Seems the sixties and the hippie movement around the Bay Area had a big impact on architectural innovation a la Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaas, as well as music, popular culture, food (Alice Waters), and technology. Zahid Sardar, writing in the San Francisco Gate, reviews Alastair Gordon’s new book, Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties. Creativity requires self-expression. It also appears to arise in clumps or clusters, not just in time but in space.
Gordon’s research makes it clear that the ’60s generated many of the ideas about recycling and protecting the environment that we consider normal today … [T]he ’60s may have inspired the most visually arresting buildings by some of the most celebrated and visionary architects today.
Some of those unconventional buildings, it turns out, were created because the amateur builders could not quite figure out how to construct Fuller’s dome of conjoined triangular components. Nevertheless, you might see links between those forms and the wild imaginings of architect Eric Owen Moss in Culver City; Frank Gehry’s roof forms for the Bilbao Museum Guggenheim and the twisting, shiny Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles; the wacky, wonderful main library in Seattle by Rem Koolhaas; and even the Federal Building in San Francisco by Thom Mayne.
What other areas of the U.S. seem to have been affected architecturally by the hippie movement?
Tags: Alice Waters, architecture, Frank Gehry, hippie movement, Rem Koolhaas, San Francisco, the 60s
August 26th, 2008 at 10:36 am
San Francisco, naturally, always seems to have the monopoly on hippie culture. I don’t know much about architecture but I hope other folks chime in here because I’m curious to see where there are other unknown hippie enclaves, particularly any that might be in unexpected locations.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:27 am
San Francisco’s hippie culture not only created the new, it re-valued the old. Hippies revived Art Nouveau style, you can see it in the classic concert posters and album covers. The houses of Haight-Ashbury made Victorian gingerbread cool again, albeit with non-traditional paint colors. Communes revived old handicrafts: candle-dipping, soap making, yogurt culturing, and so on. The Tassajara Bread Book taught a generation raised on Wonder Bread how to make their own bread.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
The Organic Architecture movement with its playfulness and focus on recycled materials, seems to have been picked up by the hippie movement.
New Mexico has a ton of organic buildings like this one by Bart Prince.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/39/100813953_4555d3af9a.jpg?v=0
It also has a ton of hippies, communes, and hippie soft drink makers.
August 26th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
‘organic’ architecture is seen by many architects as sculpture, and not architecture. It has to function - serving its intended purpose. Gehry’s buildings are known for disfunction: inability to hang a painting on a curved wall in an art gallery, sunlight concentrated in a concave face of the facade magnified and reflected into neighboring buildings, snow/ice falling on heads, etc.
August 26th, 2008 at 7:00 pm
I concur with Wizo. Am I the only one who thinks that Gehry’s and Koolhaas’ buildings look like crap? Not only are they ugly, but they seem anti-urban to me, almost purposely so. I think this kind of architecture has nothing to do with the city or urban form, and instead is a “dilettantish and narcissistic pursuit, a chic component of the high art consumer culture…”, as Jacobs and Appleyard put it. These buildings aren’t visually arresting, they are terrible, and the architects who “design” them are frauds who hate cities.
August 28th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
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