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23

Remembering Doug Michels

On June 14, just a week shy of his sixtieth birthday, architect Doug Michels was killed in a freak accident. It happened in Australia, at a place called Eden Bay, where Doug was consulting on a movie about killer whales and dolphins, an abiding interest of his. He died after falling from the ladder of an observation tower where he had gone to view the marine life in the bay.

Michels was that rarest and most vital of characters: a comedian. The comedian’s privilege and responsibility is to create improbable but telling cultural bifurcations, to provide a comfortable home for incompatible ideas, to insist that what can be thought can be expressed. By proposing juxtapositions just beyond what we know, comedians de-center us with our own spontaneous laughter at the unexpected.

In 1968, Doug partnered with fellow architect Chip Lord (later joined by Curtis Schrier, Hudson Marquez, and a free-floating collection of collaborators) to found that greatest of American architectural countercultural groups, Ant Farm. Responding to comedic, utopian, and critical muses, Ant Farm produced a series of immortal projects that spoke to both the hopes and anxieties of its generation.

With uncanny clarity, Ant Farm undertook projects that darted in and out of the sites of invention rapidly reconfiguring the world. From nomadism to inflatables to car culture to theme parking to environmentalism to electronic space, Ant Farm was there before most of us had a clue.

Many of these projects were “real” in a way that was beyond jokey forms. Was it Lenin who said that irony and love were the qualities of a true revolutionary? Ant Farm was deeply committed to a revolution with a laugh track, not one of dour homogeneity and forced altruism. It was a revolution for freedom, self-expression, and joy; for sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And architecture. Ant Farm worked hard to envision architectures of pleasure and communion.

After Ant Farm broke up following a 1978 fire that destroyed its San Francisco studio, Doug simply kept going. He investigated the same conceptual edge—the band of ambiguity between official and alternative culture—designing everything from amusement parks to doll houses to bathing suits to private homes. And even as he pursued one fantastical project after another, he kept day jobs with the corporate likes of HOK and Philip Johnson. He studied at Yale, held a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard, taught at a number of schools, but was far too subversive for tenure. Fascinated and repelled by power, he hung around the scenes of its reproduction. He lived for years in Washington, DC, intoxicated by proximity to the druids of empire, impressed and appalled and engaged in his totally singular, wild and crazy way.

Dolphins were a longstanding leitmotif for Doug. His obsession with them was complicated, made magic by an early offshore encounter with one during an acid trip. Doug was intrigued by their intelligence and their language, and by the possibility of interspecies communication suggested by these attributes. Somehow, for him, dolphins embodied a contemporary version of the state of nature, a paradise lost but perhaps recoverable. His appreciation for these creatures was further deepened by the fact that they had another, darker side. Flipper could be murderous, filled with rage. And dolphins could be deeply sexual, orgiastic.

That this attraction was obsessional was clear in the way Doug’s life as an architect returned again and again to the dolphin modular. It was surely the dark side of the dolphins that humanized them, kept his interest going, and led him to do his projects to accommodate them in his architecture. Among these were his scheme for a Dolphin Embassy (begun during the Ant Farm days), a floating research station meant to facilitate interspecies communication; Bluestar, an amazing space station positioned in geosynchronous orbit and housing a crew of dolphins and humans engaged in unspecified mental experiments; and a design for a new White House for a dolphin president.

Bluestar was the outstanding dolphin project, an unforgettable image designed on the model of Saturn: orb surrounded by rings. Human inhabitation took place in the rings, which were set in motion with the appropriate gravitational spin. Dolphins lived in a sphere of water (what liquids do in weightlessness) within a gigantic glass sphere (the ultimate think tank), where somehow a collectivized, harmonized brain was to be produced to roll back the frontiers of knowledge in a charged atmosphere of joy.

It was Doug’s great genius that he never gave up pushing his dreams in the direction of more familiar styles of reality. At the time he did Bluestar, Doug was working at HOK and managed to persuade them not simply to let him proceed with the project, but to subsidize it. The piece later attracted the attention of NASA, and was displayed at the American Institute of Architects headquarters in the Octagon. Its final incarnation was as a video game—unique for its nonviolent subject—which, after years of development, was destroyed by a software glitch. Had Doug lived a few more years, it would surely have found another incarnation.

A more recent project was the celebrated National Sofa, Doug’s entry in a competition for the redesign of Lafayette Square in Washington, DC. The sofa—several hundred feet long—was located along Pennsylvania Avenue, facing the White House. Periodically, a giant TV was to pop out of the ground to allow those seated on the sofa to interact with the president across the street. It was an amazingly incisive piece of satire, spanning questions of public space, electronic democracy, and the phony dignities of official styles of design. Classic Doug in its hilarious premise and in the ardent, deadpan style in which he promoted it.

As news of Doug’s death quickly got around, an amazing electronic wake began. From all over the planet, his friends and colleagues began to write tales and testimonials. The picture that emerged was one not just of crackling intelligence and super talent but also of enormous generosity, a willingness to reply at length to students writing out of the blue, and a tenacious devotion to friends to whom he sent a miraculous stream of words and images, festooned with weird pictures from his wonderful hand and legendary rubber-stamp collection. Doug was one of the premier correspondents of the electronic age, and a revelation of the outpouring of emotion following his death was of how many of us have a stash of postcards, letters, cartoons, and projects that Doug sent out over the years.

He wrote us to the end. Many of his friends received postcards from the now too ironically named Eden Bay in the days leading up to the accident, a sad retrospective countdown. More eerie, many of us got cards even after his death had become known. And the thought we all had was the same: if anyone can communicate from the beyond, it would be Doug.

2003