http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=3410
Link: Spaced Out.
(*...) 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. (...)
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. (((Wait a minute...)))
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, Massa chusetts; 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 build ing 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....
