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not be understood within establishment conventions of modern design and that were torn
down because building inspectors targeted their
ragtag communities.” One of the most successful anarchist communities living on Sausalito
houseboats was systematically destroyed but its
impact spread as hippie modernism produced
a new cultural geography. Its nomads moved
between New Mexico and the Bay Area, which
had each become epicenters of unconventional lifestyles and related publishing. The
underground publication San Francisco Oracle
reached nearly 500,000 readers at its height.
In Mendocino County, the Albion Nation, a
back-to-the-land retreat, published an influential feminist journal called Country Women.
“The surge of counterculture publishing
served as a teaching tool and an open resource
like the Whole Earth Catalog,” Castillo says of
the back-to-the-land handbook published regularly from 1968 to 1972.
The ideas were disseminated and spread
to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to upstate New
York and along the international hippie trail
from London to Goa, India, and on to Sydney,
Australia. “Cheap printing, underground newspapers and posted flyers were the hippie internet,”
Castillo says. “They were social media for pilgrims
in search of self and new communities marked
by evolutionary consciousness.” bampfa.org n
Four artists’ and writers’
dwellings designed in
2011 by San Francisco–
and New York–based
architect Cass Calder
Smith, who grew up in
a Santa Cruz Mountains
off-grid commune in California during the ’70s,
are the size of shipping containers, all aimed at
ocean views. They are for participants in the lauded
Djerassi Resident Artists Program, founded in 1979
by chemist Carl Djerassi on a former cattle ranch
in coastal Woodside in the Peninsula. The modern
studios by CCS Architecture (not included in Hippie
Modernism) echo hippie design-build structures
on the West Coast. A canted steel frame canopy
with solar panels and skylights hovers, above these
communal yet private live/work wood-clad pods,
like a stretched tarp. Interestingly, Djerassi was also
one of the creators of the 1960s contraceptive pill
that became a catalyst of the sexual revolution
during the hippie era. The relatively new studios
are dedicated to his wife, feminist writer and Anne
Sexton biographer Diane Middlebrook. djerassi.org
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