution. All the other domes were built out of recycled materials, like “Bucky-type” triangles cut out of car parts; it was just this one made out of PVC, and nobody liked it.

LK: Who was responsible for the recycling section of AD?

PM: Colin Moorcraft provided most of the material for this sector. I was mostly involved in scanting all the other international magazines, looking for things that we could pick up. The first one we opened was Time magazine, in particular the section that they used to have in the front on new products. They would invariably pick up some new NASA-based interesting material that they would see for more general use, but we could see uses related to the building industry. Thinking about this technological transfer, you could not find the right materials in the Standard Catalog. You just could not find them. In this sense, “found objects” from other industries, industrial components, became for us architectural elements.

LK: Speaking of Archigram magazine, Peter Cook made a statement on AD during his visit last year to Princeton. He mentioned: “At some point we stopped Archigram because AD was doing the job for us.” How would you comment on his statement?

PM: I never realized that before, but thinking about it, he is probably right. We were indeed setting up lot of things that Archigram was involved in. Archigram was a huge influence on me--that is, the second biggest influence, with the first being Cedric Price. My ventures into magazine publishing, both with Megascope and Clipkit, were very much inspired by Archigram and particularly by Peter Cook. At that stage, Peter

PETER MURRAY


Cook was a heroic figure for me.

However, Archigram’s relationship with AD was very strong long before I got there. Robin Middleton, who was my predecessor as technical editor of AD, had worked with Peter Cook in a firm called Taylor-Woodrow on a major development project. The person in charge of that team was Theo Crosby, who was the technical editor of AD two times before Robin Middleton. So there was a connection very early on in the 1960s between Taylor-Woodrow, Archigram, Theo Crosby and Robin Middleton.

But to a certain extent, we did not become a sort of second Archigram until we changed print and went to a very different format. One of the things that were very important was the shift in print technology, which gave us a lot more freedom and eventually changed the formality of the product. AD became much more radical and informal when the printing process changed.

LK: Was this shift in print technology accompanied by a rising animosity against advertisements during the late 1960s? In the September 1971 issue, there was an editorial note mentioning that from this point onwards AD would fundamentally change, because no longer would advertisements be included.

PM: We didn’t have anything against advertisements; I think the advertisers had things against us. At that point, we decided not to include advertisements because were not getting them. Advertisers are only interested in advertising to readers who are about to specify their products and since we were appealing to a more radical side of the architectural profession, especially students and people who were not in such a strong specifying position as the readers of The Architects’ Journal. The advertisers did not want to advertise with us. Because the advertising had dropped to a certain extent, it wasn’t worth for the Standard Catalog Company having an advertising salesman for AD. There is a fundamental difference between consumer

advertising, which tends to be well designed, from building materials advertising. I have never understood that, because they were trying to appeal to architects, which would hopefully have a visually sensitive antenna. However, building materials advertising used to be universally ugly, badly designed and often sexist. So, we were not sorry to see the back of the advertising, but we did not have a campaign against it either.

LK: Monica Pidgeon made a statement that radical changes happened in AD at the period when Peter Murray and Robin Middleton overlapped. What was your relationship with Robin Middleton? How would you interpret that statement?

PM: I first joined AD as art editor, because that was the available job and at the same time I was interested in graphic design. Gradually, Robin gave me more and more things to do in terms of covering both the layout and the editorial content, and in this sense there was a shift from him to me until I took over completely with Cosmorama. Robin is more an academic rather than a professional journalist, and I was becoming a professional journalist. He is a very good teacher, but we had different approaches to the world and the things that were happening around us. That probably in itself sparked off the change that Monica is referring to. Robin and I worked everything out in the pub over a beer, after we finished work at 7. It was always enjoyable and for me an educational exchange, since Robin is a remarkably well-read, clever person.

LK: In 1973 you left AD for Building Design magazine and precisely at the same moment Cosmorama ended in AD. Could you speak of your reasons for leaving, the aftermath and the end of Cosmorama?

PM: I wanted to finance my traveling to write for AD, but AD could not afford to pay the costs, so I would take freelance jobs for a whole series of magazines including Building Design. I used to write under a pseudonym in Building Design,

PETER MURRAY


so that people would not realize it was me; even Monica did not know for a while. Eventually, when Building Design was looking for an editor, they offered me the job, and it seemed that it was not something I could refuse. Monica then asked me to find somebody to replace me and I recommended my ex-tutor at the AA, Archie MacNam. I thought that he would be useful because he was previously involved in magazine production, but unfortunately like a lot of people around us at the time, he had a serious drinking problem that I was not aware of. After my departure, Monica got very fed up with all sorts of problems, like dealing with the Standard Catalog, Blackwell advertising and an alcoholic, so she also left a year after me. Martin Spring and Haig Beck then joined the magazine, working under Archie. The two of them decided to buy the magazine off from the Standard Catalog Company, supported by Papadakis. They ran it for a while, however in the end Papadakis got rid off Martin Spring. Martin still feels bitter about this up to this day. Haig Beck, who worked with Papadakis a little longer, was also pushed out of AD by Papadakis.

In any case, my leave certainly had everything to do with the end of Cosmorama at the end of 1973. I would never close Cosmorama down. In fact, if I could, I would turn the whole magazine to Cosmorama.

ON Architectural Design magazine, the educational scene in the ArchitecturalAssociation, the space program, AD’s Cosmorama and the counterculture.

