9/13/2014 Spatial Agency: Ant Farm

http://www.spatialagency.net/database/ant.farm 1/2
Ant Farm was established within the counter-cultural milieu of 1968 San Francisco by
two architects, Chip Lord and Doug Michels, later joined by Curtis Schreier. Their work
dealt with the intersection of architecture, design and media art, critiquing the North
American culture of mass media and consumerism. Ant Farm produced works in a
number of formats, including agitprop events, manifestos, videos, performances and
installations.
Their early work was a reaction to the heaviness and fixity of the Brutalist movement in
contrast to which they proposed an inflatable architecture that was cheap, easy to
transport and quick to assemble. This type of architecture fitted well with their rhetoric
of nomadic, communal lifestyles in opposition to what they saw as the rampant
consumerism of 1970s USA. The inflatables questioned the standard tenets of
building: these were structures with no fixed form and could not be described in the
usual architectural representations of plan and section. They instead promoted a type
of architecture that moved away from a reliance on expert knowledge. Ant Farm
produced a manual for making your own pneumatic structures, the Inflatocookbook.
The inflatables thus constituted a type of participatory architecture that allowed the
users to take control of their environment. Events were also organised inside the
inflatables, which were set up at festivals, university campuses or conferences to host
lectures, workshops, seminars, or simply as a place to hang out.
Other projects include the 'House of the Century' whose form was reminiscent of the
inflatables but made from ferrocement, the video 'Media Burn' where they drove an
adapted Cadillac into a wall of televisions in front of an audience hand-picked from the
media. They also produced a number of utopian projects such as Convention City and
Freedom Land. Finally, perhaps their most famous work 'Cadillac Ranch', consists of
ten Cadillacs in a row half-buried in the ground with their tail-fins in the air. It is both a
tribute to the American car culture as well as a critique of it.
Ant Farm were heavily influenced by the likes of Buckminster Fuller and Archigram
and whilst creating an architecture that was utopian, their projects were also always
ironic and tongue-in-cheek. Their work revealed the relationships between
environmental degradation and mass industry, questioned the role of mass media and
consumerism and demonstrated the use of advanced technologies with playful
projects like the Dolphin Embassy. They left behind a body of research that was
developed outside the privileged institutional context of universities and is still relevant
today in debates around sustainable architecture, building technologies as well as
public art and architecture.
House of the Century
Inflatables
Media Van
Cadillac Ranch
Ant Farm, Inflatocookbook. (San Francisco: Ant Corps, 1973), available;
http://www.letsremake.info/PDFs/inflatocookbook.pdf
C. M. Lewallen, Ant Farm 1968 - 1978, illustrated edition. (University of California
Press, 2004).
Felicity D. Scott, Ant Farm: Living Archive 7 (Barcelona: Actar, Columbia GSAPP,
2008).
Felicity D. Scott, Architecture Or Techno-Utopia (The MIT Press, 2010).
Ernest Larsen, "Junky and Important: The Collective Model in the Rearview Mirror,"
American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005): 223-236.
Ali Aslam, "The Somnambulant Practice of Postmodern Architecture," Theory & Event
11, no. 4 (2008), http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v011/11.4.aslam.html.
'We wanted to be an architecture group that was more like a rock band We would
be doing underground architecture, like underground newspapers and underground
movies, and [a friend] said, "Oh, you mean like an Ant Farm?"'
- Doug Michels quoted in, C. M. Lewallen, Ant Farm 1968 - 1978, illustrated edition.
(University of California Press, 2004), p. 41.
Key Projects
Other Work
References About
Quotes
Spatial Agency
180
9/13/2014 Spatial Agency: Ant Farm
http://www.spatialagency.net/database/ant.farm 2/2
Yale Building Project
Whole Earth Catalog
Cedric Price
1960s Utopian Groups
Raumlabor Drop City
Farallones Institute
Alternative publishing / zines
2012 Architecten
Windworks / 519 East 11th Street
Centre for Alternative Technology
Jersey Devil
Ant Farm
Christiania
Buckminster Fuller
Connections
Concept Event
Organisation Project
Show / Hide Connections Lock / unlock Position
View entry in database Remove from map
Related Organisations
Jersey Devil
Buckminster Fuller
Related Projects
Whole Earth Catalog