Books by Simon Sadler
The impact of 'non-planning' upon mainstream construction in the 1960s, an era of high-rises and ... more The impact of 'non-planning' upon mainstream construction in the 1960s, an era of high-rises and city-centre reconstruction, was marginal at best. But in experimental work, non-planning was played out upon the printed page and in the studio with a fervency unmatched before or since, spurred on by the social and cultural debates about the nature of freedom that characterized the period. This chapter offers a genealogy of non-planning from elaborate architecture systems to counterculture.
Articles, Papers, and Chapters by Simon Sadler
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, ed., Exhibit A: Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000, 2018
This contribution to Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen's Exhibit A: Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, ... more This contribution to Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen's Exhibit A: Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000, introduces Theo Crosby's 1972 exhibition (and catalog) "How to Play the Environment Game," a show that did not promote architecture per se, but rather a populist, proto-postmodern education about the built environment. For more on the exhibition, and on Crosby's curatorship, see too the 2015 paper “Theo Crosby’s Environment Games, 1956-1973," also available on this site.
Justin McGuirk, Brendan McGetrick, eds., California Designing Freedom, London: Design Museum / Phaidon Press, pp. 156-163, 2017
This catalog essay, accompanying the "Join Who You Want" section of the 2017 Design Museum exhibi... more This catalog essay, accompanying the "Join Who You Want" section of the 2017 Design Museum exhibition "California: Designing Freedom," argues that a central tenet of Californian design is its promotion of an ideology of "oneness"—from communes to ecology, from social justice to Silicon Valley, from freeways to mass transit. But because Californian oneness tends to extol individual freedom in peer-to-peer networking, it dissipates the potential for true solidarity and equality.
David Leatherbarrow and Alexander Eisenschmidt, eds., Twentieth-Century Architecture ( The Companions to the History of Modern Architecture), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017
Commissioned for the fourth volume of Blackwell's Companions to the History of Modern Architectur... more Commissioned for the fourth volume of Blackwell's Companions to the History of Modern Architecture (edited by David Leatherbarrow and Alexander Eisenschmidt), this chapter explains the impact on architecture culture of The Naked City, a 1957 print by situationists Guy Debord and Asger Jorn. I argue that as the architectural discipline turned away from strict rationalism in the late twentieth century, The Naked City represented a different way of conceptualizing the built environment—as an evolving, transformative matrix, that questioned our need for the new when the possibilities of the past are yet to be discovered, and hinted at an anarchic future beyond capitalism.
The Hammer And The Garrote: A Parable Of ‘Tool Globalism’
Valerio Borgonuovo and Silvia Franceschini, eds., Global Tools 1973-75 (Istanbul: SALT/Garanti Kültür AŞ), 2015
The title of the Italian journal Global Tools, first published in 1973 by the designers' collecti... more The title of the Italian journal Global Tools, first published in 1973 by the designers' collective of the same name, was a contraction of the title of the legendary Whole Earth Catalog, first published in California five years earlier, with its cover strapline “Access to Tools." The publications expressed an holistic design outlook approaching the world as an interconnected and changing entity that I here call “tool globalism.” Tool globalism promoted humans as a creative force with a practically infinite array of means at their disposal, individually and collectively changing the world bottom up and inside out. It was also eco-ontological, in a way later theorized by Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies (1989)—inspired by the Appropriate Technology movement, it was pragmatic and "hands-on," inspired by the direct democracy movements of the time, and questioning what is natural, what is real, and what it is for a human to exist. And so the concerns of the Whole Earth Catalog and Global Tools, published in the wake of the counterculture, furnish a prehistory to the concerns of creative workers today, faced again with the puzzle of acting in a world at once becoming whole in its social and environmental challenges, in its networks of information and resources, and yet fractured by the weakening of civic and political society. This essay concludes that Global Tools was more realistic than the Whole Earth Catalog in assessing the ability of design to disentangle from the world as it already is sufficiently to much change it.
Nordic Journal of Architecture, 2012
This essay, invited by the Nordic Journal of Architecture in 2011 and based on a keynote talk for... more This essay, invited by the Nordic Journal of Architecture in 2011 and based on a keynote talk for the Alteration symposium, KTH School of Architecture / Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2011, argues that architecture's concern with alteration was due not simply to the downturn in new build following the 2007-8 global recession. Alteration also combines the optimism of modernism with the contextualism of postmodernism, allowing designers to intervene decisively in an uncertain world. As such, practices of alteration can be understood alongside other responses to neoliberal regimes preferring contingency to idealism, such as pragmatism, a return to "the real," and "post-criticality." And yet there is little literature on alteration as a mode of design. The essay attempts to categorize modes of architectural alterations as consonant, dissonant, and synthetic, then considers the ideological implications of thinking about historical change and intention as types of alteration. Perhaps there could eventually be a canon of distinguished revisions of buildings standing alongside the canon of new-build.