Interview with by Lydia KallipolitiROBIN MIDDLETON


New York, NYAugust 1, 2007

ROBIN MIDDLETON


LK: During the time that you were part of the editorial board of Architectural Design magazine, did you consider AD as a “little magazine”?

RB: AD only became a little magazine when its financial basis broke down and it had to survive out of “selling magazines” and not advertisements. Once we had no money, we started operating like a “little magazine”. The absence of advertisements is not an absolute rule, for example Archigram was a hand-made magazine and occasionally had advertisements. Yet, what differentiates a little magazine from a commercial publication is the dependence of the magazine on a steady monthly income, regularly coming from advertisements.

LK: You agree though that during that time there are radical structural changes for AD, like the quality of the paper, the typography, the distribution of sections, even the context of the published pieces.

RB: In essence, this change was financial. AD was owned by the Standard Catalog Company and published for years by Whitefriars Press, a section of the same company. Publishing AD was a very expensive and in most cases unprofitable business, but it did not matter since Whitefriars Press did not have to make an income. However, when the Standard Catalog decided to sell the company, they had to demonstrate that each part was profitable. The policy of Architectural Design, putting down most architecture, and its status as an international magazine and did not attract local advertising like Architectural Review. We did not like publishing new buildings and therefore the concrete and the pipe manufacturers did not want to advertise with us; we simply had a different audience. We did not give a damn, but obviously the Standard Catalog Company did since they were not making any money. They wanted to sell it to Monica for nothing, but I did not want to be stuck with Monica for the rest of my life, so I said “no, not a chance.”

LK: How was the printing and the typography

influenced by these changes?

RB: We had to survive, so we had to pay for the printing costs out of the subscriptions. We tried out whatever we could and a few attempts were utterly disastrous. There was a time in these early days that we were switching printers and format at every single issue. Eventually we found somebody that could do it regularly and the printing process was stabilized.

LK: At the same time, the structure of the magazine was changing. For example in 1970, there are many sections that function like Cosmorama--”Odds,” “Recycling,” “Sector.” In parallel Cosmorama celebrates its expansion to more than fifteen pages. How did these typological changes reflect the financial concerns?

RB: Cosmorama had been expanding from the beginning. Originally this section was called “World News” and was only two pages. The Cosmorama material was more interesting than anything else in the magazine, so in time it got bigger. Cosmorama was the reason people were buying and reading the magazine. It was the main part of the magazine. We were all saving our energy to put into Cosmorama, picking up any sort of information on new lifestyles that we could find. Nobody was interested in pictures of new buildings. It is Cosmorama that kept the magazine going.

LK: Whose idea was it to re-title “World News” to “Cosmorama” 1965? Cosmorama implies a different systemic perspective of looking at the world, rather than the diligent, unbiased journalistic coverage of global events.

RB: In fact, I made up the word. We were trying to figure out a world that would cover the world and I was learning Greek at the time, so the word “cosmos” seemed fit. “Panorama” was another word in my mind at the time.

LK: How did the shift from “World News” to

ROBIN MIDDLETON


“Cosmorama” occur in 1965?

RB: Architectural Design magazine, like any other magazine, had an exchange system with other publications all over the world. “World News” originated from selected material in other publications. We sent them three copies of AD and received in return three copies of every magazine monthly; most of them we discarded: Ekistics for instance. The change happened along the way. Running a magazine is dealing with what come in, with what you can pick up straightaway. The introductory section had the additional function to direct people to other magazines, so that they would read them. I remember once, I included a piece in an early Cosmorama from the Architects’ Journal, an English weekly journal, much more technical in scope, with news of what happened around the country. It was by far the best English architectural journal at the time, very lively for what it was, that every architect would read. Monica was furious that I referenced the Architects’ Journal, because according to the principles of journalism one should not reference a rival. Next week though, the Architects’ Journal referenced AD so Monica forgave me.

LK: How influential was Peter Murray to Cosmorama?

RB: Cosmorama started long before Peter joined the magazine and the radical changes happened in AD prior to his arrival. Later on though, when I left, Peter became the editor and was probably running Cosmorama. Peter Murray had all sorts of little things on the side before joining AD. He started a toy company, selling toys to catalogs and worked on a very interesting and lively magazine called Nova. Nova was a stylish, smart, radical-chic, cutting-edge, fashion, all-inclusive magazine, with Molly Parkins running it, a very lovely and outrageous woman. Although everyone was reading, Nova collapsed because it was too outrageous for advertisers to be interested in it.

LK: This is the same time that Peter Murray published Clip-Kit?

RB: Clip-Kit was just a little student magazine he made. Everyone was doing them. They were all over the world. Most of these student publications were sent to us by mail and we published them. We also used to look at many popular magazines, nothing to do with architecture like Paris Match and Weekend in London. I used to write most of Cosmorama, not the signed articles, but the little bits, over one weekend.

Cover of AD April 1969

LK: In this sense, this interdisciplinary outlook of Cosmorama was fundamentally experimental.

RB: Yes of course. We did not like architecture. You cannot imagine this right now because architecture is quite exciting nowadays. Yet, in the postwar era, there was no allowance or money for imagination. Everything was done to a bare minimum. We were just trying to break that

ROBIN MIDDLETON


pattern.

LK: Peter Cook made a statement that in the early 1970s it was unfashionable to design buildings and that architecture was generally perceived as conglomerations of environmental elements.

