This dissertation investigates how—from the late 1960s to the early 1990s—several networks of American counterculture groups theorized a totalizing new system of thought—known as the New Age—that they physically represented in self-sufficient and ecological utopian communities. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to address planetary problems, these communities attempted to reorient the emerging environmentalism of the ‘60s away from technocratic managerialism towards a spiritual individualism. Inspired to a large extent by inventor Buckminster Fuller’s metaphysics and his whole-systems thinking, the communities at the heart of this dissertation—The New Alchemy Institute (1969-1991), the Lindisfarne Association (1972-2012), and Synergia Ranch (1969-present)—imagined an architecture representing planetary systems in miniature, employing the metaphor of Spaceship Earth or the biblical ark to propose new and evolved spatial and spiritual configurations as a model to solve global environmental problems. By historicizing these New Age architectural experiments, this dissertation reveals how architecture became an integral component of a philosophy of wholeness that took aim at environmental and social issues through spirituality, a previously unmapped territory within histories of modern architecture overshadowed by the rise of an allegedly apolitical postmodernism as a dominant architectural discourse during this period.
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