MySpace a place for friends

Interior view of Wholeo Dome, designed by Caroling, 1974, (photo, (c) Chuck Henrikson, courtesy wholeo.net)

GROOVY—THE WORD POPS INTO YOUR head the moment you lay eyes on Alastair Gordon’s Spaced Out (Rizzoli, $65), a dazzling romp through the built environment of the tripped-out hippie, circa 1965. It’s a rare coffee-table book indeed: both beautiful—an explosion of vibrant images of psychedelic structures, with half-naked commune dwellers blissfully flying the freak flag—and intelligent. Mr. Gordon is a wonderful writer, graceful, energetic, knowledgeable, and he brings to his exploration of Aquarian living a sympathetic heart and a coolly appraising head. He began his book, he writes, 'in response to the culture of control that arose after September 11, 2001. It seemed like the right time to invoke a period of free-spirited, all-out independence.' - Right on.
- The New York Observer

There was an untethered sense of space: psychedelic, sexual, hallucinatory, and drifting, a feeling that you were everywhere yet nowhere at the same time. You could feel it at the rock concerts, love-ins, group gropes, and sensitivity-training sessions, chanting and dancing, drumming together as one mindless organism, when the flash of insight, acid premonition, group mind, and astral telegram were the operative modes of communication in place of today's electronic IM's or text messaging. The sudden flashes and revelations of personal experience were in many ways more subversive than the big-time revolution that everyone was waiting for. In fact, there were thousands of overlapping revolutions and mini uprisings happening at once, thousands of different storms rising and joining forces with other storms, massing themselves along separate fronts. Yes, drugs were a major part of it, but they were just a means to another place, another reality, not an end in themselves. When Huxley's "doors of perception" crashed open, they lead to the most extraordinary garden of possibilities.

The music and drugs have been well documented, but the fractured sense of space, the softened corners, the communal élan are less easily reclaimed. Where are the landmarks and monuments of the psychedelic revolution, and how do we go back if we don't even know where to begin? I started to write Spaced Out in response to the culture of control that arose after September 11, 2001. It seemed like a good time to invoke a period of unbridled experimentation. As one Haight-Ashbury hippie put it: "Hold on by letting go." The sixties legacy lingers on, influencing everything from the Internet and sustainable design to Freak Folk, anti-globalism, organic cuisine, alternative healing and rave clubs. Behind the liberated parks, communes, crash pads and painted busses, was the struggle for a certain mental space, a place without boundaries or divisions that would foster wildness, nurture new kinds of experience, and even change human consciousness. That dream never died but the story needs retelling.

"Fascinating… Spaced Out looks at what happened back then and puts the era's architectural efforts, good and bad, into current context…"
- San Francisco Chronicle (7/26/08)

"Through hundreds of groovy photos, Alastair Gordon's book explores the tripped-out buildings of the age of Aquarius… Turn .. out,move in."
- Wired Magazine (6/23/08)

"…absolutely spectacular… a powerful mix of words and images that convey the spirit and imagination of the time… a must for every treehugger."
- treehugger.com (6/23/08)

"If you don’t have recourse to memory or the spaces themselves, Alastair Gordon’s crucial new book, 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.
- Metropolis (6/18/08)

"Alastair Gordon’s engrossing and intimately well researched book on the radical, experimental environments from this period… has something really serious to say, that the dazed and confused generation saw environmental Armageddon coming and tried to do something about it… Long live the revolution, long live long, unwashed hair."
- Building Design (4/25/08)

"…a fascinating historical record… Spaced Out reads like a refreshing, nonacademic perusal of a segment of architectural history that has been all but trivialized by institutional historians…"
- The East Hampton Star (7/24/08)