RB: David Greene was much more radical than Peter in this respect. He is working even now on an invisible university project. Peter produced thousands of drawings, you cannot imagine how many, but they were all half-baked ideas rushed into drawings. We only published a very small fraction of what he produced. However, we published anything by Michael Webb and David Greene.

LK: Like in the case of Archigram, were there geographic hubs with experimental groups that you would contact to publish their material?

RB: We were in contact with American groups mostly in the Southwest, all through Buckminster Fuller. He had a wonderful perverse architectural mind and was our only connection to America. We were also in touch with certain groups in Vienna and mostly with Hans Hollein, who I liked very much; he was an interesting man with a mind and came to our office. We also published a lot of material from Haus-Rucker-Co and another Viennese group run by a woman that didn’t take off ground. Vienna was definitely a hub with four or five groups that we would frequently publish in Cosmorama.

LK: I am very interested in the February 1967 issue, with the cover of a faceless red astronaut in red background. How was it decided that this issue would be guest edited by John McHale?

RB: John McHale was a friend and Magda Cordell was very close to Monica Pidgeon. We asked him to work on a special issue. The image on the cover was an advertisement of an electrical company published in Fortune magazine and I wrote to the company, Cuttler-Hammer Co,

asking them if we could reproduce the image for our cover. The original picture was in four colors and we changed it to black and white in red background. The cover for this issue was put together by AD, as well as the Cosmorama section.

Cover of AD February 1967

LK: Parallel to the “outer space” issue, AD published another special issue in April 1969, called inner space; it featured the headshot of a diver, an AA student that worked with Jacques Cousteau. How systematic was this approach for AD that is the promotion of experiments on the territorial exploration of earth?

RB: This is exactly what young people were interested at the time, not just AD. It was in the air. In the end, as a publishing tactic, we decided not to care about advertising and architecture. We might have dug the magazine in, but I think it was much more liberating.

ROBIN MIDDLETON


LK: Going back to your relationship with Peter Murray, how was your collaboration with him and Monica Pidgeon?

RB: I got along very well with Peter. He came in as art director, because of his work at Nova, but he actually had no sense of design at all. In any case we worked very well together. We used to go to a pub after work because we could not chat in front of Monica. She did not understand anything; she did not know what was happening and how the world had changed. She was willing to take a chance, but she could not initiate any ideas. The editor that Monica really liked was Theo Crosby and in fact it was Theo that changed the magazine and put it on the map. Before that, AD was a very dull, professional magazine. The graphic and context changes that Theo made were accepted and understood by Monica. Then Kenneth Frampton came along and he and Monica were fighting all the time. Ken had a lot of integrity about what he wanted to say and persistent on how he wanted to run the magazine; they were both control freaks, so they did not get on. Upon Ken’s departure, luckily she liked me and understood that the magazine had to change, although she did not know how. When I left AD, and Peter took the job as art editor, he came to me and said, “I had no idea how much you have protected me from Monica.” He ended up fighting her all the time.

LK: Were you invited to work for AD by Theo Crosby?

RB: I was working with Theo Crosby at Taylor-Woodrow Construction Company on a major redevelopment contract for rebuilding Euston station. A lot of the Archigram people were working there as well. It was an enormous scheme for the center of London, which entailed a new design for the façade, a luxury hotel, car parking in the roof and many shops. Although our design was ready and had already been accepted in principle, it did not go through the planning commission. We were under the impression that

development schemes for railways were exempt from planning commission, however they are only exempt for railway usage. In the end, the whole thing collapsed. Taylor-Woodrow actually built the station, but we were not part of that. Eventually, they liked us as a team and were trying to figure out how they could use us. At that time, after the Euston development, project, we were sitting around the office doing nothing and Theo said to me, “Why don’t you go down in the afternoon and help Monica?” There was nobody to help her and this is how I started to work for AD.

LK: While you were working for AD, you were teaching in parallel at the AA. How close was the academic kinship between the magazine and the school? Was AD directly reflecting AA’s research agenda?

RB: No, not at all. However, a lot of the people who contributed to AD were around the AA, because the AA was not just a school. It had a bar and a rooftop; people would have lunch there everyday and a drink in the evening. The school was open to everyone and there were a lot of visitors for lectures from all over the world. The AA was a place where ideas gathered, like in a proper community. AD obviously had a very close connection with the AA. It was just around the corner and I was teaching there in the thesis program. For fifteen years, I coordinated general studies at the AA, all the lecture series.

LK: While you were teaching at the AA did you introduce Roy Landau and Colin Moorcraft to AD? With the sections of “Sector” and “Recycling,” I assume run by Landau and Moorcraft respectively, AD was one of the few periodicals consistently covering cybernetics, systems theory and ecology with an obvious emphasis on technology.

RB: Roy was also teaching at the AA’s graduate school, he was a friend of Cedric’s. He did an issue of AD before “Sector” started and then he was mostly responsible for Sector; he selected most of the material. In London though, any piece

ROBIN MIDDLETON


of information related to cybernetics and systems theory had to go through Gordon Pask. Generally, everyone at the time was reading Norbert Wiener and was into systems theory. We all hoped it might do something.

LK: Like what?

RB: Change the world? It was the 1960s, you know. The world did change despite the fact that now we take it for granted.

