l yd i a k a l l i pol i ti

From Shit to Food

Graham Caine’s Eco-­House in South London, 1972–1975

Early in 1975, at a corner of Thames Polytechnic’s Boyarski, the chairman of the Architectural As-
playing fields in South London, an ecological sociation of London (AA). Caine, a twenty-­six-­
house was demolished. It not only looked like year-­old, fourth-­year student at the AA, designed
a spaceship but also functioned as one, even and built the Eco-­House on borrowed land from
though it had been erected from materials scav- Thames Polytechnic, as part of his AA diploma
enged from the streets and bore a striking resem- thesis (Figures 1, 2). He received a provisional
blance to a giant outhouse. From the beginning two-­year permit from the Borough of Woolwich
of its construction the Eco-­House emerged as District Surveyor with the promise to build an
something uncanny, as “something that landed “inhabitable housing laboratory” that would
on the earth rather than growing out of it,” in the grow vegetables out of household effluents and
suburban context of Eltham.1 Neighbors used to fertilize the land with reprocessed organic waste.
walk around the house’s site disenchanted with With the help of the Street Farmers, Caine was
its aesthetics, calling it an “eyesore.”2 They were
Figure 1. Grahame Caine
quite pleased with its eventual demolition. In
in the 1960s. Courtesy of
fact, they accelerated the process by helping to Grahame Caine.
pull down the house. These neighborly com-
mentaries notwithstanding, the historic signifi-
cance of the Eco-­House lies in the fact that it was
a built laboratory inhabited by its architect and
manifested for its creators a statement for politi-
cal and social reform. Inside the envelope, digest-
ers, hydroponic gardens, solar panels, and other
machines endowed the house with more func-
tions than simply to shelter.
One of the earliest ecological houses, the Eco-­
House was built in 1972 as a laboratory and liv- Figure 2. Caine in front
ing experiment by Grahame Caine, a member of of the Eco-House.
the anarchist group Street Farmers, originally Courtesy of Grahame
formed by Peter Crump and Bruce Haggart. The Caine.
Eco-­House was a fully functional, integrated
system that converted human waste to meth-
ane for cooking and maintained a hydroponic
greenhouse with radishes, tomatoes, and even
bananas. Its construction had been supported by
a donation of two thousand pounds from Alvin

