Journeys with the Autonomous House

Abstract

Australia’s first prototypical autonomous house was constructed and occupied on the grounds of the University of Sydney between 1974 and 1979. This paper focuses on various concepts, actors, materials and technologies that circulated in the production of the house. The student designer-builders planned a structure integrating systems for domestic energy production, water capture and heating, waste treatment and food production. They patched together a set of concepts and technologies that ranged from the period’s fashionable international tropes in energy-conscious design (Trombe-Michel walls and methane digesters), to colonial Australian tactics for rural self-sufficiency (the Coolgardie Safe). The students’ travels, transnational countercultural ferment, and the global circulation of radical educators and key architectural texts, all played a part in the production of the house. The project fed back into international media circuits via publication in architecture and radical technology journals. This paper foregrounds the mediation of global and local concerns in the house, and reflects on what insight it allows into the circulation and materialisation of countercultural architectures – their reformulation and reconfiguration as ideas and bodies travelled across the world.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the generosity of the interviewees, and Amelia Thorpe, whose contributions were critical to the development of the article.

Notes

1. The Hippie Trail grew out of the transnational counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Tens of thousands of Europeans and North Americans travelled along it, searching for spiritual enlightenment, drugs, an alternative to the consumerism and materialism of mainstream Western society, or just to get lost. The Trail grew in popularity until 1979, when the simultaneous collapse of Afghanistan into war and Iran into revolution forced its close. See, for example: Rory MacLean, Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2007); Brian Ireland and Sharif Gemie, “From Kerouac to the Hippy Trail: Some Notes on the Attraction of On the Road to British hippies,” Studies in Travel Writing, 19, no. 1 (2015): 66–82.

2. Tony Wheeler, Across Asia on the Cheap (Lonely Planet, Kindle Edition, 2013) first published 1973. The first print run sold out immediately, and 8500 copies were sold in the first year of publication. Lonely Planet re-released the book in 2013 as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations. “Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd. History”, accessed December 20, 2016, http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/lonely-planet-publications-pty-ltd-history/.

3. By the late-1970s a number of commercial tour operators offered regular bus services along the trail.

4. Erik Cohen, “Nomads from Affluence: Notes on the Phenomenon of Drifter-tourism,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology 14, no. 1 (1973): 89.

5. The Last Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park, California: Portola Institute, 1971), 302.

6. Julie Stephens, Anti‐Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1998), see Chapter 3: “Consuming India”; Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and “The Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999), 97.

7. Howard T. Odum, and his brother Eugene Odum, were the creators of much of the terminology of systems ecology. In their 1953 textbook on the subject, Howard Odum wrote the chapter on energetics, based on his attempts to portray generalised patterns of energy flow via a systems language. See: Eugene P. Odum. Fundamentals of ecology: In collaboration with Howard T. Odum, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1962); Howard Odum, Environment, Power, and Society (New York: Wiley-Interscience, 1970). The son of the significant Australian modernist architect Sir Roy Grounds, Marr Grounds was appointed at the University of Sydney in 1968. The sculptor and architecture lecturer had trained at the College of Environmental Design, Berkeley – then becoming involved in local communes, while pursuing a kinetic and environmental sculpture practice. In the early 2000s, Tone Wheeler and Jan O’Connor’s practice Environa Studio designed an autonomous house for Marr on the New South Wales far south coast.

8. Anthony “Tone” Wheeler, interviewed by Lee Stickells, May 31, 2016.

9. Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 74–114.

10. The paper draws particularly on interviews conducted with participants in the design, construction and occupation of autonomous house projects, including the Sydney house. The interviews were conducted in accordance with University of Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) approval for project 2015/755 “Designing Life Off the Grid: 1970s Prototypical Autonomous Houses.”.

11. Richard Neville, Playpower (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970).

12. Ros Pesman, David Walker and Richard White, The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writing, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), ix. On the profound ways in which travel and tourism has shaped the way Australians have understood and engaged with the world see, for example: Richard White, Inventing Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981) or, more recently, Agnieszka Sobocinska, Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014).