LK: However, there is a structural particularity on how AD was organized at the end of the 1960s. There were many specialized technical sections, such as “Sector” and “Recycling.” AD appeared as a compilation of information and in this sense one can trace direct link between AD and the Whole Earth Catalog. There are also many mentions of AD in the Whole Earth Catalog, praising AD, as well as graphical similarities between Cosmorama and the Whole Earth Catalog.

RB: Yes, Stewart Brand liked us. We had very similar interests with the WEC and worked in parallel, both dealing with the exchange of information of a certain kind. We had similar minds and eventually were picking up similar things.

But about the graphic convergence, there was a certain graphic style of the period that we were both in tune with, like other London-based publications such as Oz, It and Fuck. At that time, to get covers for AD, I used to go to the Royal College of Art end of the year show and the Saint Martins School of Art and see the work of diploma students, in order to recruit the ones I liked. This is how I found Adrian George, Lionel Stout, Alan Oldridge and others. Adrian and I became friends and he used to come to lay out Cosmorama, not all of it but a big part of it. We used to do it in one afternoon; Peter was there as well. The only thing that Monica did that none of us ever interfered with was the “Design Notes” section at the end of the magazine. We

had to have something to keep her occupied. The “Catalogue” section at the end, on technical information and new products, was done by Alexander Pike, who worked on Taylor-Woodrow.

LK: How would you comment on Reyner Banham’s statement on AD? He said, “At least the pigs cannot stop you from reading AD at home.”

RB: He said that?

LK: Yes, you published his statement repeatedly as an advertisement for Architectural Design in 1970.

RB: That’s nice of him. Banham always had a problem with us because he was writing for the Architectural Review. We published a lot of his articles in AD, but all of it was previously published elsewhere, like Art in America and Design Quarterly. He only wrote once piece for us and it took him years. Him and I were writing our dissertations in parallel, in London and Cambridge respectively. I was very snobbish in those days and once I sent him a college note saying that “Maybe we should meet up in London at some time.” He considered it very arrogant and off-hand; he never replied. Years later, he said that he was very angry with me. You see Banham had “class” problems; he was absolutely hung up by his social class all the time, because he was provincial and did not get the right education. He wrote a piece where this becomes obvious in a magazine called Living Arts.

LK: Did Theo Crosby edit Living Arts?

RB: That’s right. There were only two issues of it. His piece was on Archigram and the general culture of the London design scene at the time, basically about what you can like and what you cannot like. I think it is called “The Motorbike Enthusiasts.”

LK: Where are the archives of Architectural Design during these years?

ROBIN MIDDLETON


RB: I think that they have all been thrown away, unless Papadakis passed along some of the very few letters that we had kept to Phaidon. When Peter Murray and eventually Monica Pidgeon left AD, Papadakis who had a bookstore wanted to take over and distribute the magazine. Right after their departure, Haig Beck and Martin Spring, who have worked around the AA, decided to become editors of AD and to buy the magazine. I think that Martin Spring got 49 percent, Haig got close to 48 percent and Papadakis 3 percent. Papadakis did not put down any money; he said that he only wanted to distribute the magazine. At that time, the three of them inherited all the archival material. It was a very small enterprise, all in one room. Then, Haig and Martin started quarrelling and at the same time Papadakis wanted to make the magazine glossy. He eventually convinced Haig to override Martin, who was a very dedicated socialist and did not want to change the style of the magazine. In the end Papadakis managed to convince Haig and took over the magazine.

LK: If I may go back to “Recycling” and “Sector”, through these sections, there was a particular interest emerging in AD focused on closed, self-sufficient systems and the awareness of the household as a regenerative machine.

RB: We got a lot of information on that form a London-based weekly science magazine called the New Scientist. In many respects, it was an obsession of the time again on how one could change the world. There was also a wonderful unit at the AA precisely on ecological systems, run by an unattractive slob who would not talk to anybody else in the school; I can’t remember his name. We published a lot of his material in AD, because he did very interesting work.

LK: Grahame Caine, the Street Farmer?

RB: Yes. Many students worked with him to build an entirely self-sufficient house; the students at the AA were absolutely hooked on this project. Everything was ecological, the kitchen, the sinks, the house would even grow its own tomatoes.

Everything worked in the house and he lived in it; he never left in order to assure that all systems were working. At some point, he had to leave for a while for some reason, someone got ill, and he had his favorite student to look after the house and keep the systems going. While Grahame was away, the student who stayed at the house got the flue and the doctors gave him antibiotics. The antibiotics came through the system in his “crap” and the crap was part of the whole recycling system. The whole system was eventually destroyed. It was amazing!

LK: This is an incredible story. So the sick caretaker passed along his disease and turned the house sick?

RB: Yes! The antibiotics killed the house! He had to rebuild the entire system all over again.

LK: I think this conclusion “the shit killed the house” is a wonderful ending to our conversation.

RB: I think so as well.

