De-radicalizing architecture?
Since early 2020 I’ve been researching the history of one building – a visual arts studio building on the campus of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which was designed by the media art, architecture, and performance group Ant Farm in 1971. As an alumna of the college, I heard through the grapevine that the building was threatened with demolition. I have been researching, curating, and writing about the work of Ant Farm since 2013, so I was naturally alarmed, and formed a coalition of other artists, faculty, and other alumni to try to preserve the building. As part of this project I’ve worked with a variety of archivists and historians to collect materials related to the building’s commissioning, design, construction, and funding. Earlier this year, we successfully nominated the building to the National Historic Register.
In a 1973 typewritten text titled The Denomination of Ant Farm, Italian art critic and curator German Celant — who had just coined the expression “radical architecture” the previous year in the context of the MoMA exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape–refers to the Antioch Art Building as a “pre-vision.” In the text — archived at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive — Celant acknowledges the Ant Farm group for carrying on “true and real manifestations of counter-cultural information,” of which the Antioch Art Building is paradigmatic. The building, in his words, embodies the search for special adaptability and organic flexibility, and achieves these unique features by means of a simple yet highly variable construction, “capable of rendering it productive(flexible) to any uses by the institute.”
- from a letter of support for the National Historic Register nomination, written by Giorgia Aquilar.
The building has become a (fisheye?) lens through which I’ve begun to see a broader picture of the political and economic moment in which a small liberal arts college might engage a group of inexperienced self-described “radical” architects to construct a post-modern edifice out of industrial materials in the middle of an otherwise bog standard bricks and buckeyes campus. As I stepped back and surveyed the surrounding circumstances, a view emerged of a crucial turning point in American pedagogy, economics, environmental design, and media ecology.
“Antioch College (as it was later reconstituted by Arthur Morgan) represents an ideal-typical instance of the activist radical college. Its commitment to extramural action began in the 1920s with its focus on the co-op program by which Antioch Students spent alternate terms on and off campus in work programs.”
- The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Documentary History, by Bruce A. Kimball
The standard art school and media theory narrative I’d previously absorbed around those pioneers of early video and radical architecture was that the practitioners were engaged in a leftist, utopian, political struggle – and that this struggle was in opposition to the institutional gatekeepers and powers-that-be of universities, think-tanks, government agencies, and industrial R&D labs. The ideological project of the late 60s and early avant-garde was, as presented to me, nothing less than to destroy the boundaries between artistic disciplines, democratize the media and supersede broadcast television hegemony, undo American materialism, rethink previously entrenched interpersonal hierarchies, and to open up the possibilities of human creative expression.
What I’ve found, on the contrary, is that significant financial and research support for innovation in design, pedagogy, media, art, and architecture was pouring in to institutions like Antioch and (in some cases) to individuals like the members of Ant Farm, through private foundations and government agencies ranging from the Ford Foundation to the US Department of Education. Moreover, this support had clearly articulated ideological aims, most of which were focused on perceived Cold War gains in technological advancement.
In this series, I’ll be sharing the materials I’ve gathered from archives, texts, and interviews, as well as my annotations and contextual notes. My goal is to begin to demystify this early 1970s era of tumult and innovation, particularly the (now almost unthinkable) levels of institutional risk-taking, as well as the subsequent backlash. Ultimately, I hope this research will allow us to see how this period has shaped our own.
