Spaced Out

The burgeoning hippie culture that started in the streets of Haight-Ashbury and the East Village in the early 1960s spread into the countryside and fostered a communal sensibility among a generation of young seekers who learned to live in rural simplicity. Galvanized by the disillusionment with the Establishment and social constrictions, idealistic and anarchic enclaves like with names like Drop City, Morning Star, and the Hog Farm redefined the concept of community while following Marshall McLuhan's call for retriballization. The new utopians learned to live off the land and build their own shelters, and in the process invented a whole way of building and dwelling unimagined by the previous generation. From teepees, tree houses, yurts, or other forms of primitive shelter to geodesic domes, these innovative structures pioneered what has become a today very viable route to alternative and sustainable habitable structures. Concurrently with the utopian communities are spatial explorations by artists who attempted to simulate the fluctuating space harmonies of the LSD experience through stroboscopic light shows and distorted imagery. This lead, in turn, to new kinds of spatial encounters such as the Electric Circus psychedelic discotheque or the Cerebrum, an all-out sensory stimulation laboratory. Rebel designers and architects incorporated many of the same ideas into urban crash pads, distorting conventional space, creating womb-like coves and isolation chambers, and forging a new spatial vocabulary that still reverberate in today's digital generation. Spaced Out, through many never-published photography and imagery and Alastair Gordon's inventive and well-researched text, captures the spirit and far out ideas of this most inventive period in our recent history.Gordon, Alastair is the author of 'Spaced Out' with ISBN 9780847831050 and ISBN 0847831051.