Arcosanti, designed by Italian-born architect Paolo Soleri, is an experimental architectural complex perched on the side of a gulch in the Arizona desert, about 70 miles north of Phoenix. Arcosanti was begun in 1970 as a multi-stage project, but it is not—and perhaps may never be—finished. Ultimately meant to house 5000, it currently houses far fewer but nevertheless still exists as a proposition for a new hyper-dense, ecologically sensitive mode of human settlement. …read more

At Beckwoman’s, an old Vancouver institution on Commercial Drive. DON’T PRAY IN MY SCHOOL AND I WON’T THINK IN YOUR CHURCH. And lots more where that came from, if you want slogans. More photos here. Photo below by waferboard on Flickr.

These photos of The Dome Show, an exhibition by art collective Intermedia at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1970, are all from the web archive Ruins In Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. (See another post on this absolutely amazing site here.) The Dome Show was an experimental art show involving architecture, sculpture, performance, music, improvised happenings, a giant public dinner party, bonfires, public home movie nights and many other things over …read more

Vancouver curator Scott Watson’s essay Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats is part of the impressive and totally compelling Vancouver Art in the Sixties website project. It’s a well-organized archive of Vancouver’s 1960s art production and it’s far too large a topic for one post. What I found immediately interesting though was Watson’s historical contextualization of residential architecture and interior aesthetics in the 60s, especially its turn away from modernist …read more

Paul Prudence, author of the blog dataisnature, took these photographs of the abandoned Rishikesh ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—celebrity yogi to the Beatles and an central figure in late 60s counterculture. The Beatles stayed at the ashram in 1968 to study with him. He apparently disapproved of their pot use, though I think that story could be apocryphal. John and George eventually left the ashram amidst rumours the yogi had made …read more

If tumblr is a bellwether—and it may not be—then the sixties & seventies are back, in style if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing. They have a taste for a simpler yet groovier style of living, but it’s never clear if there’s …read more