EYE CANDY

This Is What Hippie Architecture Looks Like

by Steph Eckardt

Anyone can throw on bell bottoms and a flower crown, but the real devotees to the hippie scene back in the ’60s and ’70s had much stronger roots in the cause. They built and lived out of treehouse-like structures, transforming vegetation, bric-a-brac, and remnants of condemned buildings into a type of organic architecture—with a few helpful hints from DIY hippie building guides, of course. Their creations may not have weathered the decades since, but they’re now on view in “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia,” an exhibition chronicling the Bay Area’s role in the counterculture movement of the ’60s and ’70s, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) from February 8 to May 21. Peer inside their surprisingly upscale assemblages, here.

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Barry Shapiro photograph archive, BANC The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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Barry Shapiro photograph archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Geodesic home interior, Northern California.

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Barry Shapiro photograph archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Northern California craft studio with a timber-framed skylight.

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Barry Shapiro photograph archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

A tipi-framed bedroom from Handmade Houses: A Guide to the Woodbutcher’s Art, 1973.

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Barry Shapiro photograph archive, BANC The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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Barry Shapiro photograph archive, BANC The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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Barry Shapiro photograph archive, BANC The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Waite Home, Canyon, California, c. 1971.

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Courtesy of the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, The Sommer Collection. © CCA/C Archives at California College of the Arts Libraries, San Francisco, California. Photographs by Robert Sommer.

Emeryville Mudflats, 1960s-1970s.

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Courtesy of the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, The Sommer Collection. © CCA/C Archives at California College of the Arts Libraries, San Francisco, California. Photographs by Robert Sommer.

Emeryville Mudflats, 1960s-1970s.