More from Vancouver Art in the Sixties. This electronic sound work is called Floating Mushroom, by Dennis Vance, September 30, 1969. Photo by Michael de Courcy. Nice piece and nice pea coat. From the site:

“Floating Mushroom” was a floating steel form containing sound-generating equipment that responded to movement on the shore. This intervention took place at Lost Lagoon in Vancouver. L-R: Ian Ridgeway, Gerry Gilbert, Galen Ridgeway, Heidi Ridgeway, Kita Ridgeway, Dallas Selman, Dennis Vance, Glenn Toppings.

Thanks to @gebgdc.

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.

Makeshift is a year-long project by Natalie Purschwitz, clothing designer and founder of Hunt & Gather, the award-winning Vancouver shop and clothing line. Her project is this: for a whole year, she will wear only clothes she has made herself, and that includes everything – “all of my clothes, socks, shoes, underwear, coats, jackets, hats, bathing suits, and accessories.” There are only a few exceptions – hair accessories, tools, eyeglass lenses. The outfit for Day 1 was her cool black coveralls, below. Here are the rules she has set for herself:

1. My entire wardrobe will be made by me out of new or used materials.

2. I don’t have to make my materials, however, I will aspire to do so whenever possible.

She goes on to say:

If I’m talking about making everything that I wear, you may be wondering how the rules for the ‘making’ part have been determined. That’s where the beauty lies – they haven’t! Not yet anyway. I hope to develop a set of rules as I go. As a simple starting point I will say that my wardrobe will consist of anything made by me from either new or used materials. Materials can be reused but just altering something doesn’t count.

The project is part conceptual art, part fashion design, and part social experiment, and this combination seems inevitable given Purschwitz’s mixed training in anthropology, visual art and design. The project is ostensibly simple – make all your own clothes for a year – but as so often happens with an apparently simple idea, it quickly opens out into dozens of complex questions. There’s the fact that we’re all so de-skilled in our specialized global economy. What if you had to make your own shoes, in a pinch – could you? And what would they look like? And in terms of clothing design, what is the relationship of utility to creativity, of life to making things? The production of clothes is a creative and even artistic act, but it becomes assembly line-ish very easily. Only three weeks in to the project, Purschwitz confesses to being very tired, because maintaining this level of creativity, innovation and learning curve while at the same time running her business is not easy (she’d never made shoes before, or a bra.) There’s the collaborative social angle – Purshwitz is keeping a blog to document her daily activities, and is requesting comments and discussion so she herself can more fully understand what the project means. The blog too is labour, just of another kind. The blog’s public interactivity echoes the collaborative element in craft and fashion and retail itself, but in a different way; it somewhat collapses the distance between producer and consumer as well as the distinction between art viewer or audience and buying public. In this way, among others, the project blurs art, craft, business and design. There are many more questions to consider, but you can explore them yourself by participating on the Makeshift blog or visiting the space at 8 E. Cordova during visiting hours.

Purschwitz is a very good designer and it’s not surprising she has dedicated fans like Toronto singer Jane Siberry. Her work has always been distinctive because she doesn’t closely follow fashion, but finds her ideas in diverse places such as historical fashion design – a few years ago she described the style of her fall line as “paleo-Queen Anne” – and in idiosyncratic craft practices. Her mother was a Japanese archeologist working in Egypt when she met Natalie’s German father, and this probably explains Purschwitz’s interest in anthropology. She would have been conditioned to notice the eccentric crafts projects she grew up around in Radium Hot Springs. “A big influence for my store and my style is a guy I call Rolf the Radium Woodcarver. He’s this crazy woodcarver who makes bears, cowboys, and everything out of logs. He’s got booby traps all over his property.…I always thought that was really great, that he could make whatever he wanted and that was his store. And that’s what I wanted to do.” As with her clothing line, Purschwitz is taking the Makeshift project somewhere really interesting. Visit her during her open hours at Makeshift (check blog for times) and find her clothes at Hunt & Gather. More information on Natalie Purschwitz and Hunt & Gather can be found in the Georgia Straight.

PS. She didn’t want me to include this photo of the felt apron, above, but it’s one of my favourites. I should mention that I’m wearing one of her skirts as I write this; I’ve probably worn it about a hundred times, and not only because my boyfriend likes it (you can see it in the photo with the purple scarf). Maybe it’s because of her experience in theatrical and dance costume design, but Purschwitz knows how to make clothes that flow properly.

I’ll admit right off the bat that this is not strictly an architecture post; it’s technically a moment of retro 70s nostalgia. The 1976 movie Logan’s Run, a dark sci-fi dystopia about escape from a domed post-apocalyptic society which euthanizes its citizens at age 30, completely occupied my late childhood imagination. The movie was shot entirely in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas and most of the film’s key action takes place in the “Great Hall,” which turns out to be the fairly bizarre and also recently demolished Dallas Market Center Apparel Mart, not a great piece of architecture but one that did conveniently feature a quasi-sci-fi interior. If someone has the correct terminology for this style of interior, please advise – my guess is 60s mall rendition of Corbusier, Notre Dame du Haut era. The novel the film is based on was written at the height of  60s youth culture and student unrest, and it was explicitly written with a screenplay in mind. Though it was published in 1967, like Dune the process of turning the novel into a film was fraught with problems, and by the time the film was made, the decor and costumes were reflecting the 70s. The film’s commentaries on totalitarianism, a Brave New World-style docile populace distracted by pleasures, and youth-oriented culture are pretty heavy-handed, but I loved it when I saw it around age 12, too young to notice how wooden Michael York’s acting was but not young enough to avoid total infatuation.

Above, scenes from the film. Below, the mart as it was in reality and then during its demolition. Its destruction is strangely fitting considering the film’s ending. Oddly, the building is part of the vast trade complex JFK was headed for when he was assassinated – he was on his way to a luncheon for 2400 people, in a setup very similar to the one shown below. This particular part of the complex, however, was built a year later, in 1964.

All photos and information in this post are from racprops, aintitcool and snowcrest. The film’s “Love Shop” (image at top, with the odd, oozing brown leather seating, and the mall shot with somewhat anatomical neon sign) was the Oz Restaurant/Nightclub in Dallas. Other locations: Sandman HQ was Zales’ International Headquarters; the Sandman gym was the Arlington Health Center and the living units were the Burton Park Building. The video below was a long promotional trailer for the film intended as a preview for theatre owners, and it gives a sense of the futuristic 70s sets and costumes.