Architects: Kiyonori Kikutake (Japan, 1959)Creative Documentation with Kenneth Yeung (Hong Kong, 2008)

Marine CityUrban Plateau


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Architects: Kiyonori Kikutake (Japan, 1959)Creative Documentation with Kenneth Yeung (Hong Kong, 2008)

Marine CityUrban Plateau

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Architects: Buckminster Fuller & Soji Sadao (New York, 1960)Creative Documentation with Katerina Kourkoula (New York, 2008)

Dome Over ManhattanEgg Shells


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Architects: Andre Bloc (France, 1965)Creative Documentation with Georgios Andreasakis, Hara Christopoulou, Eirini Kalogeropoulou, Michail Kantarzis, Dimitrios Vaimakis (Crete, Greece, 2010)

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Architects: Rudolph Doernach (Germany, 1966)Creative Documentation with: Mitchell Joachim (New York, 2008)

BiotectureMeat House

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Architects: Rudolph Doernach (Germany, 1966)Creative Documentation with: Mitchell Joachim (New York, 2008)


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12Architects: Rudolph Doernach (Germany, 1966)Creative Documentation with: Mitchell Joachim (New York, 2008)


Architects: Ferdinand Spindel (Germany, 1966)Creative Documentation with Colleen Sweeney (Columbus, Ohio, 2008)

Hole in a HomeSoundproof Hole in the City

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Architects: Ferdinand Spindel (Germany, 1966)Creative Documentation with Colleen Sweeney (Columbus, Ohio, 2008)


14Architects: Ferdinand Spindel (Germany, 1966)Creative Documentation with Colleen Sweeney (Columbus, Ohio, 2008)



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Architects: Konrad Frey (Vienna, 1967)Creative Documentation with Nikos Batakis, Mariel Cremlis, Despina Linaraki, Vaggelis Maistralis, Eleni Tseva (Crete Greece, 2010)

CowcicleThe Cow Project

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Architects: Konrad Frey (Vienna, 1967)Creative Documentation with Nikos Batakis, Mariel Cremlis, Despina Linaraki, Vaggelis Maistralis, Eleni Tseva (Crete Greece, 2010)

CowcicleThe Cow Project


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Architects: Michael Webb (London, 1968)Creative Documentation with !ndie architecture Paul Anderson (Denver, 2010)

Magic Carpet & Fluid Air WallThermographic Theater

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Architects: Michael Webb (London, 1968)Creative Documentation with !ndie architecture Paul Anderson (Denver, 2010)

Magic Carpet & Fluid Air WallThermographic Theater


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Architects: Michael Webb (London, 1968)Creative Documentation with Ionnis Liofagos, Eleni Roupa, Angeliki Terezaki, Fouteini Fotopulou (Crete Greece, 2010)

Magic Carpet & Fluid Air WallBody Heat Generated Interactive Surfaces

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Architects: Haus-Rucker-Co (Vienna, 1968)Creative Documentation with Cathryn Dwyre, Chris Perry, and Justin Snider(Philadelphia, 2010)

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28Architects: Haus-Rucker-Co (Vienna, 1968)Creative Documentation with Cathryn Dwyre, Chris Perry, and Justin Snider(Philadelphia, 2010)



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Architects: Mark Fisher & David Harrison (London, 1969)Creative Documentation with Jason Scroggin (Lexington, Kentucky, 2008)

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Architects: Robin Evans (London, 1969)Creative Documentation with Lydia Kallipoliti & Alexandros Tsamis(Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008)

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Architects: Rudolph Doernach (Germany, 1969)Creative Documentation with Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Meredith Bostwick, Ricardo Escutia, Henry Mena and Jeremy Jacinth (New York, 2010)

ProvolutionEcoInduction

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32Architects: Rudolph Doernach (Germany, 1969)Creative Documentation with Pablo Lorenzo-Eiroa, Meredith Bostwick, Ricardo Escutia, Henry Mena and Jeremy Jacinth (New York, 2010)



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Architects: David Hunt (London, 1971)Creative Documentation with Michael Young and Kutan Ayata (New York, 2010)

Sugar Puffs PackagingOptic Puffs

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Architects: David Hunt (London, 1971)Creative Documentation with Michael Young and Kutan Ayata (New York, 2010)

Sugar Puffs PackagingOptic Puffs


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Architects: Victor Papanek (1971)Creative Documentation with Terreform One, Mitchell Joachim andMaria Aioloya (Brooklyn, 2010)

Human Ecology DiagramURBANEERING

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Architects: Victor Papanek (1971)Creative Documentation with Terreform One, Mitchell Joachim andMaria Aioloya (Brooklyn, 2010)

Human Ecology DiagramURBANEERING


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Architects: Farallones Design Group (Pt. Reyes, California, 1971)Creative Documentation with Yan Wai Chu (Princeton, 2008)

PlyDomePlyDome?


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PlyDomePlyDome?

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PlyDomePlyDome?

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PlyDomePlyDome?

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PlyDomePlyDome?

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Architects: Beicher, Breitenbucher and Schneider (UK, 1971)Creative Documentation with Gregory Delaney (Columbus, Ohio, 2008)

StyroCubeburrow/BOROUGH


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Architects: “The Street Farmers” Peter Crump & Bruce Haggart (London, 1971)Creative Documentation with Jimenez Lai (Chicago, 2008)

Transmogrifi cationBlack Out City


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Architects: Stuart Lever (London, 1971)Creative Documentation with Marilena Dimopoulou, Iasonas Paterakis, Alma Tralo, Dimitris Vidalis, Georgia Voradaki (Crete Greece, 2010)

Tree HouseAIRPOTITION

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66Architects: Ettore Sottsass (Italy, 1972)Creative Documentation with Marianthi Liapi & Kotis Oungrinis (Thessaloniki, Greece, 2008)

Container FurnitureEcoPop


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Architects: Ettore Sottsass (Italy, 1972)Creative Documentation with Marianthi Liapi & Kotis Oungrinis (Thessaloniki, Greece, 2008)


