ABSTRACT
The social and cultural revolutions of the 1960s produced a host of architectural icons that represented an effort to redefine the future of human habitation. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes, Ant Farm’s ephemeral architecture, and experiments in communal living, such as “Drop City” and “Arcosanti,” vilified the urban environment, rejected social conventions, and revealed an interest in childhood and creative experimentation that would eventually define the American counterculture. Yet these familiar examples represent only a small portion of the diverse spatial experimentation of the period and the complex reimagining of nature, technology, and the body that occurred in the field of architecture. In the wake of the 1960s environmental movement, a little-known architectural proposition emerged in the California Bay Area called “Whole Systems Design.” Attributed to architect Sim Van der Ryn, Whole Systems Design theorized an urban ecology movement of self-contained ecological residences designed to harness the energy circulating between the environment, technology, and bodies, both human and animal. The resulting architecture was “physiological,” positioning housing as integral to a synthetic metabolic cycle, with the human body at the center receiving heat, nutrients, and calories from surrounding technological sources. Van der Ryn represented his proposal through a series of publications, architectural diagrams, and subsequently realized two physical models of the system—the Energy Pavilion (1973), a temporary architectural installation built on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, and the “Integral Urban House” (1974), a laboratory and full-scale demonstration project in West Berkeley. Whole Systems Design, and its architectural manifestations, is representative of a larger epistemic movement that would come to define ecological architecture of the period. Through the adoption of “appropriate technology,” systems thinking, and a new model of human physiology filtered through contemporary developments in ecology, cybernetics, and the aerospace industry, ecological design in the 1970s positioned man and machines as networked organisms in artificially constructed ecologies. The following analysis will trace the cultural and intellectual history of Whole Systems Design as a form of “biotechnology,” operating on, protecting, and extending the notion of the human body in a post-industrial urban environment perceived as “toxic” and “hostile to life.” The Energy Pavilion and the Integral Urban House will be positioned as sites of confluence for the ideas of several influential proponents for the reconceptualization of technology and ecology, including Ian McHarg, Norbert Wiener, E.F. Schumacher, and Steward Brand. This intellectual trajectory will also be contrasted with a contemporaneous cultural critique of the relationship between technology and the human body. The central argument of this chapter is the paradox of Whole System Design’s adoption of a cybernetic notion of ecology. This technocratic approach to the environment, characterized by optimal calibrations of resources, organisms, and technological systems, rather than allowing for social and individual autonomy as suggested, required strict regulation and control of the body, from daily habits and labor practices to bodily inputs and outputs.
