5 out of 100 Wild Huts prospected

100 Wild Huts is Kevin Langan's ongoing project to: "build 100 small survival shelters on any piece of ground that harbours enough natural resources for the build. I intend to sleep rough in each shelter for one night and blog about the experiences." He is down to five so far and already the range of designs is impressive. When he is done the result with be catalogue for primitivist-survivalists looking for inspiration. Great stuff. Langan is a long distance walker with a 132km Highland walk guide book to his name.

The wild hut project came to me in an email by Felix Wilson (earlier) who has been helping a friend in constructing similar one-night huts. But not in Glasgow but in Tasmania. Ray Mears is to art in the 21th century what Marchel Duchamp was in the 20th century.

Drop City: A Total Living Environment

Drop City: A Total Living Environment (1967)

By Albin Wagner

It is impossible to define drop city. It fell out of a window in Kansas three years ago and landed in a goat pasture near Trinidad, Colorado. At first droppers lived in tents and tarpaper shacks. And then other began to see the same vision and began making things.Geodesic domes. Now there are sixteen to twenty Droppers living in ten domes and as many different ideas of what Drop City is as there are droppers.

We have attempted to create in Drop City a total living environment, outside the structure of society, where the artist can remain in touch with himself, with other creative human beings.

We live in geodesic domes and domes of other crystalline forms because the dome shape is easier to construct. We live on a subsistence level and almost entirely scrounge the materials for our buildings. All materials are used. Car tops, cement, wood,plastic. The cheapest and least structural of building material are structurally sound when used in a true tension system.

We can buy car-tops in Albuquerque, N.M. for 20c each. We jump on top of a car with an ax and chop them out, stomp out the back glass, strip off the mirrors, and pull out the insulation. All of it can be used to cover a large dome for the small cost of about $30.

We have discovered a new art form: creative scrounging. We dismantle abandoned bridges by moonlight. We are sort of advanced junkmen taking advantage of advanced obsolescence. Drop city was begun without money, built on practically nothing. None of us is employed or has a steady income. Somehow we have not gone hungry, or done without materials. Things come to us.

America, the most affluent waste society. There is enough waste here to feed and house thousand works of art. To the townspeople in Trinidad, five miles away, we are scroungers, bums, garbage pickers. They are right. Perhaps the most beautiful creation in all Drop City is our junk pile. The garbage of the garbage pickers.

Drop City is a tribal unit. It has no formal structure, no written laws, yet the intuitive structure is amazingly complex and functional. Not a single schedule has been made, and less than three things have come to vote. Even though Droppers rarely, if ever, agree on anything, everything works itself out with the help of cosmic forces. We are conscious of ourselves and others as human beings.

Each dropper is free. Each does what he wants. No rules, no duties, no obligations. Anarchy. But as anarchistic as the growth of an organism which has its own internal needs and fulfils them in a natural, simple way, without compulsion.

Droppers are not asked to do anything. They work out of the need to work. Out of guilt or emptiness the desire to work, hopefully, arises. If it is no longer work, but pleasure. Doing nothing is real work. We play at working, It is as gratifying as eating or loving. We are based on the pleasure principle. Our main concern is to be alive.

Droppers come in all sizes, shapes, colors: painters, writers, architects, panhandlers, film-makers, unclassifiables. Each has its own individual endeavours and achievements. These perhaps tell what we are doing more than anything else. But they cannot be enumerated. They have to be seen, read, touched, heard. They speak for themselves. But we do all have this in common - whatever art we produce is not separated from our lives.

Droppers have painted the Ultimate Painting. A rotating infinite sphere, a circular geodesic structure loaded with spatial paradox, complete with strobatac. A painting to walk up the stairs into and lose your mind by. The Ultimate Painting was done by five Droppers, to make it five times better. The Ultimate Painting is for sale for $60.000.

The Droppers have printed a comic book called The Being Bag. We welcome the feds and postal inspectors who come to harangue us about its content. Our poet looks forward to the inspectors and their reading of his work.

Droppers make movies, black-and-white wind poems, flickering TV beauties with the subliminal delights of pulsating Coke ads, the crystal-molecular good sense of a dome going into time-lapse, and the grunting goodness of sex. We have two movies on Drop City for distribution. 

The second week in June we held a Joy Festival. The First Annual Drop City Festival and Bacchanal Post Walpurgis and Pre-Equinox overflow and dropping. Over 300 people attended. It was a freakout in all media, 96 hours of continues mind-blow. 

We want to use everything, new, junk, good, bad, we want to be able to make limitless things. We want videotape recorders and cameras. WE want computers and miles of color film and elaborate cine cameras and tape decks and amps and echo-chambers and everywhere. We want millionaire patrons. We need the most up-to-date equipment in the world to make our things. We want an atomic reactor.

Drop City the first attempt to use domes for housing a community. Buckminster Fuller gave us his 1966 Award for "poetically economic structural achievements." We hope to buy more land, build more Drop Cities all over the world, the universe. Free and open way stations for every and anyone. Living space and heat can be made available to all at a fraction of the present cost through application of advanced building techniques such as solar heated domes. Already Drop City is firmly established near Albuquerque, N.M.

