Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties

by Alastair Gordon

The utopian sixties inspired revolutionary and alternative ways to live, love, and entertain—and equally radical spaces to do it in. Stimulated by the psychedelic drug culture, rebel designers and architects distorted space to create womblike coves and isolation chambers, forging a spatial vocabulary that still reverberates today. At the same time, the tune-in-turn-on-drop-out message lured youths into far-flung communes, often under the roofs of brightly painted geodesic domes draped and tie-dyed fabric. Idealistic and anarchic enclaves with names like Drop City and Morning Star redefined the concept of community, inventing a wildly spontaneous way of building and dwelling. For the first time, these ephemeral spaces are brought together in Spaced Out. The many never-before-published photographs and an inventive text by acclaimed author Alastair Gordon show in detail the spirit and ideas of this radical period.

Genres: Architecture, History

304 pages, Hardcover

First published June 17, 2008

About the author

Alastair Gordon is an award-winning critic, curator, cultural historian and author whose work bridges art, architecture and the environment. For over twenty years he wrote for The New York Times and later became Contributing Editor for WSJ. Magazine, where he also created the popular “Wall-to-Wall” design blog. His essays have appeared in Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Le Monde and Dwell, among others. The author of more than twenty-eight books, including Weekend Utopia, Naked Airport and Theater of Shopping, Gordon also co-founded Gordon de Vries Studio, an imprint devoted to books on the human environment. He has taught at Harvard University and received multiple honors for excellence in architectural criticism.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

As luck would have it, I found myself reading this hefty, glossy art book in an open-plan A-frame vacation home, while on holiday in a small town on the Oregon coast which, by virtue of its relative isolation, still contains a few geodesic domes, whimsies and other visible architectural vestiges of the 1960s and 1970s.

Read in such a setting, Spaced Out becomes a work of almost unbearable nostalgia. Collected from original sources, unrehearsed, and often quite explicit, hundreds of photographs, drawings and paintings illustrate Gordon's thesis that the architectural experiments of "The Sixties" (tm) were both integral to the era's social experiments and necessary extensions of them.

Spaced Out's most flawed aspect is its layout. The images are glorious, many full-page or even filling two facing pages, but the game of find-the-caption quickly becomes tedious. Gordon's essay (while it still manages occasionally to be pretentious and verbose) does contain interesting nuggets of history--but it is marginalized by appearing in widely-spaced columns against backgrounds sometimes almost as unreadable as those in early Wired magazine layouts. I would have been happier with this book had its format paid more respect to its content.

These beautiful, shaggy people, clad in denim, in robes or rags or proudly naked, smile from the midst of the places they built themselves. These beautiful, ramshackle spaces, often grown organically rather than constructed to any plan, make clear how very differently the people who built them thought (or wanted to think) - at least for awhile.

And, from how many of these places no longer exist, it becomes plain how evanescent so many of these physical structures - and the mental structures behind them - truly were.

[Oakley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Radical pictures and a good summary of different 60's architecture and philosophy. This isn't some cliche hippie nostalgia trip either. Whether they are living in tree houses communes or conceptual modern structures, these folks are all living far out on the edge and transforming themselves and the world around them.

[Redshift13 · Rating 5 out of 5]

A flowing narrative of the 1960's cultural awakening that leapt from the electric prod of a psychedelic trip and found itself spacing out first inwardly, then in an evolution of created spaces--psychedelic dance halls to neumatic structures to geodesic domes and organic and chaotic forms.

An absolute triumph of a book, and an incredibly exciting and inspiring excavation of a colorful, creative, independent-minded past, one that came about two decades too early for me to have experienced first hand. But regardless of this, Gordon's deft descriptions and appraisals combined with the explosion of stunning images in this book all made it real for me. If recreation was partly his goal, and surely it was, then he succeeded brilliantly. And I am now awakened and committed to a new image in my mind of new human possibilities.

Out of many hundreds if not thousands of books I've read in my life, this was one of the very few that left me in tears at the end. It's also one of a handful I'd consider precious. I never wanted it to end. But then I realized it didn't have to.

[Gilles Douaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

A deep dive into a different type of architectural vision.

[Howard Mansfield · Rating 3 out of 5]

Alastair Gordon pulls together all the crazy strands of hippie building – domes, yurts, crash pads, communes, and “biomorphic” space. The book has a trippy look that the designers must have loved playing with. The photos carry the story. I wish Gordon had gone into more depth about these places and what it was really like living there, but he’s caught the phenomenon; he’s given us a gazetteer to the spaced out places on the map.

[Mittens · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book has lots of boobs and monolithic domes.
this is more for the photos than the reading.
my favorite part was about timothy leary's mexican lsd compound with a "tripping tower" where there were trip shifts so someone would be trippin' up there at all times. rumor has it that just walking by it would get you high. yeah, man, yeah.

[Kime · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just got this book, which is RAD! Super cool hippie commune pads and space egg like solar houses. Lots to look at, with big color images of the 60's radical environments. I am excited to read all about them

[Filip Daniëls · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book documents in a very accessible way the psychedelic movement from a broad perspective and links it to more main stream influences in for example architecture, interior design, ... . Very accessible document with many pictures.