Author revisits daring past to speculate about a different future

Alastair Gordon—critic, curator and author of several books—is an intellectual adventurer who has always preferred projects that take him out to the edge: the edge where old ideas die and the future is born. Oddly enough, that predilection has often led him back to a more daring past.

In “Weekend Utopia: Modern Living in the Hamptons” (2001), he focused on the plucky beachfront homes of the post-war years, and in “Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Revolutionary Structure” (2004), he examined the ultra-modern airports designed by visionary architects at the dawn of the Jet Age.

With “Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties,” just out from Rizzoli ($65), Mr. Gordon has again gone back to the future’s early roots to document with characteristic verbal élan and more than 300 photographs—many of them never-before published—the crash pads, hippie communes and other out-there environments created by ’60s Utopians as beachheads on the shores of the future.

Well known for writing that puts architects and their buildings into cultural context, Mr. Gordon, who spent youthful summers in that well-known laboratory for architectural innovation, Amagansett, has pursued a broader agenda this time around.

“This is by no means an architecture book,” stressed the author in an interview during a recent visit to Sag Harbor with his wife and daughters. Speaking at top speed and with the same excitement for his subject that pops off the page, Mr. Gordon explained that in this book he has gone beyond architecture to address “the broad culture” of the times.

Among the more familiar visual manifestations of those times are the wildly creative psychedelic posters and light shows that have come to symbolize the liberated ’60s mind set that spawned them. Less familiar today, and largely undocumented until Mr.

Gordon tackled the subject, were the extraordinary living environments inspired by that hallucinogenic culture, in which spatial conventions were deliberately disdained and distorted to accommodate alternative ways of thinking, building and dwelling.

“Everyone’s experience was so different,” said Mr. Gordon of those times. “There are good histories of the music and the drugs,” he said, “but almost no documentation of the spatial manifestations of ’60s radical thinking.”

Given that gap in the record, it may surprise some readers to learn that not everyone turned in their tie-dye for pinstripes at the end of the ’60s to settle down in suburbia.

Indeed, Mr. Gordon said that the most exciting part of researching his book “was meeting so many former heroes and some I didn’t know about.”

Take Ramon Sender, for example, who abandoned a career in experimental music after finding God on LSD. His next stop was Morning Star, “a liberated settlement zone” in Sonoma County where anyone was welcome. Eventually the excesses and the neighbors’ objections put an end to the exhilarating experiment, but Morning Star achieved a remarkable level of group synergy at its peak and, said Mr. Gordon, Ramon Sender is “still way out there.”

Also unreconstructed is the poet Gerd Stern, who was a founding member of the wildly inventive multimedia collaborative USCO (the Company of Us), which used strobe lights, kinetic sculpture, prisms, smoke and loud screeching sounds to create a state of sensory overload.

“He was at my book party and created a light show,” said Mr. Gordon.

Tony Martin, who did light shows with Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, showed Mr. Gordon box after box of extraordinary glass slides at his Brooklyn apartment. Calling them “very poetic,” Mr. Gordon said he hopes that one offshoot of the book project will be a show of the slides—“a huge wall of them.”

Such radical artistry could not be contained in conventional spaces or ordinary nightclubs.

Instead there were Happenings—unscripted, unruly street theater—and inspired alternative spaces like the Trip Circus in Los Angeles and Cerebrum in New York. Of the latter, Mr. Gordon writes: “No one was quite sure what to call Cerebrum when it opened in New York in the summer of 1968. Was it a participatory nightclub? A pleasure dome? A sensory-stimulation laboratory?”

With no dance floor, no live music and no alcohol, it was a place to be bombarded by bubbles and other far-out sensory experiences and was variously described as a “cabaret of the mind” and a place “to regain the indiscriminate bliss of babyhood.”

The same radical mentality led architects, designers and many others with a rebellious confidence in their own self-sufficiency to build their own dwellings or join together to create whole communities in which experimentation—with personal relations, drugs, the natural and spiritual worlds—were the norm.

“For them,” said Mr. Gordon, “it was not enough to have a Happening that lasted 24 hours. They wanted to live a Happening.”

Mr. Gordon’s book is full of remarkable photographs of the otherworldly domes and zomes (stretched-out geodesic domes) that creative craftsmen (and women) came up with. Some were brilliantly conceived and reflected mathematical and engineering skills of a high order. Most were clearly the work of learning-by-doing builders who just didn’t believe that building a house required anything beyond the will and some time.

Materials could be scavenged. Labor was free, and alternative sources for energy could be harnessed to meet the demands of a population with extremely minimal demands.

Mr. Gordon quotes a member of the radical hippie collective Red Rocker, who offered this explanation of the thinking behind the 60-foot-diameter dome the group built in southern Colorado: “We wanted to create a structure that didn’t remind us of anything—a new kind of space in which to create new selves.”

As a way of life—living and loving together, forgoing the products of American capitalism, turning on and tuning out—theirs could hardly have been more subversive. So it is surprising when Mr. Gordon reminds us that its early manifestations were not just tolerated but greeted with some enthusiasm by at least a few in the mainstream media. No less a force than Life magazine devoted a cover story in 1966 to the mind-expanding possibilities of the psychedelic subculture. To be sure, Life’s tolerant stance was not universally shared and may have had something to do with the fact that Time/Life founder Henry Luce and his wife Claire Booth Luce had both experimented with psilocybin, according to Mr. Gordon.

In any case, the benign coverage was short-lived. The Establishment was not about to encourage an obvious threat to its own authority and Mr. Gordon asserts that sometime after that 1966 cover story, “Bobby Kennedy grabbed hold of Luce and warned him that all the Harvard MBAs would be on their backs looking at daisies and the Communists would come in.”

That was the end of talk of “a new art form” or any other positive spin. The “very colorful layouts” ended, said Mr. Gordon, replaced by “depressing black and white photos showing girls clutching themselves, having a bad trip, and kids jumping off roofs.”

“I didn’t write the book to promote drug use,” said Mr. Gordon, “but let’s not pretend there wasn’t something amazing that came out of it.”

It opened doors to new ways of thinking and seeing and energized even those who were “not necessarily tripping,” according to Mr. Gordon, who holds the view that many of the cultural changes that occurred in the ’60s were generated by that energy.

Mr. Gordon would never deny the dangers of drug abuse. Nor would he contend that disapproving neighbors were always wrong in their complaints that communes could be cavalier about sanitation and naively open to outlaw elements. But he does believe that history has treated the Hippie Revolution unfairly.

“Everyone always looks at the latter part of the period,” said Mr. Gordon. “What they remember is Altamont, Charles Manson and fetid hippie crash pads.”

In art, it is Peter Max and the kitsch that are considered typical of the ’60s, while Mr. Gordon argues that there are many “important works” that have been ignored or forgotten and deserve to be rediscovered. Moreover, at a time when conserving energy and building “green” have at last become priorities, Mr. Gordon believes we have much to learn from those radically innovative builders who created “amazing, sustainable little cities,” grew their own food, devised their own solar heating systems and proved that treading lightly on the planet need not be some kind of penance.

“You don’t have to be dour and boring,” Mr. Gordon asserted “Most green advocates get so righteous about it. They have sanitized the whole thing.”

Yet, beyond the practical lessons for living happily with less, there is a deeper issue. “The important message is not how to build,” said Mr. Gordon. What we should really be asking ourselves, he suggested, is “What were these guys doing and how did we lose this line of inquiry, this sense of self-empowerment and freedom?”