13. Agnieszka Sobocinska, “Travel, Tourism and Diplomacy: Is the Australian Government a ‘Smart Traveller’?,” Australian Policy and History, November 2010. Available at www.aph.org.au

14. Following their sweeping victory at the 1972 Federal election, Gough Whitlam’s Labour government attempted to implement a strikingly progressive program of social and legislative reform, in areas such as law, social policy, the arts, land rights and foreign policy. However, after a turbulent three years in office, on 11 November 1975 Whitlam was dismissed as Prime Minister by Governor General Sir John Kerr. This paved the way for a double dissolution and the highly controversial end of the Whitlam era.

15. Kathy Lothian, “Seizing the Time,” Journal of Black Studies 35, no. 4 (2016): 179–200; Jon Piccini, Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Christopher Rootes, “The Development of Radical Student Movements and Their Sequelae,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 34, no. 2 (1988): 173–186.; Christopher Rootes, “Exemplars and Influences: Transnational Flows in the Environmental Movement,” Australian Journal of Politics and History 61, no. 3 (2015): 414–431.

16. Kate Murphy, “‘In the Backblocks of Capitalism’: Australian Student Activism in the Global 1960s,” Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 2 (2015): 252–268.

17. Piccini, Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s; Sobocinska, Visiting the Neighbours.

18. George McKay, “The Social and (Counter)cultural 1960s in the USA, Transatlantically,” in Summer of Love: Psychedelic Art, Social Crisis and Counterculture in the 1960s, ed. Jonathan Harris and Christoph Grunenberg (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press+Tate Liverpool, 2005).

19. Jilly Traganou and Miodrag Mitrašinović, eds., Travel, Space, Architecture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 32.

20. Caroline Maniaque-Benton, French Encounters with the American Counterculture 1960–1980 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).

21. Janina Gosseye and John Macarthur, “Angry Young Architects: Counterculture. and the Critique of Modernism in Brisbane, 1967–1972,” in Proceedings of the. Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 31, Translation, ed. Christoph Schnoor (Auckland, New Zealand: SAHANZ and Unitec ePress; and Gold Coast, Queensland: SAHANZ, 2014), 263–275; Elizabeth Musgrave, “What’s ‘out’ … what’s ‘in’. Revolution versus Evolution: John Dalton Architect as Pamphleteer,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 30, Open, ed. Alexandra Brown and Andrew Leach (Gold Coast, Qld: SAHANZ, 2013), vol. 2, 461–471. Andrew Murray and Leonie Matthews, “Geodesic Domes and Experimental Architectural Education Practices of the 1960s.” In Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change, ed. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan, (Sydney: SAHANZ, 2015), 435–445.

22. See for example: Tony Schuman, “Form and Counterform: Architecture in a Non-Heroic Age,” Journal of Architectural Education 35, no.1 (Fall 1981): 2–4; George Baird, “1968 and its Aftermath: The Loss of Moral Confidence in Architectural practice and Education” in Reflections on Architectural Practices in the Nineties, ed. William S. Saunders, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996); Eve Blau, Architecture or Revolution: Charles Moore and Yale in the late 1960s, Exhibition Catalogue (Yale University School of Architecture, 2001); Beatriz Colomina, “Radical pedagogies in architectural education,” AR The Architectural Review, September 28, 2012. Accessed http://www.architectural-review.com/essays/radical-pedagogies-in-Architectural-Education; Joan Ockman, ed., Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Architects in North America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).

23. Honi Soit 20, September 7, 1972: 3.

24. Colin “Col” James, interviewed by Therese Kenyon, August 9, 1994.

25. Wheeler interviewed by Stickells.

26. Wheeler’s diary entry from August 19, 1973 notes that he arrived in Taos from Synergia Ranch “[…] after 10 rides! All in VWs.” Anthony “Tone” Wheeler, Diary 1973, private collection.

