Spaced Out

My aunt and uncle’s old house in Taos, New Mexico, came with its own creation myth. The story as passed down tells of an Anglo seeker, drawn to this spiritually rich edge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, who bought some land up against the national forest on the side of a ridge outside of town and began to build, as the locals do, in adobe brick. The first day he built a wall; by the next morning it had collapsed. The second day he tried again and failed. The third day a neighbor came by, shook his head, and gave the newcomer two suggestions: build two walls at a right angle so they will support each other, or build in curves so the walls support themselves.

It was the late 1960s, and circles were in—cosmic oneness, and so on—so he chose that course, eventually handcrafting, brick by mud brick, a great half-buried wheel of a house, a garden in a center court, podlike bedrooms opening off a wide circular hall. The living room—­overcrossed by long vigas, the traditional unmilled logs supporting the roof—was centered on a deep conversation pit. Later he built a circular guesthouse out front, topped by a white geodesic dome.

I hadn’t thought about that house in years—that wing of the family moved long ago to an equally funky corner of Maine—but it all came back while I read Alastair Gordon’s crucial new book, Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Com­munes, Infinity Machines and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties, to be released this month by Rizzoli. I value more the memory of that house, and the feeling for that era it transmitted, after picking up on a pair of tragic ideas that run through Gordon’s book.

Because of the impulsive, low-tech DIY nature of the spaces typical of the movement Gordon describes—“the stroboscopic light shows, crash pads, painted busses, and head shops,” as he puts it, “the domes, yurts, tepees, and hand-built ­shelters”—few have ­survived. At the same time, he quietly makes an argument that should warm the cockles of any architect’s or architectural historian’s heart: that the building of environments, foremost among our cultural products, maintains the ability to capture the nuances of a complex moment and, when they last, send them forward in time to be reviewed and interpreted.

We get lost in words, thinking they are the bones of the world, not mere ill-fitting tags. But words, however much we may love and rely on them—and architects of a certain stripe seem to value them more than many writers—don’t always cut it. It is evident that the more dimensions one has at one’s disposal, the more information a construction, verbal or physical, can contain. Consider film versus painting, hyperlinked versus static text, a monograph versus a museum. I’m rattling on here, stringing these words in a row, and the best I can do, squeezing from each a jot of meaning, is to suggest the contour of an idea, from which it is hoped that you, the sympathetic reader, will then manufacture within yourself a specific understanding that matches mine—a favorite old idea triggered anew while reading a good book. Writing is a Hail Mary. Architecture, working haptically and intellectually all around us, can play a deeper game.

This may have been particularly true for the era in question, addled and overwhelmed by its confrontation with inner space and synesthesia. Gordon gives a concise and amusing account of attempts by the early “psychedelic explorers” to record and express their experiences. Many of these tellingly veer to spatial metaphor—the world as labyrinth, theater, palaces of endless rooms. One experimenter, the Belgian writer Henri Michaux, coined the term Anopodokotolotopadnodrome to describe his mescaline trips, “an improbable word construction,” Gordon writes, “that collapsed from the weight of its twenty-five characters.” Michaux eventually found himself doodling “unthinkable, baroque cathedrals” in his futile efforts to reduce his multidimensional visions to a string of mono-­dimensional words. “No surprise that the psychedelic period left so few notable works of literature,” Gordon concludes.

This failure of language led directly to spatial experiments, each an effort to capture in light, sound, and environments—an orgy of barefoot Gesamtkunstwerke—what could not be put in words. From Timothy Leary’s retreats in Newton, Massa­chusetts; Mexico; and Millbrook, New York; and Ken Kesey’s wilder West Coast encampment in La Honda, California; to the Electric Circus and the short-lived Cerebrum club in New York, we see ever more elaborate efforts to marshal the communicative potential of architecture to the cause of expressing the inexpressible. In later chapters Gor­don pieces together the story of various novel build­ing types—urban inflatables and frontier domes, tree houses and homesteaders’ shacks, high and low—all in their way remarkably affecting interpretations of the cultures they were asked to enable and celebrate.

It is a story of architecture rising to the occasion, and there are lessons here for architects working in more sober contexts. First among them might be to acknowledge the formidable ability of their art to communicate and encapsulate cultural experience, then quickly forget it. A common theme among the many projects examined is a profound selflessness—not quite the tribal hive mind celebrated in Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects, but some­thing close. To reproduce the spirit of a ­culture—to provide it with a fitting home, to serve it (we all agree that architecture is a service profession, no?)—designers need to act more as medium than master builder. Architecture, with all its surplus meaning-bearing possibility, functions best when not bossed around by the architectural ego.

The work in Spaced Out is largely authorless, impromptu, communal. Perhaps to be a good steward of a culture, architects need first to be a part of that culture, not imagining themselves as an other, an elite—experts winging in from theoryland to save the day. The sterility of so much contemporary building might be attributable in part to the gap between the lived experience of the architect and the lives of the communities served. I wouldn’t argue for a retreat to the particular aesthetics of that era—rare is the woman who can pull off patchouli with grace—but it’s impossible to remember some of the environments inspired by those years and not wonder what became of soul.

Gordon starts his story at Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti. Even in its only minimally realized state, it is among the most elaborate acid visions ever to have crossed the high barrier between the cerebral and the concrete. But it is important also because, poured in place by the side of the interstate, it has survived. Consider the high percentage of vanished works from this recent American episode—“burned or rotted into nothingness,” per Gordon—and chalk one up for language. If you don’t have recourse to memory or the spaces themselves, Spaced Out will bring you closer to a time when architecture was expanding its horizons in concert with those who built and used it. Architects today have a lot to learn from these hippies. Why not tune in, turn on, and drop the habits that have put distance between their work and the things good buildings have always been asked to do: create appropriate arenas for vital new cultures and provide an alternative to a world weighed down by words.