Perhaps the real change is when it becomes a matter of aesthetic and intellectual choice to build out of scraps and reuse what is around you. As Alastair Gordon wrote in Architectural Record prior to the launch of his book Spaced Out:
"It was just there, somehow, in the air, the back-to-nature vibe, the need to make shelter, the need to uncomplicate oneâ€™s life. There was scrounging and recycling of old materials, living off the spoils of straight society. â€œTrapped inside a waste economy, man finds an identity as a consumer,â€ wrote Bill Voyd. â€œOnce outside the trap, he finds enormous resources at his disposalâ€”free.â€ Voyd and other pioneers at Drop City learned to chop the metal tops out of junked cars and shape them into building panels. Other free-form builders learned to work with bottles, mounds of earth, mud bricks, old tires, and bales of hay."
More in TreeHugger at Architectural Lessons from the 60s Counterculture
Credit: The Hippie Museum