27. Wheeler, Diary 1973.

28. Roger Morse, “Solar energy,” in Technology in Australia 1788–1988: A Condensed History of Australian Technological Innovation and Adaptation During the First Two Hundred Years, ed. Russell Madigan (Melbourne: Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering 1988), 777–790.

29. Wheeler interviewed by Stickells.

30. These papers are now held in the University of Sydney Library.

31. Lee Stickells, “Exiting the Grid: Autonomous House Design in the 1970s,” in Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change, eds. Paul Hogben and Judith O’Callaghan, 652–663. Sydney: SAHANZ, 2015. At the time, the Wheeler’s research appeared less than impressive to its faculty assessors. The thesis was failed, but passed on appeal.

32. Jaap Bakema, “Some Thoughts About Relationships Between Buildings and Cities,” Ekistics 14, no. 82 (August–September 1962): 96–99.

33. “Archanon II,” Architecture in Australia 63, no. 4, (August 1974): 79–84; Sandy Gray and Nick Hollo, “Archanon II and Sydney University Students at the Black Theatre Arts and Cultural Centre,” Architecture in Australia 64, no. 2, (April 1975): 79–84. Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, Col James’ career is deserving of extended consideration. He was a well-connected figure involved in a host of para-architectural projects across the late the twentieth century concerned with broader issues of social justice. For an insightful, but brief, overview, see Anna Rubbo, “Colin James,” in The Encyclopaedia of Australian Architecture, ed. Philip Goad and Julie Willis (Port Melbourne, Vic.: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 200.

34. On the strike, see: Mark Stiles. “Contribution from Sydney University.” Architecture in Australia 63, no.1 (February 1974): 63–64; Lee Stickells and Glen Hill, “Pig Architecture,” Architecture Australia, 101(2, March/April 2012): 75–76.

35. See, for example: M/C Journal 17, no. 6 (2014), special issue “Counterculture” ed. Rob Garbutt, Jacqueline Dutton and Johanna Kijas.

36. “The May Manifesto” reproduced in: Graeme Dunstan, “Nimbin: The Vision and the Reality,” in The Way Out, ed. David Smith and Margaret Crossley, assisted by Peter and Sandra Cock (Melbourne: Landsdowne, 1975), 20.

37. For example, two of the students who lived in the house, Mark Arbuz and Steven Stokes, were part of Earthworks Poster Collective, which focused on environmental issues, Aboriginal land rights, gay and lesbian rights, the women’s movement, and the anti-nuclear movement. Arbuz produced posters for the fairs held at the house. See: Therese Kenyon, Under a hot tin roof: art, passion, and politics at the Tin Sheds Art Workshop (Sydney: State Library of New South Wales Press, 1995).

38. Wheeler interviewed by Stickells.

39. Dan McNamara and Jane Dillon, interviewed by Margo Beasley, March 15, 2011. City of Sydney Oral History Collection, http://www.sydneyoralhistories.com.au/ (accessed August 8, 2016).

40. Kerry Francis, “Ether: an atmosphere of possibility,” in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the European Architectural History Network, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Dublin, Ireland: UCD School of Art History and Cultural Policy University College Dublin, Belfield, 2016), 277.

41. Alternative Technology Unit (ATU), “Australian Autonomy,” Architectural Design (AD) 47, no. 1 (1977): 15–17.

42. One interviewee estimated that $30 was spent on construction materials; the rest were recycled or donated. Julia Dwyer, interviewed by Lee Stickells, August 10, 2016.

43. “Autonomous House: Futuristic Experiment in ‘Bi-cycling,’” The University of Sydney News 6, no.11 (September 16, 1974).

