Spaceship Earth and the designer Guru

© Buckminster Fuller Institute / Director unknown

Buckminster Fuller meets the Hippies is a rare footage showing the architect in conversation with a group of Hippies from the west coast. It was projected at the Barbican centre as Part of Radical Nature thanks to Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today. 
The film which refers to design, geodesic structures or spatial agency becomes an insightful and captivating journey about metaphysics and the purpose of man on earth.




















Dome over Manahattan - 1960 © Buckminster Fuller Institute/ Shoji Sadao

The assumption that we are on earth not to consume but to learn becomes in Buckminster's fashion the vision that humans are astronauts and earth the spaceship; technologies are tools to drive the spaceship and not instruments of fear.


Drop city

LA Dome village - 1994 © Dome village/ photo © Craig Chamberlain © Ronda Flanzbaum

His faith in (utopian) technology is celebrated with the geodesic domes that can be erected as high as needed : lightweight and low cost, they are put to the test by the hippie commune of Drop city. 
The geodesic dome will then inspire the radical LA Dome village which shelters homeless people.

Counter communities - 2003 © Croy & Elser

A second footage, Counter communities by Croy & Elser which exemplifies the influence of utopian architecture with more counter-cultural experiments - Arcosanti, Nader khalili's earth shelters -, mostly concentrates on Michael Reynolds's earthships. 
Challenged by the californian building legislation, Reynolds brings the concept of his earthships (build in situ from recycled, natural, local material) to tsunami's inflected areas in India, to show locals how to erect emergency shelters.


Once upon an island : utopian cowboys, guru astronauts ...

I am so sorry. Goodbye

© Heather & Ivan Morison

I am so sorry. Goodbye by Heather and Ivan Morison has been transported in the middle of the Barbican estate for Radical Nature, Art and Architecture in a changing planet.
Made of wood harvested from fallen trees and assembled piece by piece, it forms a pentagonal structure reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller's survival constructions.
The shelter confronts our future as it is a spaceship to board in case of a disaster. Its title refers to mis-communication between locals and visitors of foreign countries, the work opening here onto a prophetic ecological failure.







Journee des Barricades 2008 © Heather and Ivan Morison

Journee des Barricades, another Morison's project, borrows from activist practices to mention the ecological failure making the citizens of Wellington spectators of a fantastic tsunami of rubbish.
Collecting garbage from derelict areas of the city and involving viewers in its re-appropriation would reflect on possible alternatives but 'borrowing' garbage from recycling areas - meaning complex logistics and environmental non-friendly processes to move tones of garbage - and back again, requiring more negotiations with the authorities than "disruption from the city traffic"* can be seen as symptomatic of the failure.























© Heather & Ivan Morison

Land of Cockaigne, another project, shows kilos of flowers being given away as graceful, hedonist gesture : with its observational platform, the work seems to denounce the flower industry - flowers grown in third world countries by western industries that overuse local land and local food potential. 
As its viewers are eager to grab as much as they can, it swaps the laws of luxury for complacent generosity, turning Land of Cockaigne into a performance more concerned with human failure than activism.


















* Dorita Hannah, Ivan and Heather Morison, Journee des Barricades - a critical response, Massey university, Litmus research initiative, 2009.

Radical Nature

Wheatfield, a confrontation - 1982 © Agnes Denes

Radical Nature at the Barbican Centre explores Art and Architecture in a changing planet, maybe suggesting that our relationship to the natural environment is one determined by a form of activist engagement. 
Outside the gallery, Agnes Denes's pioneer guerrilla gardening, a Wheatfield which was once staged on a disused site in Manhattan, is this time erected on a disused site in Hackney.

© Exyzt collective flickr

The architectural collective Exyzt is given the task to build a Mill to go with the field which turns out to be the highlight of the show as the collective builds up audience and local interaction. 

© Exyzt collective flickr

Inside the gallery, the focus is on eco-design, survivalism, experimental architecture, utopianism, physical science amongst others, showing artists of different eras and preoccupations together.

Survival Series #6 - 1973/2009 © Harrison Studio © Lyndon Douglas 

In the first room, Survival series, a line of raised beds by Harrison studio, explores farming awareness or how biodiversity opposes to monoculture-farming. 
This is where we expected to hear about permaculture farming, such as the work of Fukuoka and his Straw revolution but there is no mention of radical gardening, in fact the show doesn't even engage with activist/artistic practices that overlooks nature in urban contexts today.


© Larry Korn and Masanobu Fukuoka

Further away, when showing the work of Joseph Beuys, there is no mention of his connection to food, land and gastrosophy.
While Beuys's multi-layered mythology is installed in a complexified manner, there is no focus on his environmental engagement.

Joseph Beuys. The art of cooking

In other parts of the show, the interest comes from projects inspired by biomimicry : foam bubbles are re-used by Buckminster Fuller for his geodesic structures and by Thomas Saraceno for his Airt-Port-City, mineral accretion mirrors coral reefs in Wolf Hilbertz' ecological city, Ant Farm, with its visionary Dolphin Embassy, aspires towards inter-species communication.

Dolphin Embassy - 1974-78 © Ant farm [taken from Spatial agency web page]

Finally, one image from the Center for Land Use Interpretation does hint at what Art and Architecture in a changing planet meant to expose : the picture which scale fully emerges the viewer, shows a bird's eye view of an Alaskan pipeline cutting across miles of wilderness, forcing awareness on the way the planet is being dramatically re-shaped by human hand.

Alaskan pipeline © CLUI