Handmade Utopia

A compendium of unseen folk architecture and a cultural history of 1960s NorCal utopianism

Published with Edition Patrick Frey.

Half a century ago, a legion of young idealists dropped out of society and went “back to the land,” creating a patchwork of utopian communes across Northern California. Handmade Utopia: Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California tracks down the rogue souls still committed to this way of life, capturing their handbuilt, otherworldly residences alongside the stories of how they came to be―at what is now the tail end of one generation’s grand social experiment. Handmade Utopia travels the length of Northern California, which formed the epicenter of the movement, journeying down hidden dirt roads and deep into redwood forests to discover handmade homes kept hidden for decades. Michael Schmelling’s photography documents how these structures appear today and David Jacob Kramer’s oral histories detail how they came to be, and are presented alongside a plethora of archival materials.
In the mid-1960s, back-to-the-landers fled a Bay Area that had become over-policed and overrun with runaways, drugs and commercial exploitation. These new pioneers taught themselves to farm, practiced free love and generated radical new architectural styles. Only a fraction of these pioneers stuck it out for the decades following the Summer of Love. These flinty souls remain a study in principled self-reliance and human ingenuity. They are now in their 70s and 80s and the question arises of what they will leave behind, literally and figuratively. For decades they have kept these experimental homes hidden, long fearful of building inspectors and drug squads. Handmade Utopia presents these structures as artworks in their own right, captured at a moment when they risk being lost forever.