Drop city is Home. It is a strange place. An incredible webbing of circumstance and chance, planning and accidents, smashed thumbs and car-tops. We are not responsible for what and where we are, we have only taken our place in space and light and time. We are only people who want love, food, warmth. We have no integrity. We borrow, copy,steal and and all ideas and things. We use everything. We take things, we make things, we give things.

Drop City pivots on a sublime paradox, opposing forces exist side by side in joy and harmony. A psychedelic community? Chemically, no. We consider drugs unnecessary. But etymologically, perhaps. We are alive. We dance the Joy-dance. We listen to the eternal rhythm. Our feet move to unity, a balanced step of beauty and strength. Creation is joy. Joy is love. Life, love, joy, energy are one. We are all one. Can you hear the music? Come dance with us.  

Drop City is one of the more famous of the numerous back-to-the-land free communities that emerged from the middle 1960ties onwards throughout the US. I found it in "Notes from the New Underground", a 1968 anthology collecting several important texts and writers from that period. This text catches the feel of the time well I think, it also catches the childish inconsistency that is the first thing I normally associate with hippies. Simon Sadler has a good account (PDF-link).

Villa Plasmodium [Mosquito architecture]

Charles C. Mann's latest book 1493 is as fascinating as his previous book 1491. Early on, after explaining how the US north-south divide was created on top of cultural differences between indigenous people and by Malaria-friendly temperatures he gives us the above image of the Tara Mansion from Gone with the Wind. The sole purpose of Southern plantation mansion design and site-choice is to keep out the malaria carrying mosquitoes: "High on a nearly treeless hill, with tall windows to admit the breeze, it was ideally suited to avoid mosquitoes and the diseases that accompanied them". Mann uses the term Villa Plasmodium. Fascinating.

Historical antecedent to the reforestation of Utrecht

Click to enlarge the above map. It's shows a plan for the future growth of Utrecht as proposed by nobleman, poet, Catholic and rich boy Everard Meyster in 1670. The Dom church is still firmly in the middle of the city, and the old part is clearly demarcated as a dirty stain surrounded by a newly gridded oval-shaped new town, luscious and rational. Even the new harbour in the North-east is a circle. 

Meyster also proposed to make the new Utrecht a reforested city with the planting of 10.000 trees. Based on the map that would mean that Utrecht would be surrounded by an planted forest. Imagine that sight of that after 350 years.

To the west you can see the 'moes grachten,' garden allotment alongside the canals, as created by former Mayor Moreelse who died in 1666. 

Map and information found in Stadblad. 

Skatebored urban activism

Ian Borden, UK theorist, architectural historian and skateboarder, visited The Hague on the 9th of June to lecture about skateboarding as an urban space production system. My review for Archined in Dutch is here. In my teens I used to skate a lot and the central idea of his work has always seemed completely reasonable to me: the idea that skateboarders through their special needs find novel ways to use and interpret the city. Using previews on Google Books I read some bits and pieces of Borden's writing and I didn't like what I read. 

"....the "ollie", the impact-adhesion-ascension procedure by which the skater unweights the front of the skateboard to make it pop-up seemingly unaided in the air."

talking of the skateboarder's senses "they are a sensory and spatialized version of the Althusserian concept of ideology as the imaginary representation of the subject's relationship to his or her real conditions of existence"

"...from the early 1980's, the focus of skateboarding has shifted, becoming more urban in character, directly confronting not only architecture but also the economic logic of capitalist abstract space."

"Skateboarders target the targets and times of the urban degree zero, reinscribing themselves onto everyday functional spaces and objects."

An 'imaginary representation' is that the same as an imaginary imagination? I also have my doubts about skateboarding as confrontational to any capitalist economic logic. When we met new skaters the first conversation was always about decks and wheels, mine always substandard from a lack of money. How I wished to have rich parents.

I did enjoy the lecture however: skating is a fun subject and Borden spoke like a human rather than some neo-Marxist oracle in overdrive. Iain Sinclair spoke earlier in the same lecture series and together they constituted a perfect pair of representatives for 21th century urban activism. An activism that acts through non-committal and silence. Borden spoke of the skateboarder's resistance to the city as one of 'wilful ignorance'. As cities are being developed by shady coalitions of corrupt building firms and money merchants, unchallenged by the public and out of bounds of political control, international monetary gangs are creating their urban skyscraping legacies. The skateboarder and the drifter challenge their hegemony by ignoring them, by refusing to acknowledge the star-architect and his backers. The city is not made by city planners but by people and the free interaction between people. I see the point but I wonder if something with more confrontational substance and visibility is needed. If only the Iains would make the frontpage of the Guardian: eminent writers attempted a citizens arrest of Rem Koolhaas. 

The Unabomber's cabin

According to Wikipedia Ted Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, built his own cabin in remote Montana, and I have to say: what a total failure of imagination. You would expect that a child prodigy in math would come up with a creative way of solving some obscure problem in geodesic dome design to underscore energy effiency and sustainability. Instead kaczynski constructed the dullest cabin ever: a stereotypical middle-class free-standing family house in mini-format based on the Walden template. Where is the garden gnome Ted? What strikes me the most is that it doens't seem that he has used locally sourced wood, in fact his cabin seems to been made from materials bought at the hardware store. This tells us that his body may have have been in the woods but that this mind was still in the city.  
The cabin was exhibited in 2008