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Architects: Graham Caine (Eltham London, 1972)Creative Documentation with Nathan Petty & Sheena Garcia(Princeton, 2008)

The Ecological HouseThe Trilet Project


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Architects: Robert Schimel (1972)Creative Documentation with Alicia Imperiale (Princeton, 2008)

Giant Flexible TubesPiezoelectric Tubes


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Architects: Robert Schimel (1972)Creative Documentation with Alicia Imperiale (Princeton, 2008)

Giant Flexible TubesPiezoelectric Tubes

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Breathing BowelsArchitects: Robert Schimel (1972)Creative Documentation with Dustin Tobias (New York, 2010)

Giant Flexible Tubes 76



Giant Flexible Tubes 76Breathing Bowels


Architects: Robert Schimel (1972)Creative Documentation with Dustin Tobias (New York, 2010)


Architects: Dr. B.S. Benjamin (UK, 1972)Creative Documentation with Eva Franch i Gilabert (Houston, 2008)

Parachute HouseHurricane


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79Architects: Dr. B.S. Benjamin (UK, 1972)Creative Documentation with Eva Franch i Gilabert (Houston, 2008)



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79Architects: Dr. B.S. Benjamin (UK, 1972)Creative Documentation with Eva Franch i Gilabert (Houston, 2008)



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Architects: (Ankara, Turkey, 1972)Creative Documentation with Yiannis Apostolopoulos, Tzeny Gorantonaki, Anna Neratzouli, Evangelia Ntafa and Ionna Thanou (Crete Greece 2010)

Recycling Building ComponentsBacteria Brick

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Architects: (Ankara, Turkey, 1972)Creative Documentation with Yiannis Apostolopoulos, Tzeny Gorantonaki, Anna Neratzouli, Evangelia Ntafa and Ionna Thanou (Crete Greece 2010)

Recycling Building ComponentsBacteria Brick


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Architects: Bod de Buck & Jerry Thorman (Truchas, New Mexico, 1973)Creative Documentation with Miriam Waltz (Princeton, 2008)

Free Form DomeSpiral to Spiral Dome


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Architects: Bod de Buck & Jerry Thorman (Truchas, New Mexico, 1973)Creative Documentation with Miriam Waltz (Princeton, 2008)

Free Form DomeSpiral to Spiral Dome

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Architects: Jim Dine (Northumberland, 1973)Creative Documentation with Matthew McHanon (Princeton, 2008)

Grow Your Own FurnitureGrow Your Own Furniture 2

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Architects: Wolf H. Hilbertz (Fargo, North Dakota, 1973)Creative Documentation with Aurel von Richthofen (Columbus, Ohio, 2008)

Ice CityHiicety


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AuroraArchitects: Wolf H. Hilbertz (Fargo, North Dakota, 1973)Creative Documentation with”Future Cities Lab” Jason Kelly Johnson & Nataly Gattegno (San Francisco, 2010)

Ice City 90

Aurora


Architects: Wolf H. Hilbertz (Fargo, North Dakota, 1973)Creative Documentation with”Future Cities Lab” Jason Kelly Johnson & Nataly Gattegno (San Francisco, 2010)

Ice City 90

Aurora


Architects: Wolf H. Hilbertz (Fargo, North Dakota, 1973)Creative Documentation with”Future Cities Lab” Jason Kelly Johnson & Nataly Gattegno (San Francisco, 2010)

Ice City 90



Ice CityHiicety

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Ice CityHiicety

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Architects: Wolf Hilbretz and Joseph Mathis (Austin, Texas, 1973)Creative Documentation with Panagiota Athanailidi, Erianna Geromitsou, Dimitris Koudounakis, Avra Tomara, George Velivasakis (Crete Greece, 2010)

Space Form ManipulationCandy Scapes

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Architects: Wolf Hilbretz and Joseph Mathis (Austin, Texas, 1973)Creative Documentation with Panagiota Athanailidi, Erianna Geromitsou, Dimitris Koudounakis, Avra Tomara, George Velivasakis (Crete Greece, 2010)

Space Form ManipulationCandy Scapes


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Architects: Raoul Gasnier (UK, 1973)Creative Documentation with Amy Dedonato (Columbus, Ohio, 2008)

Vertical HorticultureSky Farm


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Architects: Raoul Gasnier (UK, 1973)Creative Documentation with Amy Dedonato (Columbus, Ohio, 2008)

Vertical HorticultureSky Farm

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Architects: Raoul Gasnier (UK, 1973)Creative Documentation with Eric Vergne (New York, 2010)

Vertical HorticultureDystopian Farming

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Clean Air Pods ReduxEnvirobubble

1970, Lower Sproul Plaza at the University of California, Berkeley:

The underground architecture collective Antfarm staged the performance “Breathing – That’s your Bag,” inviting visitors to enter an enclosed pneumatic bubble, in order to breathe safely sealed off from the air pollution outside. The bubble, called the “Clean Air Pod” (CAP), would screen out noxious atmospheric contaminants and shield the people sheltered in the envelope. With an idiosyncratic sense of humor, Antfarm -Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez, Doug Michels and Curtis Schreier- wore gas masks, protective gear and white laboratory suits to survive outdoor air pollution; they urged passing visitors to sign death consent forms if choosing not to come into the Clean Air Pod. The Oakland Tribune reported Antfarm’s recital as if it were to happen in the future; per Antfarm’s request, the event was published as a forecast for April 22, 1972.

