Hippie architecture: geomantic ideas and vibes
“I
was astonished by the inventive beauty of the hippie architecture,” film-maker
Dan Salmon said, to the New
Zealand herald, after researching New Zealand’s back-to-landers for his
documentary Dirty bloody hippies.
A-frames, geodesic domes and house-trucks were popular builds for young urban back-to-landers who often learnt home building skills from ‘how-to’ books like The first New Zealand whole earth catalogue - which sold 20,000 copies in 1972. This inaugural edition explained how to make a stoneware pottery kiln, a concrete culvert, and a water tank. It included a ‘Cheap Instant Buildings’ section based on The Aunt Daisy cookbook, which had advised making “cheap buildings such as hen houses from bags and sacks covered with a waterproof composition”.
Meanwhile, hippie home-building concepts were percolating through the formal architecture community where “young designers cranked out houses in a hippy-fied neo-colonial style,” according to Andrew Barrie who wrote Auckland city in the 1970s for the New Zealand Institute of Architects’ Block Building Tours.
In
1974, the Labour Government established the ohu scheme for people wanting to
create alternative communities in rural areas by leasing government land for a
pepper-corn rental. But much of the land was scrub-covered and too remote for
communities to survive.
“Some
of the houses, pulled together from hand-milled timber and demolition materials
were absolutely mad, others were sensibly warm and cozy, with steep-pitched
roofing and attic bedrooms echoing our early pioneer cottages.”
A-frames, geodesic domes and house-trucks were popular builds for young urban back-to-landers who often learnt home building skills from ‘how-to’ books like The first New Zealand whole earth catalogue - which sold 20,000 copies in 1972. This inaugural edition explained how to make a stoneware pottery kiln, a concrete culvert, and a water tank. It included a ‘Cheap Instant Buildings’ section based on The Aunt Daisy cookbook, which had advised making “cheap buildings such as hen houses from bags and sacks covered with a waterproof composition”.
“If
you have access to demolition timber or a good supply of manuka poles, and a
plentiful supply of old sacks, wool bales, canvas…” wrote the Whole earth catalogue, “you can use this
method to build the shell of a habitation at almost nil cost. You will only
need to buy a bag of cement at about $1.80 and 10 gallons of tar at about 25c a
gallon. You’ll also need a few 4 inch nails to hold the framework together.”
Rammed
earth, adobe and cob houses also featured in the ‘Shelter’ section of this edition,
as well as advice on how to build a greenhouse, and how to create
unconventional concrete by adding broken glass, oyster shells or cinders from
industrial furnaces.
Back-to-landers
and house-truckers used recycled kauri, totara and rimu that became available
when large numbers of colonial farm houses were demolished in the 1970s. Windows
and doors were also found at timber recyclers, and second hand traders sold
wood-fired potbellies or small wood stoves with a wetback attached for cooking
and heating water.
In
the 1970s, the Toyota Motor company imported new vehicles from Japan in car
crates made from marine grade plywood. A six-sided crate cost around $25 and it
took about five to build and clad a house-truck. Graeme
Cairns made a house-truck in Rotorua in 1977. He “settled on a flat-deck ex-plasterer’s
lorry from Frankton [Hamilton]…I bumped into a chap who’d bought a load of
car-crate plywood from Thames…Talk about cheap. Most of the timber-framed
plywood packing crates from the then still-operating Toyota assembly plant were
being heaped up and burned…Crazy. Still, the world’s loss was my gain and $24
later I had enough…to construct an entire shack on the back of my
truck…Completed in a mere 15 days, by total novices, it was the simplest of
constructions: plain gabled roof, bit out over the cab, half-a-dozen old house
windows and a wee verandah out back.” (Waikato
Times, 24 November 1998).
Meanwhile, hippie home-building concepts were percolating through the formal architecture community where “young designers cranked out houses in a hippy-fied neo-colonial style,” according to Andrew Barrie who wrote Auckland city in the 1970s for the New Zealand Institute of Architects’ Block Building Tours.
“A flick through the architecture journals of
the 1970s reveals the steady absorption of counterculture values, with
editorial photos featuring increasingly heavily bearded men and advertising
images of progressively more scantily clad women – the cover of the August 1973
issue of Home & Building boldly
featured a bare breasted woman. New (or old?) materials and technologies also
began to appear – Home & Building
articles explained pole building, log construction, and hessian’s merits as a
wall covering."
Ref: Minhinnick, Gordon Edward George (Sir), 1902-1992. Minhinnick, Gordon (Sir), 1902-1992 :Oh, Moses! New Zealand Herald, 10 October, 1973. Ref: A-311-1-040. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://natlib.govt.nz/records/22751297
The 2nd New Zealand whole earth catalogue described the tenacity of
ohu members at Coromandel’s Sunburst
Community: “They arrived in darkest August night (NZ winter), the green
truck full of 11 or so adults and 3 or 4 kids, to a fiercely flooded river.
Using ropes and a people-chain they somehow crossed. Next day a flying fox was
rigged and supplies ferried across.”
Urban back-to-landers had to learn how to build homes and fences, garden, keep bees, kill and butcher sheep, and milk cows - from books, and experimentation.
Urban back-to-landers had to learn how to build homes and fences, garden, keep bees, kill and butcher sheep, and milk cows - from books, and experimentation.
One
hexagonal house-builder wrote about his design process in Mushroom magazine: “After spending a couple of months living in a
canvas wagon on the land, we chose our building site…for maximum sunshine
hours, minimum surface area for the NorWest winds to blow into and other
geomantic ideas and vibes. The head trip ended and the practicalities
started…We used a central sleeper as our main measuring point and sunk sleepers
in all corners cutting them level with a chainsaw. I’ve tried using other
machinery, but a skillsaw proved too freaky and we eventually ended up using
only elbow grease; it was far more peaceful and enjoyable.” (Mushroom magazine, No. 12, 1978)
The hippie back-to-landers’
creative, improvised shelters and desire to have minimal environmental impact
may well have laid the foundations for today’s green building movement: earthships,
straw-bale houses, and passive housing.
Olive Jones, who featured in
the Dirty Bloody Hippies documentary,
hitched to Nelson as a teenager and helped set up an anarchist community. She skinned
a horse at 18 and built her own house while pregnant. She said
it was “incredibly hard physical work, but there was something intensely
satisfying about it. Everything came from the land.”
For more information on housing in Aotearoa have a
read of Joanne’s post
on State Houses. Also, Audioculture has a great post about the Nambassa festivals. If you’d like to more information about hippie
architecture see the following resources:
- A hard-won freedom: alternative communities in New Zealand, Jones, T. and Baker, I. (1975)
- Nambassa: a new direction. Broadley, C. and Jones, J. ed. (1979)
- The Aunt Daisy cookbook: with household hints. Basham, B. (1968)
- The first New Zealand whole earth catalogue. Wilkes, O. ed. (1972)
- The 2nd New Zealand whole earth catalogue. List, D. & Taylor, A. ed. (1975)
- Mushroom magazine. Number 12, 1978
- How the hippies really did help to change our world. New Zealand herald, 13 February 2011
Author: Leanne,
Central Auckland Research Centre
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