(Space)Ship of Fools? Esoteric Practices and the Management of Human and Nonhuman life in a Planetary Society

DISSERTATION

This dissertation follows the strange experiments of a group of postwar designers speaking on behalf of plants, animals, humanity, and the entire planet. It asks: How did human and nonhuman life figure in the works of Buckminster Fuller, Stewart Brand, The New Alchemists, and the Synergists? And how did the provincial practices of these figures—considered on the fringes, if not entirely outside, of mainstream architectural discourses—come to imagine the entire planet as an architectural or a design problem and engage the totality of life on Earth? I explore the role that these architectural experiments played in establishing an awareness of the whole planet and the specific ways plants, animals, and humans were imagined in the textual and material outputs of these figures. Often associated with the countercultural communes of the 60s and 70s, these figures were drawing from a whole array of non-Western belief systems and traditions as a counter to what they saw as the dominant practices of mainstream American society. By considering their strange practices seriously, I aim to show how non-Western and pre-modern traditions combined with philosophies and conceptions of life to contribute to an idea of the planet produced through architecture.

Rami Kanafani