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“Clean Air Pod” (CAP) by Antfarm. Installation at the University of California at Berkeley in 1970.


EnvirobubbleClean Air Pods Redux

Air quality in urban environments was a primary press headline in the environmental campaign of the 1960s and 1970s. Toxic air, smog and the fear of asphyxiation in cities fueled a collective sociopolitical battle against pollution for all parties that composed the political scenery at the time. On one hand, Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration was markedly active on the issue, having signed several “clean air acts” with the scope of protecting the environment. On the other hand, countercultural activist groups shared similar concerns, as witnessed in numerous proactive performances and riots with

respiratory devices. Parallel to Antfarm, Vettor Pisani’s Stampo Virile (published in Casabella, January 1971) featured a woman unable to breathe without a respirator. With the title, translated as the “imprint of man,” Pisani reflected on John McHale’s vision of bodily prosthetic devices as an imminent prerequisite of human survival and raised a severe critique of large scale infrastructure and social reality. At the same year, the anarchist British architectural group “Street Farmer” released a manifesto on the first page of their self-published homonymous magazine, prognosticating that fresh air would soon constitute a new prominent type of real estate to purchase. The kinship between governmental goals and countercultural group was a paradoxical convergence from antithetical social streams that led to entirely different sets of actions; yet the concerns stemmed from a common point of departure that marked the dawn of the age of ecology as a gallant political and religious position.

With the impact of the whole earth view and the rise of environmental awareness in the postwar period, sustainable design practices have promoted buildings as regenerative and closed ecological systems, capable of harnessing waste and providing their own energy. Antafrm’s Clean Air Pod, as a protective uterine-like environment, has been reiteratively translated as a conserved milieu blocked from the effluence of the exterior world. Forty years after, however, we may consider the viability of closed ecological systems and the process of translating planetary ideals to environmental policies

Vettor Pisani’s Stampo Virile, published in Casabella, January 1971.



and consequently to a set of physical rules and artifacts in the building industry. Enclosed spaces were tested in the massive Biosphere 2 project in Arizona, which was completed and sealed in 1991; after a period of time, fresh air had to be pumped and food introduced into the sphere to ensure the health of the sealed subjects. But beyond the Biosphere 2, the enclosed space of the Biosphere’s “envirobubble” lives within thousands of sick buildings of corporate America. Sealed, heavily air-conditioned buildings usually generate problematic airborne conditions, resulting from a building’s lack of exchange with its surrounding environment. In most sick buildings, there cannot be an identifiable cause for illness, as a causal effect of a specific deficiency. A 1984 World Health Organization Committee report suggested that up to 30 percent of new and remodeled buildings worldwide may be the subject of excessive complaints related to indoor air quality and suffer from what is known as the “sick building syndrome”, a term used to describe situations in which building occupants experience acute health and comfort effects that appear to be linked to time spent in a building.

*

2011, Design Hub (D-Hub) Barcelona, Spain:

Inspired by Antfarm’s project for the theatrical purification of air in urban environments, five architecture professors from the Cooper Union in New York, the Technical University of Crete (TUC) and the IE school of Madrid led a collaborative design and fabrication workshop (Crete, Greece August 2010) with the intention to revisit the issues raised in the 1960s, still eminent today. More than a dozen students from TUC worked laboriously on inventing architectural prototypes for air chambers as purifying machines. During the workshop, we revisited Reyner Banham’s celebrated “well–tempered environment” in HVAC building systems and examined a diverse body of building technology techniques translated as design and spatial tools for the development of air purifying strategies in enclosed spaces.

The research was consolidated in “The Envirobubble” installation fabricated at the Design Hub of Barcelona in March 2011. “The Envirobubble” raises issues on air quality still prominent today, though questioning at the same time if the air we breathe indoors is more hazardous than the air we breathe outdoors. We seek to expand awareness from outdoor to indoor air quality and alert visitors as to the breathable air in heavily sealed air conditioned buildings, with high degrees of condensation.

“The envirobubble” presents four types of air pods as purifying machines. Each cluster of air pods performs and visualizes a purification process focusing on different types of pollutants: A) Dust (particulate inorganic matter) B) Moisture (humidity levels) D) Gas (toxic off-gas emissions E) CO2 (plant respiration). By opening up a perspective on the development of indoor air quality as an architectural design problem, rather than an engineering problem, the aim is to initiate a vital reassessment of environmental control in design terminology.



Moisture Pod: The moisture pod harvests water vapor (humidity) from the air and collects it in pneumatic tanks for further alternative use. Matrices of interconnecting tubes “farm” water vapor, via temperature change accommodated in the matrix, and distribute droplets of water in plastic pods. The tubes are located according to the process of vapor distillation. . In the lower part of the pod, moisture is reaching two vessels and is then recirculated for other programs. The moisture pod is envisioned as a prototype for a building system that dehumidifies the air, improving indoor air quality, while at the same time collects water to be recycled for irrigating plants or for secondary household water systems.

Dust Pod: Dust is an assemblage of particulate matter ubiquitous in the air and a leading pollutant in indoor air quality. In the domestic scale, it contains small amounts of human and animal hairs and shed skin particles, plant pollen, textile and paper fibers, soil minerals from outdoor soil, and other matter found in the local environment. The Dust Pod is an electrical dust collector, which ionizes dust particles and collects them on a net of strings that in time grow into a surface. Ionization is conducted via copper wire to which high voltage is applied. The Dust Pod is envisioned as a prototype for a building system that purifies the air from particulate matter, while at the same time collects dust to create insulating felt surfaces for other uses.