44. The core group of occupants in 1975 was likely Dan McNamara, Mark Arbuzz, Nick Hollo, Jan Felton, and Steven Stokes. McNamara, Arbuzz and Stokes were part of the initial cohort of University of Sydney students; McNamara has been described by participants as the most committed and thoughtful of the students involved. Hollo and Felton were recent graduates of the architecture program at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), then working as tutors at the University of Sydney. By 1978, the occupants were Dan MacNamara, Steven Stokes, Mark Arbuz and Al Wurth.

45. The exact numbers involved in the building and subsequent occupation of the house is uncertain. The estimates given by interviewees involved in the Sydney autonomous house range from twelve to more than thirty.

46. “Solar heat and beer bottle insulation in the $1-a-week house,” Sydney Morning Herald, June 9, 1977, 7. Lest the students get too carried away with their success, two University of Sydney Lecturers in Plant Pathology and Agricultural Entomology wrote to the SMH editor the following week to protest that they had visited the house and (although they admired the students’ energy efficiency initiatives) found the vegetable plants were “far from healthy.” “Gardening Fantasy,” Sydney Morning Herald, June 18, 1977, 10.

47. They also recognised that living rent-free on campus for a number of years had been, in a financial sense, an unusual privilege.

48. Wheeler had extensively photographed Baer’s house in Albuquerque and its water-filled drum walls.

49. Nick Hollo, interviewed by Lee Stickells, November 30, 2015; 54 Alma Street Darlington, mail-order pamphlet (Sydney, c.1978).

50. ATU, “Australian Autonomy”: 16.

51. Dan McNamara and Jane Dillon, interviewed by Margo Beasley.

52. 54 Alma Street Darlington: 6; Hollo interviewed by Stickells; Wheeler interviewed by Stickells. Caine’s methane digester apparently failed when a house guest accidentally introduced anti-biotics into the system, see; Lydia Kallipoliti, “From shit to Food. Graham Caine’s Eco House in South London, 1972–1975,” Buildings and Landscapes 19, no. 1 (Spring 2012).

53. 54 Alma Street Darlington: 6.

54. Autonomous House, directed by Jim Dale (Sydney: University of Sydney Film Unit, c.1980), DVD copy.

55. ATU, “Autonomy,” 16.

56. The fairs were largely organised by the young architect Tony Edye, who had also been involved in building dome villages at the 1976 Down to Earth Festival in Canberra (itself billed as “an exploration of alternatives”). “Technology: Looking at the alternatives,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 19, 1977, 13.

57. “Alternative Technology Fair,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 8, 1976, 42; “Integrated Technology Fair,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 21, 1977, 41; “Utopian Technology Fair,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 27, 1978, 38.

58. “Bill Mollison – Permaculture,” Sydney Morning Herald, May 27, 1978, 38; Wheeler interview by Stickells.

59. James, interviewed by Therese Kenyon.

60. James, interviewed by Therese Kenyon.

61. Mark Baxter and Russell Grayson, “Bottling Up the Sun: Details of a Self-Built Autonomous House in Sydney, New South Wales,” Undercurrents 18 (1976): 29.

62. “New Ways to Supply Energy,” Tallahassee Democrat, November 14, 1976.

63. Hollo interviewed by Stickells.

64. ATU, “Autonomy”; Tony Wheeler, “The Autonomous House,” Architecture in Australia 63, no. 4, (August 1974): 72–76; 54 Alma Street Darlington.

65. The Eco Tech Workshop also involved a University of Sydney Physics lecturer, Patrick Howden, who would later self-publish a rambling ecological design tome: Ecologistics: A How-it-Will Work Grand Tour of Compatible Alternatives, Mutual Self-Reliance, the Bio-Economy, and Ecotechnic Peasantry; Including Gentle Steps into the Good Life. Another Idea Whose Time has Come (Truro: P.F. Howden, 1980). Howden reportedly had little to do with the actual design, construction or occupation of the house, but actively promoted the project in various media.

