California's hippie architecture is disappearing

2021-09-13T13:46:00-04:00

The movement wasn't about living in isolation. Residents of these communes didn't seek an escape from society so much as the chance to create it anew: a generous, civic-minded, highly social culture with regular potlucks and solstice blowouts.

Unfortunately, society went the other way to greed and ignorance.

"Constructing a home with next to no money demands feats of creative resourcefulness. Back in the 1970s, free building materials were everywhere—if you knew where to look. Jon Turner's house, a two-story, gable-roofed structure in Mendocino County, is fabricated from 2,000-year-old redwood logs he pulled out of the Albion River. His ceiling is the height of a gymnasium because he couldn't bring himself to trim the ancient logs, he explains. He never put a single architectural sketch on paper."

To sum it up, these are "architecture without architects" grade.

Hippie Modernism: How Bay Area design radicals tried to save the planet

2015-10-29T11:05:00-04:00

Hippie modernism focused not on rigorous form but rather on a kind of socially inspired bricolage. Hippie modernism has been not only misunderstood but also underestimated. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of a ‘design science revolution’ inspired the hippie bricoleurs to shoulder their generation’s emerging notion of environmental stewardship.

Greg Castillo pens a great article about one of the most overlooked and often dismissed role of hippies in what we have today greedily claimed by the millenials and known as "environmental movement."

“Hippie Modernism” is published in coordination with the Walker Art Center exhibition,Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia,

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California's hippie architecture is disappearing

Hippie Modernism: How Bay Area design radicals tried to save the planet