This series is about a style of architecture that repelled me when I was growing up but that I now find strangely attractive. These examples of brutalist modernism are all from Vancouver, but there are equivalents all over North America. The brutalist hand-etched steel front door of this building is a classic in this style. I’ve always found it odd that concrete brutalism tends to be accompanied by this sort of medieval or Middle Earth/Lord of the Rings decorative treatment on metal (and in furniture), but it works. Is it concrete harking back to stone or what exactly? 815 Chilco Street, built in 1970, was designed by Vancouver’s “father of modern architecture,” Charles Burwell Kerrins van Norman (1907-1975).

The building of modernist lo-rise condos and apartments in the 70s was part of a deliberate move on the part of the city’s planning department to do away with a certain type of groovy downtown living in funky, sometimes decrepit (but affordable) Victorian and Edwardian houses. Read about the politics of this history in curator Scott Watson’s Urban Renewal: Ghost Traps, Collage, Condos and Squats. Despite the politics of their introduction into Vancouver, these buildings have the virtue of being solid and livable, and they’re now prized. This building, which sits right next to the large and beautiful Stanley Park, is particularly pricey these days. See the next post for another fantastic building, right next door at 845 Chilco Street. Vancouver, let’s not knock down any more 60s and 70s architecture.

These photos of The Dome Show, an exhibition by art collective Intermedia at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 1970, are all from the web archive Ruins In Process: Vancouver Art in the Sixties. (See another post on this absolutely amazing site here.) The Dome Show was an experimental art show involving architecture, sculpture, performance, music, improvised happenings, a giant public dinner party, bonfires, public home movie nights and many other things over the months of its exhibition. Above, Installing the Dome Show at the VAG.

From the site: “The unifying structure of the Dome Show was Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. Each Intermedia member who was interested was invited to build domes individually or communally for the exhibition. Before the exhibition installation Intermedia members constructed their domes in a variety of public spaces, including the Maplewood Mud Flats, at 4th and Arbutus, Kitsilano Beach, in front of the Bentall Center in Downtown Vancouver, and outside of the Vancouver planetarium.”

Buckminster’s geodesic dome was obviously at the height of its popularity then. Now, forty years later, there seems to be a revival of interest in its utopian promise or its grooviness or its sheer architectural difference or what, exactly? It reappears during times of environmental crisis, war, or general turmoil? Or when staid protestantism makes you want to flee to a stately hippie pleasure dome? Whatever it is, I like looking at these structures and I’m grateful to Ruins in Process for the documentation. The website is particularly valuable not just because of the beards and the fashions, but because it covers a period of art that for all its notoriety is actually not all that well known, not just because it was pre-internet, but also perhaps because of the tendency of the work to be temporary, performative, process-based and dependent upon happenings, and in so many other ways difficult to document. Also, as Carole Itter says in her interview on the site, if you were present at a happening and were documenting, it meant you weren’t in the moment, and that wasn’t cool. Her comments on the role of women in Intermedia are also pretty interesting.

Above, an art insert in the Vancouver weekly The Georgia Straight. Below, construction of a dome in the Mudflats, Vancouver.

Above and below, dancers in a dome near the Burrard Street Bridge.

Above, meeting of Intermedia on Beatty Street. Below, “100 flutes” performance in aluminum dome.

Above,”Bingo,” an event at City Feast, a city-wide public dinner to close The Dome Show. Below, End of the Dome Show – burning of a dome out in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery, on the night of City Feast at the close of the show. A bonfire on one of Vancouver’s main arteries could so not happen now.

These are all, as usual, from The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970. I love the photo of the little garden house with the abstract geometric painting, above, and the book actually includes plans for it (click at bottom). One of the things that is so great about 1960s and 70s decor books is that many of the best ideas come with DIY instructions or are just simple to make, like the cedar privacy wall below.

Bicycle wheel potato chip cart! Happy Spring.

(more…)

More far out interiors from The Practical Encyclopedia of Good Decorating and Home Improvement, Greystone Press, 1970.

From the YouTube description:

Germany 1970. The German moderator discuss in the beginning how boring and lame the official looks are and that the fashion and color designers came up with the following outfits to make the game more interesting and colorful. They explain very detailed the colors since at the point many did not have color tv!

Clearly they made my day with the ideas. I just keep cracking up! I have no clue why they dance so madly. latin music dancing models with soccer fashion without shoes. but even Guenther thinks that the trikot needs an update as a service and entertainment for the fans who watch soccer games

OK from a textile design point of view I have to say I love the new 1970 jerseys. Fantastic. The dancing? I have no clue why they dance so madly. See also this recent remix of this video.