We have already talked about the title exhibition of the Triennial "Behind the Green Door", but in addition to it, this festival includes 70 different events, including the Far-Out Voices exhibition at the National Museum. Responding to the general theme of the triennial - "sustainability" - it is dedicated to one of the sources of the modern "green" movement, which arose when no one had ever used the adjective "green" in the meaning of "ecological". We are talking about the countercultural movement of the 1960s - 1970s, when the daily use of the energy of the sun and recyclable materials was equally associated with the desire to live in harmony with the "Mother Earth" and the desire to gain independence from the state and consumer society.
Curator Caroline Maniaque-Benton met with several of the key figures of the era, and their stories became the basis for the concept of the exhibition and entered into it in the form of video interviews. All of them are Americans, with the exception of the British artist Graham Stevens, whose inflatable kinetic object "Desert Cloud" (1972) got on the poster of the exhibition (it was conceived to condense moisture in hot climates), because it is the USA, especially the states California, New Mexico and Colorado, and were the center of the nascent eco-movement. During the years of its peak, tens of thousands of communes (the most famous being Drop City) could be counted in this region, where their members often lived in "domes" built from scrap materials in the likeness of Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome (another hero of that time, who However, he did not openly support the counterculture), opposed the experience gained in practice to formal training, endlessly experimented and generously shared knowledge with each other. Europeans, on the other hand, were more likely to be students arriving in America or admiring observers: articles on the achievements of the "Communards" appeared in Domus, L'architecture d'aujourd'hui, and other leading journals.
Caroline Maniak-Benton and her colleague Jérémie McGowan identified three key themes in their collected material - Experiment, Waste and Tools. The personification of the endless experimentation characteristic of that time was Steve Baer, a designer of devices for using solar energy: 40 years ago, and now he sees them as a way to autonomous existence from state systems and sharply criticizes the appropriation of "solar" technologies by the authorities. which should remain publicly available.
The problem of waste recycling is represented by the figure of the architect Sim Van der Ryn, who devoted special efforts to the disposal of human waste products - the design of dry toilets, environmentally friendly sewage systems, gray water systems, etc. He embodied his ideas in dwellings independent of any communications, including city houses. Van der Rijn is also a rare example of a merger with the establishment in the era: as the chief architect of California in the second half of the 1970s, he created the first state program for the construction of energy-efficient office buildings and developed mandatory energy and accessibility for persons with disabilities.
Developing the topic of waste, curators remind that the current practice of sorting garbage, actively imposed from above and has already become an element of "decent" behavior in the West (if you do not put plastic and paper in different bags, neighbors will look askance!), In the 60s and 70s -e seemed almost subversive because of the "asocial" ideas associated with it. In addition, the same domes made of industrial waste or pieces of cars thrown into a landfill were given to their owner-builders for almost nothing; today, waste has become the same raw material as any other, and often costs a lot of money. Suffice it to recall how, in the course of urban mining, non-ferrous metals are mined from old landfills, burning all organic matter: earlier this method was unprofitable from a financial point of view, now it is no longer.
The Tools section features an interview with industrial designer James Baldwin, who invented and tested new tools for a self-sufficient life and trained everyone to work with them, traveling around America in the Toolbox Truck, which served as his home and workshop. However, such a specific interpretation of this word is only one of the options used in those years: tools were called any way to achieve goals - both yoga and herbal treatment.
Also among the heroes of the exhibition is the architect Michael Reynolds, who is still designing houses of the Earthship type - to one degree or another autonomous buildings, and he was especially interested in adobe structures and houses from cans.
An entire wall of the exhibition hall is occupied by the "Neon Board" - a diagram of the relationship between society and the designer and the forms of his social responsibility, which Victor Papanek drew at a conference in Copenhagen in 1969: there was a place for quotes by Pablo Picasso, the Kennedy brothers and even Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The author deliberately left this scheme unfinished, giving everyone the opportunity to think it out on their own. Such a democratic approach was characteristic of the entire movement, especially clearly manifested in the "self-made" publications on the topic of autonomous life, the construction of "domes" houses, etc., called by the authors "scrapbooks" - despite the many thousands of circulations and the number of readers in several million (Whole Earth Catalog, Survival Scrapbooks, Dome Cookbook). The material was located there without obvious logic, and everyone could add their own story or idea there.
The curators of the exhibition at the National Museum acted on the same principle, inviting visitors to draw their own conclusions from the material presented. Of course, this can be a trick, and even a confession of timidity on their part, although the curators of the main exposition of the triennial, studio Rotor, did the same; we have to admit that this is already an established technique in organizing exhibitions, tested at the highest level.
But still, one thought of the curators cannot be missed: the notorious "sustainable development", which corporations and government agencies are now promoting by all means and which is criticized by intellectuals fighting the establishment, began in the days of the hippies as a radical movement of freedom-loving inventors and bohemians who sought to gain complete independence from public and government institutions. The heroes of the exhibition continue to work now, but it seems that centuries have passed since their heyday - the absolute faith in man, which the first eco-activists possessed, and the decisiveness of their followers, united in thousands of communes, is so unimaginable now.
The 5th Oslo Architecture Triennial will run until December 1, 2013.
The exhibition "Unusual Voices" at the National Museum (architectural building) will end on March 2, 2014.