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 2016
This article explores an origin of architectural sustainability in the 1970s Californian governme... more This article explores an origin of architectural sustainability in the 1970s Californian governmental programs of Governor Jerry Brown and the circle around his Consultant, the countercultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand. Focusing on the Bateson Building, designed by State Architect Sim Van der Ryn and his team to be the world’s first large energy-saving, climate-modulating building, the article traces the ambition of the first Brown Administration to reinvent the state as a unified ecology founded on New Age principles, notably those drawn from the second order cybernetics of the Governor’s Advisor, anthropologist Gregory Bateson. Through archival and published sources drawn from government, environmental policy, cybernetics and architecture, the article recounts an ambitious ecological agenda that included a new Office of Appropriate Technology, a projected Space program, and a Water Atlas. The article argues for a reconsideration of the history of sustainable and postmodern architecture alike.
Icon, 2017
This think piece for British design magazine Icon conjectures about Elon Musk's grand design and ... more This think piece for British design magazine Icon conjectures about Elon Musk's grand design and its possible impact on the common culture.
This paper, for the 2013 Yale School of Architecture symposium "Exhibiting Architecture: a parado... more This paper, for the 2013 Yale School of Architecture symposium "Exhibiting Architecture: a paradox?," focuses on Theo Crosby, who was a figure central to the post-war architectural avant-garde, yet whose own personal program and preferences seem mercurial, and obscured by his preference to edit and curate the work of others. The paper makes the case that Crosby’s curatorship of a series of key exhibitions from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s was, rather, an act of stealth architecture, and that Crosby was an architect-curator who elevated curatorship to the level of modernist heroism in an era which, he seems to have intuited, was edging beyond modernist heroism into what we would now recognize as postmodern quietism. Sensing the imminent loss of a unifying project in the arts, and at the same time the opportunity which that presented for a stimulating pluralism, his exhibitions tried to imagine future communities without identity—communities of creators and audiences that did not depend on core affinity. Community would be instead played out through unavoidable conflicts of interest, termed "pessimist utopias" by Crosby.
“Mandalas or Raised Fists? Hippie Holism, Panther Totality, and Another Modernism,” in Andrew Blauvelt, ed., Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia, Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015, pp.114-125., 2015
In what way was there a "Hippie Modernism," as the Walker Art Center thought-provokingly framed i... more In what way was there a "Hippie Modernism," as the Walker Art Center thought-provokingly framed its 2015 exhibition? Modernism implied that human actions can create a better world, and this demanded an understanding of the whole in which actions take place—better, a critical understanding, which reconsidered the world-changing impact of industrial capitalism. That does indeed make the hippies into firm candidates for accession to the modernist canon, if as this essay contends their ethos was profoundly holistic.
But the hippies avoided the sort of programmatic or antagonistic reform that we could also regard as typically modernist, preferring an equilibrium balanced around the self. To illustrate the difference, this essay contrasts hippie holism with the then better-recognized models of totality stemming from the political left. Specifically, it juxtaposes two neighbors in California’s Bay Area activist scene, the hippies of the Whole Earth Catalog and the revolutionaries of the Black Panther Party. The two overlap one another rather like a Venn diagram, each committed to a deep, bottom-up reorganization of the world through self-reliance, yet doing so with subtly dissimilar conceptions of the whole, one radically liberal, the other radically leftist and identity-based, which likely originate in unlike cultural, economic, and racial circumstances. The shape of the whole depended upon the position of the viewer.
West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, Oakland: PM Press / Retort, 2012
Why did domes and shacks figure so large for the Hippie countercultural builders of the 1960s and... more Why did domes and shacks figure so large for the Hippie countercultural builders of the 1960s and 1970s? In this chapter for the 2012 PM Press / Retort book West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, I argue that domes (symbols of the ideal) and shacks (pragmatic shelters) offered a dialectic through which countercultural builders could reflect on their interactions with a world they were trying to change. Drawing on a deep intellectual ancestry from Pragmatism and Transcendentalism, this exploration of the dialectic of the ideal and pragmatic was more sophisticated than a druggy escapism, and can even be related to some of the reflections upon our relationship to Nature found in the philosophy of the Frankfurt School.
The extraordinary David Bowie was a shape-shifting avatar of the postmodern era. His passing is a... more The extraordinary David Bowie was a shape-shifting avatar of the postmodern era. His passing is a prompt to consider the curious nature of change in an era that seems to have given up on progress — an era during which design practice downscaled from the grand ambitions of high modernism to the modesty of design thinking and problem solving.
