In the 1960s and 70s, concerns about Earth’s finite resources, limited growth capacity, and environmental degradation culminated in a series of protests, publications, and initiatives. In 1962, Rachel Carson published her seminal book, Silent Spring, which highlighted how the lack of consideration for natural processes, in her case, the misuse of biocides and pesticides, caused ecological catastrophes by damaging flora and fauna, thereby harming the environmental balance between a diverse set of species.¹ Spearheaded by her work, environmentalism gained traction during that period, raising issues about resources, degradation, and ecological crisis, which led to countercultural movements such as the Student Movements in May 1968, originating in Paris. Paul Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, 1968, and The Club of Rome’s book, The Limits to Growth, 1972, further highlighted the ecological problems caused by industrial society and how we could engage with them.² These initiatives strongly criticised capitalism and consumerism. Architectural historian Steven Mannell portrays that “environmentalism emerged from the counterculture,” which he defines as “the protest movements resisting the Cold War nuclear arms race, the Vietnam War draft, and the development of nuclear power, as well as the idealism of the civil rights movement and the youth movements of the 1960s.”³ From thereon, events follow one another: 1970, the first year Earth Day was celebrated; 1972, the United Nations organised the first major conference on the environment in Stockholm, and 1973, the OPEC oil crisis broke out due to the Arab-Israeli Wars, showing how living systems drive their energy from finite and non-renewable fossil fuels. These findings demonstrated that alternative living modes were necessary to protect the planet from environmental degradation and to ensure sustainable energy systems for a reliable future.

Within this context, architects and landscape designers turned their attention to space ecology to explore alternative modes of living in response to the ecological crisis. As architectural historian Peder Anker illustrated, these events, such as the Arab oil embargo, had global effects, which affected not only specific regions but also their political, economic, cultural, and environmental constellations.⁴ A new way of thinking emerged, in which the Earth was seen as a closed cybernetic system constructed with interconnected ecosystems, much like NASA’s spaceships for astronauts. Being self-sufficient by emulating natural processes and therefore not demanding exploitation of nature, spaceships became ideal structures for architects and ecological designers during the “rise of environmentalism.”⁵ Architects and ecological designers synthetically emulated nature, trapping it in a jar, as Hans Rucker—Co’s A Piece of Nature strikingly illustrated, creating a closed system looping back onto itself, with the mission of rescuing the world from environmental crisis by fabricating an ideal microcosmos. Autonomous, self-organised, and self-regulated constructs emerged from the disciplines of cybernetics and ecology, aiming to rewrite the existing design understanding in the language of nature, with a strong belief in the power of technology. Technology was seen as the saviour that “could alter social structures and human relationships with the environment,” as researcher Henry Trim portrayed with the example of the New Alchemy Institute.⁶

These experiments with integrated and technologically driven living systems, under the banner of “ecological design,” were not without contradictions. Anker implies that this novel “design programme was at the expense of a wider aesthetic and social understanding of the human condition.”⁷ In line, architectural researcher Lydia Kallipoliti propounds that ecological design is derived from a “new modernist ethos,” replacing the concept of “function” with “environmental performance.”⁸ As briefly mentioned, cybernetics emerged as a key discipline for capturing ecological complexity during this period. These projects, inspired by ecologist Howard T. Odum’s diagrammatic abstraction, employed a shared representational cybernetic language for managing ecological, biological and social systems.⁹ Anker notes, “Odum’s methodological reductionism of all biological life (including human behaviour) to charts of energy circuits became the justification for his proposals for scientific management of human society.”¹⁰ According to Kallipoliti and Anker, in a way, capitalist, consumerist and neoliberalist strategies changed shape and were latently embedded within the corpus of ecological design. By recreating nature, ecological designers created a relational system that is efficient, productive, and manipulable. Philosopher Erich Hörl underscores that this highlights the processes of “ecologisation” and “cyberneticisation” of nature, where the “modes of existence, faculties, and forms of life in terms of relations” were reconceptualised, forming a new power dynamics. To this day, this remains an inherent dilemma within closed worlds of ecological design.¹¹

This dissertation explores the New Alchemy Institute’s (NAI) work from 1969 to 1991, scrutinising their synthetically built closed natural worlds through the lens of cybernetics and ecological design. It will focus on the architectural outputs of the Institute, namely arks and bioshelters, to explore their sustainable, environmentally performative, and self-regulating systems. Solely identifying their work as “back-to-the-land countercultural utopianism,” as architectural historian Daniel A. Barber criticises, caused their lack of visibility in architectural history and theory, and environmental history. However, they oscillated between the natural and artificial in a dialogue to predict a mutual design approach, rather than championing one another, despite being named by architectural historian Lydia Kallipoliti and others as a typical example of mimicking nature to create a new mode of living. While seeking efficiency in terms of food production, energy gain, and economic sustainability, they never undermined social and cultural context; yet, their architectural proposals lacked this context, despite their attention to the issues and criticisms posed in similar projects.

Their work challenged conventional ecological design and its problematic relationship to cybernetics elsewhere, drawing inspiration from philosophies of Margaret Mead, Ernst Schumacher, and Gregory Bateson. They used cybernetics not to control but to understand and resonate with nature. However, despite their work stemming from Bateson’s theoretical framework, their projects were unable to transform these theoretical ideas into reality. Therefore, by adopting Bateson’s second-order cybernetic framework, this study reveals the limits, implications, and potential of NAI’s arks. Drawing on interdisciplinary fields of ecological design, cybernetics, and architectural history, this study will explore how ecosystems in the arks and bioshelters are constructed through the relationships among their components, and it will critically engage with these relationalities to engage with NAI’s work and explore the reasons why it was considerably overlooked within histories and theories of ecological design, cybernetics, and architectural history.