CO2 Pod: The CO2 Pod uses plant life as a purification system for the atmosphere. Through photosynthesis, and more specifically through respiration, plants absorb CO2, exhaled by humans, and return oxygen. Human respiration and plant respiration work supplementary. This continuous cycle links the breathing mechanisms of two species. The CO2 Pod is a moving, breathing “lung” that regulates the respiration percentage of carbon dioxide through the expansion and contraction of plant life surface area. A series of pneumatically controlled pods embedded in the plants modulate the inflation and deflation of plant surface area in response to different times within a day. CO2 is exhaled into the pod and absorbed by the respiring “plant lung.” In return, the air pod exhales back, emitting oxygen to the room.

Gas Pod: Indoors, we daily inhale colorless and odorless toxic gases produced from daily activities. VOCs, is a group of volatile organic compounds, carbon based chemicals that evaporate as off-gases from certain solids and liquids at room temperature. They pervade our indoor air with concentrations that can be two to ten times greater in comparison to outdoor air. VOCs have potentially damaging health effects, like eye, nose and throat irritation, respiratory tract irritation, headaches, nausea, allergic skin reactions, fatigue, dizziness, visual disorders, and memory impairment, among other symptoms. There are numerous kinds of volatile organic compounds produced and used in manufacturing products. The Gas Pod is a serial filtering system which procedurally cleans air from the first pod onwards, until clean air is emitted to the room. The gas pod is envisioned as a prototype for a building system that filters air and prevents the intrusion of biological life indoors, while at the same time creates a series of overlapping layers with various degrees of transparency and opacity for the exterior envelope.



Experiments for the CO2 Air Pod of “The Envirobubble” installation conducted at the Technical University of Crete in Greece, 2010. Kostis Oungrinis and Marianthi Liapi with Georgios Andresakis, Yiannis Apostolopoulos, Tzeny Gorantonaki, Eirini Kalogeropoulou, Michalis Kantarzis, Despina Linaraki, Ioannis Liofagos, Dimitris Mairopoulos, Evangelos Alexandros Maistralis, Anna Neratzouli, Iasonas Paterakis, Eleni Roupa, Aggeliki Terezaki, Alma Tralo, Vassilis Tsesmetzis, Dimitris Vaima-kis, Anna-Maria Moschouti-Vermer, Georgia Voradaki.



Diagrams for the CO2 and Moisture Air Pod of “The Envirobubble” installation by Lydia Kallipoliti and Michael Young.



Kostis Oungrinis and students from the Technical University of Crete (Greece) assembling the installation at the Design Hub in Barcelona, March 2011. Georgios Andresakis, Yiannis Apostolopoulos, Tzeny Gorantonaki, Eirini Kalogeropoulou, Michalis Kantarzis, Despina Linaraki, Ionnis Liofagos, Dimitris Mairopoulos, Evan-gelos Alexandros Maistralis, Anna Neratzouli, Iasonas Paterakis, Eleni Roupa, Aggeliki Terezaki, Alma Tralo, Vassilis Tsesmetzis, Dimitris Vaimakis, Anna-Maria Moscouti-Vermer, Georgia Voradaki.

Application of the moisture pod as a branched building system that recirculates water. Lydia Kallipoliti and Sofia Krimizi.



“The Envirobubble” installation by Kostis Oungrinis, Lydia Kallipoliti, Anna Pla Català, Marianthi Liapi, Michael Young with Georgios Andresakis, Yiannis Apostolopoulos, Tzeny Gorantonaki, Eirini Kalog-eropoulou, Michalis Kantarzis, Despina Linaraki, Ionnis Liofagos, Dimitris Mairopoulos, Evangelos Alexandros Maistralis, Anna Neratzouli, Iasonas Pa-terakis, Eleni Roupa, Aggeliki Terezaki, Alma Tralo, Vassilis Tsesmetzis, Dimitris Vaimakis, Anna-Maria Moscouti-Vermer, Georgia Voradaki.



(Left) Kostis Oungrinis, Lydia Kallipoliti and Anna Pla Català presenting “The Envirobubble” installation at the Design Hub in Barcelona, March 2011. (Right) Opening Day for the installation, which took place in the framework of the exhibition EcoRedux 02: Design Manuals for a Dying Planet.

Credits | Research and Design Team for “THE ENVIROBUBBLE” installation:

Kostis Oungrinis and Marianthi Liapi (Technical University of Crete, Greece)

Anna Pla Catalá (IE School of Architecture, University of Madrid, Spain)

Lydia Kallipoliti and Michael Young (The Cooper Union, New York, USA)

Student Project Team (Technical University of Crete, Greece):

Georgios Andresakis, Yiannis Apostolopoulos, Tzeny Gorantonaki , Eirini Kalogeropoulou, Michalis

Kantarzis, Despina Linaraki, Ioannis Liofagos, Dimitris Mairopoulos, Evangelos Alexandros Maistralis,

Anna Neratzouli , Iasonas Paterakis, Eleni Roupa, Aggeliki Terezaki, Alma Tralo, Vassilis Tsesmetzis,

Dimitris Vaimakis, Anna-Maria Moschouti-Vermer, Georgia Voradaki.

EcoRedux

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Transcript of EcoRedux