Many of the group's structures (Balloon for Two, Oase no7, Gelbes Herz...) are designed to offer a sense of intimacy inside the public space: the plastic membrane isolate the visitor from the world around them, participating one can imagine, in re-appropriating the public sphere - but paradoxically, all those modules, all the spaces seemingly designed to restore human interactions in their perfected, edenic sense, are formed of mostly transparent membranes.
This might hold one of the paradoxes of Haus-Rucker-Co. and one that spreads over the sixties and their uneasy relationship to political radicalism and utopia: their reforming ideals are unabashedly a form of spectacle. Militants are media-conscious, spirituality is communal, sexual liberation brings about commodification.
Of course Haus-Rucker-Co. is not Amon Duul II - but in crystallizing the typical tension of the age between radicalism and commodification (generally justified as a strategy of efficiency), they seem to exemplify what Eisenmann's catchy saying, "The Rococo of Modernism", always brings to my mind: a society, to use Situationist terminology, where détournement and récupération have become so deeply embedded into each other that deciding whether radicalism uses spectacle or spectacle uses radicalism is virtually impossible.
Haus-Rucker-Co. - Cover and Balloon for Two
"Toys for adults simulating contact, contact between two people, a man and a woman,
who experience their environement and themselves in a completely new way."
Haus-Rucker-Co. on Vanilla Future, 1969
The very impermanence of the structures not only question their role in the urban context but also grant them a specific status: as a construct that can be removed and transported, we tend to identify the provisional structure with a tool - but in the mean time, it's artistic ambition leave it largely deprived from a practical use. The useless tool is then left with only two option: too tactile and eager for an audience participation to be a work of art, the structure aims at delivering an experience rather than a message: it's a toy, a Froebel's gift for the epoch of space.
"Play is (...) imitation of the total human life, of the inner, secret, natural life in man and in all things. It produces, therefore, joy, freedom, satisfaction, repose within and without, peace with the world. The springs of all good rest within it and go out from it."
Friedrich Froebel, Inventing Kindergarten
The "goals" of the Haus-Rucker-Co. structure, seems in good part to have relied on the characteristic terminology of the times: development of "psychological capacity", "exploration of the inner world" and "concentrated experience" are ludicrous psychobabble. They share this ludicrous psychobabble with an other contemporary culture of keen experimentators, psychedelics.
The goals and the medium of the "environement transformers" and, considering it was also producing sound and light effects from the inside of it's dome, the "mind expander", are as reminiscent of Pucci's 65 fligh attendants as of the mind machines of the seventies and their low-fi hallucinogenic virtual reality. but unlike those, the construction of a space isolated from the quotidian, such as Nicolas Schoffer's Cybernetic City, or the some of Warhol's more ambitious Happenings aimed at the immersion of the audience as a group.
What the sixties brought to this age-old dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk is a radical shift of focus from the demiurgic artist to the audience: the relationships within it, and their relationship with both the world inside and outside of the artwork. Quite characteristically the "Mind Expanders" are designed for two seaters, just like the Happenings or the Cybernetic City were intended as spaces of exchange - not only between the artist and the audience but within the audience itself, becoming what Habermas coined Offentlichkeit.
When the designer aim at creating or re-organizing the social interactions of it's audience he becomes irremediably political. The space of the piece becomes a temporary autonomous zone, and the artwork becomes a utopia.
"In strongly opposing the world of play to that of reality, and in stressing that play is essentially a side activity, the interference is drawn that any contamination by ordinary life runs the risk of corrupting and destroying its very nature."
Roger Caillois, Men, Play and Games
If, as Caillois argues, reality is likely to corrupt the world of the game, then the game itself might be, in return, able to corrupt the game of life:
The experience of the game, and it's collective experience even more, constitutes the essence of the situationist alternative life experience. A self contained world, with it's own rules and it's own goals (if any) - both a prophetic vision of what the future could be, and an experiment on how to build it.
"Everything that was lived has moved away into representation."
Guy Debord, The Society of Spectacle
Not having had the chance to try out any of the mind expanding "machinery", I am allowed to remain skeptical as to the actual mind expansion this would provide: if one was particularly eager to link back Haus-Rucker-Co. to situationist ideas, one could see in the presentation of normal quotidian experiences, though the absent lense of the mind expanders and environement transformers, as a form of détournement, or even maybe as over-identification with the society of spectacle it adresses: within the particular frame provided by the helmets or the dome, that provide little if any effectual transformation to the sight of the eyes, the capitalist world is framed as what it is, a spectacle.
"Not houses finely roofed or the stones of walls well build, nay nor canals and dockyards make the city, but men able to use their opportunity."
Alcaeus, quoted by Donal Kagan
Many of the works of Haus-Rucker-Co. like a number of their contemporaries, attempt to re-asses our relationship to space and it's purpose: a space abstracted from history and positioned in what must have seemed at the time like a timeless future. The continuous emphasis on impermanence they saw as a key to experimentation, an unstable state where architecture is freed from it's constraints of firmness, commodity and delight. Freed from the contingencies of purpose and durability they were allowed, more than functionalist architecture and urbanism could ever dream, to re-write human relationships between themselves, but also of course, human relationship with their environment.
"Architecture is a theatre stage setting where the leading actors are the people, and to dramatically direct the dialogue between these people and space is the technique of designing."
Kisho Kurokawa
It seems that the timely pop aesthetics that presided over many of Haus-Rucker-Co designs emphasizes, consciously or not, the playful and inconspicuous aspects of their work - "relaxation" and "changes in consciousness", for all their savoury meaninglessness, hint at a growing sentiment in the sixties: the prevalence of experience over ownership - happiness no longer a situation it is a state of mind.
Like all narratives that attempted, throughout the twentieth century to bridge the gap between style and politics, to rationalize the utopia into a historical or post-historical situation, the Space Age was bound to end up stripped off from it's militant substance and relegated to the quirky and the inconsequent. But in the case of Haus-Rucker-Co. it seems that the collective moved away from away from the kitsch early enough and stuck instead to it's Utopian ideals.
"The architecture of pleasure lies where concept and experience of space abruptly coincide."
Bernard Tschumi, The Pleasure of Architecture