87
 able start construction in September 1972, dur-
ing his fifth year, and to install himself by Christ-
mas. After having lived in the house for two years
with his family, he was asked to destroy it in 1975.
By that time the Eco-­House had already re-
ceived wide attention from the British press,
architectural magazines, as well as British tele­
vision. It was the main subject of a BBC Open Pro-
gram for Television episode in June 1973 entitled
“Clearings of a Concrete Jungle,” which featured
the promotional line “Spring is here and the time
is ripe for planting in the streets.”3 Other publica-
tions about the house included “The House That
Grows” and “A New Way of Living” in the Lon-
don Garden News, “Living off the Sun in South
London” in The Observer, and “A Revolutionary
Structure” in Oz magazine (Figure 3). 4
Despite the extensive press coverage and the
massive logistical and administrative struggle
to acquire permission to use land for an experi-
mental facility, Caine failed his final examina-
tions at the AA and never received his diploma
as an architect. In his final presentation, he did
Figure 3. The Eco-House
in Oz (November 1972).
Courtesy of Grahame
Caine.
88 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2
not present to the committee any architectural
drawings. He did present, however, endless ar-
rays of scientific diagrams and tables monitor-
ing in excruciating detail the performance of the
Eco-­House’s interconnected machines, as well as
sketches that envisioned an alternative political
reality. Although Caine envisioned his scientific
analyses as a crusade for the individual’s political
liberation, the jury could never quite forgive the
obliteration of an “architectural middle ground,”
that is, his rejection of conventional forms of ar-
chitectural representation. In 2008, when this
author met Caine in Ronda, Spain, and asked
him to recollect this story, he was comically apa-
thetic to his deprivation of the architect’s certi-
fied title.
This was normal at the time. They could give you
funding for a project they believed in, but they
could not risk giving a degree to someone like
me, interested more in biology than in drawings.
Honestly though, it did not matter to me. I was con-
vinced at that point that architecture is immoral.5
Even though Caine failed his thesis exams, the
AA hired him as an instructor the day after his
presentation.
The story of the Eco-­House in South London
raises a significant disciplinary paradox. It was
an experimental laboratory sponsored by the En-
vironmental Council of London and a house that
compelled the public’s imagination as well as
the interest of the popular press; it raised hopes
for an alternative sustainable occupation of the
urban sphere. At the same time, it was rejected
and notoriously criticized by the architectural
community for its lack of canonical references
to core disciplinary conventions: investigations
of form, proportions, and spatial syntax. Alvin
Boyarski and Martin Pawley recognized this
critical moment of disciplinary outreach, think-
ing of the Eco-­House as a spatial tool for social
reform propelled by scientific investigations,
rather than as a project fostering technologi-
cal supremacy. Therefore, they both supported
Caine in his experiments and allowed him to
further his research in the academic framework
of the AA.
Because of architects like Boyarski, Pawley,
the Archigram group, and Cedric Price and cy-
berneticians like Gordon Pask and Roy Landau,
the AA at the time comprised a complex cultural
environment that espoused experimental work
originating from scientific discoveries. This
spirit nurtured, however, an ironic and humor-
ous “antiproject” to modernist technological
determinism. Price and the Archigram group
argued for the transference of military technol-
ogy to civilian use, as a social welfare mission in
an era of the global worker, student protest, and
cultural revolution. David Greene’s “LogPlug”
project and his L.A.W.u.N. series (pro-­landscape
and anti-­architecture projects) poignantly re-
sembled the Street Farmers’ collages in their
self-­published homonymous magazine. In Street
Farmer, Haggart and Crump portrayed the city
entirely covered by a carpet of nature with cows
roaming on top of embedded microelectronic
devices.
Apart from the AA, Caine’s Eco-­House was
part of a larger continuum of countercultural
practices that rose to cultural prominence in the
early 1970s. At the time, algae digesters, water fil-
tration systems, solar plate collectors, wind gen-
erators, composting toilets, and in general the
technical “know-­how” of alternative technologies
pervaded architectural debates, especially as re-
lated to communes in the United States South­
west and the squatting movement in England.
Caine’s work was contiguous to Stewart Brand’s
Whole Earth Catalog, Steve Baer’s Zomeworks,
John Todd’s New Alchemy Institute, Sim van der
Ryn’s Farallones Institute, and Integral Urban
House, as well as Colin Moorcarft’s “Recycling”
section in Architectural Design. These figures
represented an entire generation of environ-
mentally concerned architects and thinkers that
popularized autonomy from the grid of supplies
as an ecological and libertarian way of living
and acting. The 1970s witnessed dense environ-
mental debates with the terms “self-­sufficiency,”
“self-­reliance,” “life-­support,” and “living auton-
omy” surfacing as a consistent lexicon for alter-
native technologies, described by Architectural
Design in 1976 as an “architectural prevailing
cult project” that preoccupied the British avant-­
garde scene for several years.6
What is unique in Caine’s Eco-­House is sim-
ply that it was built. Caine was clearly a step
ahead of Archigram’s pictorial iconography.
The Eco-­House did not represent a cultural fas-
cination with self-­reliance but was actually an
integrated household system that functioned
as closed-­loop ecology. Moreover, Caine started
working on the logistics of the project in 1970
(while studying at the AA), evidently before
Brenda and Robert Vale’s Autonomous House of
1975 and the Integral Urban House at Berkeley
in the late 1970s. In this sense, the Eco-­House
cannot be historically interpreted as a direct re-
sponse to the 1973 oil crisis (as were many other
projects of a similar nature). It preceded the oil
crisis and emerged from an investigation on self-­
sufficient systems that occurred before the crisis
popularized the energy problem. In addition to
its alliance with the 1970s do-­it-­yourself, off-­the-­
grid countercultural movement, the Eco-­House
conjures key disciplinary questions about the
physiology of inhabitation, the nature of the de-
sign process, and the idea that large-­scale urban
lyd ia kal l i pol iti, F rom Sh it to F o o d | 89
 change may occur from an alternative aware-
ness of the domestic interior.
More specifically, the Eco-­House was built
and inhabited by its architect, who used his
body as a test bed for living experimentation;
it was an integrated system where a man and
his physiology of ingestion and excretion be-
came a part of the system he inhabited. Caine
called the house a “semi-­scientific” experiment,
which for him was only partially designed but
mostly calculated and grown. With the re­
cycling of organic substances, Caine imagined
the segmentation of matter into infinitesimal
units that could then be recombined into new
assemblages. This line of thinking propelled a
chemical imagery in architectural thought, be-
yond the implications of recycling byproducts as
a response to the solid waste crisis. In addition,
he conceived of the Eco-­House as a physical and
spatial tool that not only contributed to the indi-
vidual’s liberation but also simultaneously dem-
onstrated an answer to this ontological problem:
creating an autonomous personal space or a
protective environmental enclosure around the
human. Therefore beyond technical innovations
in ecological design, the Eco-­House demon-
strates an unrooted spatial paradigm, detached
from the urban condition, which alludes to a
novel territorial paradigm of the twentieth cen-
tury that German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk
named modern individualism.7
The Architect as Guinea Pig
While living in the Eco-­House, Caine used him-
self and his family as guinea pigs in order to test
the function of several components of the house.8
He experimented with his waste, his cook-
ing habits, his use of water, monitoring closely
every activity of daily practice until the day the
house was demolished. Caine was undoubtedly
the steward of the house; he alone knew how to
feed the house with the right nutrients­—how to
supply engines with the appropriate amounts of
fuel, and how much to water the plants in the
greenhouse. The architect, therefore, was an in-
dispensable biological part of the house he built.
He portrayed himself as a combustion engine for
generating electricity, connected to the house in
90 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2
a diagram where excretion was a vital constituent
of the system’s sustenance (Figure 4). In many
respects, the house was grown more than con-
structed. It needed care from its caretaker; with-
out human presence its living biotechnical sys-
tems would degenerate and die.
This absolute requirement, for daily connec-
tion to the house to assure its wellness, meant
that Caine rarely left the house. Robin Middleton,
then technical editor of Architectural Design and
a colleague of Caine at the AA, humorously
spoke of a Gordian knot between Caine and the
house. As Middleton recalls, Caine “never left, in
order to assure that all systems were working. At
some point, he had to leave for a while for some
reason, someone got ill, and he had his favorite
AA student to look after the house and make
sure that all systems keep going.”9 According
to Middleton, everyday housekeeping habits af-
fected the health of the Eco-­House and vice versa.
In other words, the house’s health was physio-
logically codependent with the dweller’s health
as in an interlinked biological pattern.
The fragile bond between occupant and
shelter­— as enveloping environmental enclo-
sure—demonstrates an intensive preoccupa-
tion with the physiology of inhabitation. Caine
considered detailed instructions for daily house-
keeping to be a remedy and a regulating mecha-
nism for the health of the Eco-­House, as well as
his own fitness. In many respects, housekeeping
was a curative practice for Caine.
Nevertheless, there were daily housekeep-
ing routines that were unrelated to cleanliness
and hygiene. Caine was intensely preoccupied
with the physiological footprint of his inhabita-
tion and developed an obsession with managing,
retaining, and reorganizing his excrements. In
his interview he mentions, “I did several small-­
scale experiments, defecating in buckets. It was
awful; I don’t want go into details. I mixed feces
with liquids in different solid-­to-­liquid ratios.
If they were too liquid, they produced no gas.”10
Describing his house as a life-­support system
and sarcastically alluding to the architect’s con-
founded identity, Caine argued that it allowed the
architect to better relate to his own shit. Caine
wrote:

Within the ecological house, which I believe to be
a real alternative to official architecture, the indi-
vidual is not only involved in its production, he is
directly involved within the biological cycles that
constitute so much of its life support systems. one
relates to one’s own shit.
11
As witnessed in several diagrams, drawings,
and statements, the act of defecation was vital
to the nutrition of the house. Caine was tied
to his house with an umbilical cord. Feces as
a material substance were incorporated in the
power generation the house. Like plants and
animals, humans were also a requisite part of
the overall house system in a complete cycle
Figure 4. Grahame
Caine’s diagram for the
Eco-House. Courtesy of
Grahame Caine. This
drawing was reprinted
in Stefan Szcelkun’s
Survival Scrapbook,
vol. 5: Energy (Bristol,
UK: Unicorn Bookshop
Press, 1975).
of organic matter, based on the interaction
of plant and animal life.12 Moreover, he orga-
nized an extensive step-­by-­step procedure on
how to hold on to feces, in order not to damage
aquatic subecosystems, allowing natural de-
composition for the reconstitution of food and
energy.13 To accomplish successful conversion
of energy cycles, Caine thoroughly studied the
physiological cycles of humans, organisms, and
machines. Numbers, statistics, numeric calcu-
lations, and the logistics of injection and excre-
tion were vital components of his research. In
order to construct a recirculatory household,
Caine needed to thoroughly examine his inter-
nal biology.
lyd ia kal l i pol iti, F rom Sh it to F o o d | 91
 that the human body fascinates me. How much
energy can it derive from one boiled egg? How
long does it keep you, as an animal, going? It is
really amazing.14