For the "Future Archive" series published by Places with the support of the Graham Foundation, th... more For the "Future Archive" series published by Places with the support of the Graham Foundation, this essay introduces the beguiling 1965 article "You Have to Pay for the Public Life" by Charles Moore. The article brought Disneyland to critical academic attention, heralded postmodernism, explored the condition of the mid-century Californian built environment, promoted place-making, and introduced MLTW's iconic Sea Ranch complex. All of these aspects more than merit its re-reading. But it is the enigmatic declaration of the article's title which feels most insistent a half-century after its publication, this essay argues, since it lays the ground for contemporary architecture's ambition to extract a "public surplus" from the built environment. This is a root of an affirmative culture that prevails in design.
Places, 2014
The "D" in the wildly popular TED Talks stands for "Design." But is the TED model a good one for ... more The "D" in the wildly popular TED Talks stands for "Design." But is the TED model a good one for design? TED's celebration of the technology and enterprise that has transformed the world draws on a tradition originating in 19th-century Transcendentalism and 18th-century classical economics. Yet one aspect of the world that TED Talks rarely propose changing is the economy itself, which seems surprising given the extraordinary crises of inequality and climate change—exactly the challenges that concern many designers. And designers know that problems are far more likely to be "wicked" in their complexity, and "iterative" in their partial solution, than the euphoria of TED would have its audience believe. Indeed, is the TED model even a good one for TED itself, if TED is serious about changing the world?
Peggy Deamer, ed., Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, New York: Routledge, 2013
During the formative years of today’s senior architects and educators in the late 1960s and early... more During the formative years of today’s senior architects and educators in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the architectural discipline faced seismic developments in political economy and culture. Architectural education was drawn to the way that the New Left (led out, from Paris, by situationists) and counterculture (led out by hippies in the West of the US) located political consciousness close to architecture’s disciplinary heart in design, aesthetics, and everyday life. After 1968, partly in response to counterculture, architecture schools reconsidered the making of the architect and architectural culture, yet the discipline also prevented design from becoming the instrument of total revolution that the counterculture demanded. The cleft between capitalism and counterculture, in which architecture was wedged by the late 1960s, instead prompted the discipline to reassert its relative autonomy from political economy and assimilate counterculture.
Peggy Deamer, ed., Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present, New York: Routledge, 2013
There are many ways of explaining the perceived failure of the Millennium Dome in London, which o... more There are many ways of explaining the perceived failure of the Millennium Dome in London, which opened to commemorate the new millennium in 2000. But this chapter—from the collection edited by Peggy Deamer, Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2013)—argues that the Dome's failure was phenomenological: it failed as a spectacle, because its program was unable to pinpoint what was to be celebrated. And this inability was ultimately attributable to the philosophical and moral lacunae of late capitalism: the Dome's creators were embarrassed by a tacit program of "reskilling" devised to satisfy its sponsors' demand for flexible labor and the state's unease about the loss of traditional industries. The state and capitalism alike lost their ability to induce the wonder of the 1851 Great Exhibition and 1951 Festival of Britain, and late capitalism, we can speculate, is beyond representation.
Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, 2013
Written for the MAK Center exhibition "Everything Loose Will Land:
1970s Art and Architecture in... more Written for the MAK Center exhibition "Everything Loose Will Land:
1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles" (curated by Sylvia Lavin), this essay argues that LA's reputation as a futuristic urban model was something of an invention of visiting British architects and critics—like Reyner Banham and Archigram—which required a selective, mythic, and even nostalgic understanding of the city.
La Citta Nuova Oltre Sant'Elia, 2013
This essay introduces Italian readers to Archigram's Plug-in City for the catalog accompanying th... more This essay introduces Italian readers to Archigram's Plug-in City for the catalog accompanying the exhibition La Citta Nuova Oltre Sant'Elia (Beyond Sant’Elia. A Hundred Years of Urban Visions), Villa Olmo, Como, March-July 2013, curated by Marco de Michelis.
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Books by Simon Sadler
Articles, Papers, and Chapters by Simon Sadler
But the hippies avoided the sort of programmatic or antagonistic reform that we could also regard as typically modernist, preferring an equilibrium balanced around the self. To illustrate the difference, this essay contrasts hippie holism with the then better-recognized models of totality stemming from the political left. Specifically, it juxtaposes two neighbors in California’s Bay Area activist scene, the hippies of the Whole Earth Catalog and the revolutionaries of the Black Panther Party. The two overlap one another rather like a Venn diagram, each committed to a deep, bottom-up reorganization of the world through self-reliance, yet doing so with subtly dissimilar conceptions of the whole, one radically liberal, the other radically leftist and identity-based, which likely originate in unlike cultural, economic, and racial circumstances. The shape of the whole depended upon the position of the viewer.
1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles" (curated by Sylvia Lavin), this essay argues that LA's reputation as a futuristic urban model was something of an invention of visiting British architects and critics—like Reyner Banham and Archigram—which required a selective, mythic, and even nostalgic understanding of the city.