Last Futures: Nature, Technology, and the End of Architecture by Douglas Murphy

Author:Douglas Murphy [Murphy, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781781689752
Amazon: B01AW5104M
Publisher: Verso
Published: 2016-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

Steve Baer, who had by then built a solar water heater for Drop City, marking an introduction of ‘green’ technology to the mix, published Dome Cookbook in 1968. Lloyd Kahn, using information that had been acquired and distributed via the Whole Earth Catalog, published Dome-book, a ramshackle mix of instruction and anecdote in 1970, followed the next year by Domebook 2. These books provided information on techniques and methods for constructing domes, stories about just how people had gone about making theirs and what they were like to live in. They mixed cartoons with tables of mathematical formulae, anecdotes on drug experiences with essays contributed by Buckminster Fuller.

The domebooks were enthusiastically received by the more progressive architectural press, who watched these disseminations of Buckminster Fuller’s innovations with interest,. At the same time, a historical narrative of ‘alternative architecture’ began to spring up that included the customised California houseboats of Sausalito and visionary builders like Bruce Goff and Paulo Soleri. Like many aspects of the counterculture, the dome-builders frequently found themselves in the mainstream press – Time, Life, Popular Science and many others wrote articles about Drop City and the new dome communities, while Stewart Brand himself was profiled in Playboy and Time. The USA’s latent passion for the pioneer mythology allowed these young rejectionists to be portrayed as the latest in a long line of American free spirits.

Cybernetics provided the intellectual sustenance for all of these developments. Popularised by Norbert Wiener, the new multidisciplinary topic managed to bring together military scientists, anthropologists, mathematicians, sociologists, computer scientists, biologists, ecologists, anti-psychiatrists, revolutionaries and of course hippies, in a feverish stew of interconnected research and collaboration. From arcane mathematical beginnings, it spread to become a catch-all term for interconnected, self-regulating systems, inspiring perceptions of ecology and of political organisation, as well as feeding into management and computer studies. The origins of cybernetics were born during WWII, when scientists and researchers working on the war effort were thrown together and encouraged to collaborate in a way that was completely unfamiliar to them. Enthralled by the experience but painfully aware that all these fields lacked a common language allowing them to compare their findings, they entered the peacetime world with a hunger to find a way to communicate properly with each other.

Wiener, a mathematician, had spent part of the war working on anti-aircraft gunning installations, attempting to develop systems that automatically made corrections to the aim of the gunners, anticipating the possible trajectories of the target as its pilot attempted to evade the attack. By mathematically modelling the processes that governed the behaviour of both the gunner and the pilot, Wiener began to consider the concept of feedback, how the information in a system at any point continually affects the future behaviour of that system. As a participant at the Macy Conferences, organised to stimulate conversations between elite thinkers in different fields, Wiener noted that there was growing scientific interest in feedback, from new discoveries in the biology of cells to weather patterns, from electronic circuits to the processes of the brain.

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