Alongside caloric calculations for the conver-

sion of “excrements to food,” Caine used him-
self and his wife in order to draw diagrams and
take measures for the bathroom commode. The
toilet bowl was manufactured by Caine himself
after a series of studies on man’s digestive sys-
tem and the interface between defecation and
the human’s rear. Based on his experiments,
he drew a close-­up of routine defecation, docu-
menting the regular locations of liquid drops in
a given area (Figures 5, 6, 7). Caine also drew
sections and plans recording variable rear pres-
sures, inspired by Alexander Kira’s diagrams
in The Bathroom. 15 The book was put together
by the Center for Housing and Environmental
Studies at Cornell University, in collaboration
with Cornell’s Aeronautical Laboratory, in order
to optimize the activities of urination and defe­
cation for NASA’s manned space missions in
zero-­gravity conditions.
Caine was also influenced by the Gobar bio-­
gas movement building at the time in India and
Figure 5. The Eco-
focused on the topic of assembling methane
House’s toilet bowl,
drawn by Grahame generators.16 One of the most prominent figures
Caine. Courtesy of in this field, Ram Bux Singh, directed bio-­gas
Grahame Caine. experiments for two decades at the Research
Station at Ajitmal in Northern India. Bux Singh
Figure 6. The Eco-
developed more than two hundred low-­cost di-
House’s toilet bowl,
drawn by Grahame
gesters designed to convert plant and animal
Caine. Courtesy of waste into composted fertilizer and methane for
Grahame Caine. fuel.17 He invented a chemical method that not
only accelerated the fermentation and decompo-
sition in the composting process but also pro-
duced a valuable byproduct, combustible gas.18
During the early 1970s, the bibliography on the
topic of methane generation (natural and non-
polluting power sources) boomed. The work of
Numbers were very important. I did all the home- Ram Bux Singh, whose fame spread to Britain
work. I knew how many calories and how much and the United States, was popularized through
energy was being used up by the human body. I The Whole Earth Catalog, Mother Earth News,
broke down my daily activity into components, and Colin Moorcraft’s “Recycling” section in
which was an important part of running the Eco-­ Architectural Design. Bux Singh claims to have
House. I monitored daily what I ate. I have to say received ten letters a day as a result of articles ap-

92 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2

pearing in these periodicals, all asking for more brated for proper function, however Caine could
information about his experiments.19 not quite pinpoint what it was that eventually
Overall, the initiative of reusing worthless by­ produced methane. Whatever the malfunctions,
products of chemical reactions for something Caine was still captivated by the thought that
useful was fundamental for the rising discourse the design of the system was overtaken by life
of ecological design in the postwar period. Like (Figure 8).
Witold Rybczynski’s experiments in recycling
sulphur, an abundant worthless chemical ele-
ment, into building blocks, Caine and Bux Singh
furthered expectations for waste recovery by pro-
posing to use human and animal excrement.20
This line of thinking constructed a connecting
value system across nations, from the methane
digesters in the farmlands of India to Britain and
the United States, through periodicals on alterna-
tive lifestyles and structures. Caine’s absolute in-
volvement with the Eco-­House’s organic lifecycle
opened up the possibility of a new world, one that
recycled materials perpetually and fed all leftover
substances back into cycles of production.

