The Energy Underground: Environmental Culture in the Architecture of the 1970s

• In Event: Energy Frontiers in the Late 20th Century

Abstract

In the past few years, the relationship between architecture and the environment has been subject to increased historical analysis. Across the 20th century, as this scholarship has made clear, architects were both involved in organizing the material conditions of shelter, and also active in culture movements exploring new relationships between nature and society.

The 1970s is well known as a tumultuous decade in environmental history. At the tail end of counter-cultural activism, and defined by oil crises and other resource and population panics, the decade saw numerous shifts in policy and popular opinion around the environment. Architects were among the many cultural actors proposing new forms of living, and able to, at times, build them. Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti, an energy efficient linear city in the Arizona desert, was begun in 1970; in 1974, John and Nancy Jack Todd began to build a self-sustaining Ark on Prince Edward Island. These and other architects saw new forms of design as a means to create new relationships between cultural practices and natural systems.

Surveying some of these experiments, the presentation will focus on a loosely connected group called “The Energy Underground.” The name was a pun, on numerous levels: Malcolm Wells, a leader of the group, was an architect of many underground buildings and an advocate of their energy savings; the group was opposed to use of the ‘other’ energy underground –fossil fuels; finally, there was a political positioning alongside the Weather Underground and other activists of the period. Writings by the group resisted government regulation of solar power, and intended to leverage the capacities of energy efficient, off-the-grid buildings to establish an alternative economic and social system.

Based on this evidence, I will argue for the significance of architectural discussions in articulating a culture of environmentalism in this period, and more generally.

Author

• Daniel Barber, University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University