66. Michael Muir, interviewed by Lee Stickells, December 10, 2015.

67. 54 Alma Street Darlington: 8.

68. 54 Alma Street Darlington: 6.

69. “Solar heat and beer bottle insulation in the $1-a-week house,” 7.

70. Hollo interviewed by Stickells.

71. Stickells, “Exiting the Grid.”

72. Stefan Szczelkun, “Exploding Cinema 1992–1999, culture and democracy” (PhD thesis. Royal College of Arts, 2002) (http://www.stefan-szczelkun.org.uk/index2.htm); Peter Harper, interviewed by Lee Stickells, September 29, 2016.

73. Karl Hess, Community Technology (Washington: Loompanics, 1979).

74. Alexander Pike, James Thring, Gerry Smith, John Littler, Christiana Freeman, and Randall Thomas, “The Autonomous Housing Research Programme” in Energy and Housing: A Symposium Held at the Open University, Milton Keynes, ed. Barrie William Jones (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1975); Alvaro Ortega and Witold Rybczynski, ed., The Ecol Operation (Ecology, Building and Common Sense) (Montreal: Minimum Cost Housing McGill University, 1975).

75. James B. DeKorne, The survival greenhouse: An eco-system approach to home food production (Walden Foundation, 1975).

76. Sharon Marcovich, “Autonomous Living in the Ouroboros House,” Popular Science Magazine (December 1975): 80–82, 111; Grahame Caine, “A Revolutionary Structure,” Oz 45 (November 1972): 12–13; Stephen E. Hunt, The Revolutionary Urbanism of Street Farm (Bristol: Tangent Books, 2014); “Dimetrodon, East Warren, Vermont, 1978.” Process: Architecture 6 (1978): 88–91; Stephen Morris, “The Prickly Mountain gang” Times Argus, October 9, 2005, http://timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051009/NEWS/510090305/1013

77. On the Prince Edward Island Ark see: Nancy Jack Todd ed., The Book of the New Alchemists (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977); On Biotechnic Research and Development, see: Patrick Rivers, The Survivalists (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975), 11–36; Robin Clarke, “Soft Technology: Blueprint for a Research Community.” Undercurrents 2 (1972): 11; Philip Bracchi, “Reflections on a Deceased Community,” Ecologist 8, no.1 (January/February 1978): 16. On the Integral Urban House, see: Helga Olkowski, Bill Olkowski, Tom Javits, and the Farallones Institute staff, The Integral Urban House (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1979). On the De Kleine Aarde dome, see: Tony Osman. “Dome Sweet Dome,” Sunday Times Magazine 30 (November 1975): 68–75 and Godfrey Boyle and Peter Harper ed., Radical Technology (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 152.

78. While publication of autonomous house projects in journals, especially Architectural Design, raised awareness of the experimentation internationally, Wheeler’s extensive personal tour was unusual. My interviews with autonomous house designers, and contemporary commentators, has indicated a relatively limited engagement with projects and designers outside local networks. This was, of course, partly due to communication limitations of the period. However, there also appeared to be a common desire across many projects to establish and develop them from “first principles,” in a deinstitutionalised, convivial, locally-focused manner.

79. See, for example: Peder Anker, From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A history of ecological design (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2010), 113–125, Christine Macy and Sarah Bonnemaison, Architecture and Nature: Creating the American Landscape (London: Routledge, 2003); Giovanna Borasi and Mirko Zardini, ed., Sorry, out of gas: Architecture’s response to the 1973 oil crisis (Montréal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2007), 44; Lydia Kallipoliti, “Recirculatory Households, or ‘How to Grow Tomatoes out of Household Effluents’” in eds. Luca Basso Peressut, Imma Forino, Gennaro Postiglione, Francesco Scullica, Places and Themes of Interiors (Milan, Italy: Franco Angeli, 2008); Colin Porteous, The New Eco-Architecture: Alternatives from the Modern Movement (London: Spon Press, 2002).