In 1978, architect Craig Hodgetts was commissioned to design a sustainable utopia of the future based on the book “Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston,” by Ernest Callenbach. Some credit the book with anticipating the use of videoconferencing (one of the technologies of the future the characters use selectively so as to not interfere with man’s relationship with the natural world). Whether or not this is true is much less interesting than the drawings Hodgetts created: washed-out landscapes that are at once 70s sci-fi and museum-worthy renderings.
Hodgetts is the co-founder and Creative Director at a design and architecture firm in Los Angeles. His firm designed The Hollywood Bowl, The Brooklyn Park Ampitheatre, and the American Cinematheque. He’s one the leaders in Urban Design today and is a professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. His Ecotopia drawings, along with other projects from 1965-78 (like vacuum-formed models and cardboard furniture), are part of the exhibition “Craig Hodgetts, Playmaker,” at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles until the end of the month. What began as science fiction has now become a career based on creating innovative and sustainable design.
Be among of the first to colonize Los Angeles’ San Gabriel Mountains in Fritz Haeg’s geodesic domed tents. The innovative design includes the means for “temporary colonization, squatting, taking over and making yourself at home” wherever you please. Not sure if your colonizing skills are up to snuff? Try a dry run at the X Initiative, where the ground floor has been painted with a silhouette of the San Gabriel’s. Remember, this is a Dome Colony, as in community, with plenty of activities to prevent colonists from becoming restless. Each Dome has its own theme. There’s the Ecology Dome, Gastronomy Dome, Literary Dome, and the Drums & Skins Dome for optimum dome-hopping experience.
Who says architecture is just about buildings? To European design studios Feld72 and Raumlabor, architecture is a more loosely defined term that encompasses all aspects of social and urban interaction. Take the traffic jam project, in which members of Feld72 rode on motorscooters in between lanes of slow-moving traffic, handing drivers activity packs stuffed with items like balloons and squirt guns which they could use to interact with other drivers on the road. While shooting neighboring cars with streams of water would definitely never fly in the US, Feld72’s experiments with space get much more complicated, like the Million Donkey Hotel, located in a small town near Napoli. The term hotel is also used loosely. It’s more of a temporary, multi-purpose space located in one of the many abandoned buildings in Europe. Like most of these projects, it’s difficult to define exactly what it is, but then again, where’s the fun in that?