Chemosynthesis
When speaking of his digesters, Caine could not
quite relinquish his fascination for the strategic
management of organic matter. The process of
recycling necessitated a series of organizational
assessments similar to decisions taken through-
out a design process, yet the end product was
somehow unpredictable when compared to the
architect’s plan. Each digester was carefully cali-

Figure 7. The Eco-

House’s toilet bowl,
drawn by Grahame
Caine. Courtesy of
Grahame Caine.

Figure 8. A cross-section
of the Eco-House,
published in Street
Farmer 1. Courtesy of
Grahame Caine and
Peter Crump.

lyd ia kal l i pol iti, F rom Sh it to F o o d | 93

 Caine carefully employed the phase change of
materials as a regulating mechanism to moder-
ate temperature in different sections of the Eco-­
House. In particular, he fabricated a solar collec-
tor out of wax, like a satchel on a window, which
melted when the window opened and returned to
wax when the window closed. The wax’s change
of state emitted more energy than conventional
cooling mechanisms. Still, it was more than the
performance of the material that mattered to
Caine, as he was watching it grow in a molded
state, inflating and deflating. He could well un-
derstand the utility of the wax’s cycle, but the ef-
fect of the material’s phase change, on a molecu-
lar scale, left him speechless to the extent that
he described it as a “germinal form of art.” As
he recalls,
The wax was pink and I put red paint in it, just
so that it looks wild. One day, the expansion and
contraction of the material got out of control and it
burst into the whole wall. Just like that, suddenly,
there was all this wax all over the room. I would
never call this type of material misbehavior a fail-
ure. I had an artwork on my wall.21
In the Eco-­House, several interior and the ex-
terior envelope surfaces were made from materi-
als that were temperature tuned at a molecular
level. Caine’s archive included samples of thin
membranes that underwent phase changes in
response to varying environmental conditions.
Like the wax window, Caine installed an invis-
ible wall membrane that purified water, which
was developed by the General Atomics in San
Diego.22 The product’s advertisement in Science
Digest featured a joyful woman behind a thin
translucent partition, which would modify its
material state from transparent to opaque ac-
cording to inner microclimates. This variable
“see-­through” quality in membranes was taken
on by Day Charoudi, a colleague and friend of
Stewart Brand and Steve Baer and principal
of the Suntek Research Laboratory in Corte
Madera, California. A close successor of the Eco-­
House, Charoudi’s house would operate like an
“organism through the exclusive use of interac-
tive materials that amended their microstruc-
94 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2
ture followed by ecological parameters.”23 In both
Caine’s and Charoudi’s cases, aspirations were to
explore the possibilities of design with biological
substances and organic reactions that can par-
tially be controlled on a molecular level.
Caine’s series of digesters in the Eco-­House
were deployed to produce methane and to power
the house with self-­sufficient means. Parallel to
that goal, however, Caine was enchanted with the
methodic evolutionary character of the recycling
process and the transformation of substances.
Although the Eco-­House was built out of wood
panels, steel beams, cellophane enclosures, and
other components, the way the house operated
as a system of cyclical interdependencies raised
an alternative understanding of materiality. His
experiments signaled a shift from mechanical
devices to soft material structures. Like the wax
used in the window, many substances in the re-
cycling process existed temporally in a “smectic”
material state, derivative from the Greek word
rlejs, meaning “smeared,” as in the case of
liquid crystals in a mesomorphic phase, where
molecules align in series of layers, form alli-
ances, and coalesce.
In physics, for instance, a phase diagram
shows the preferred physical states of matter at
different temperatures and pressures; within
each phase, the material is uniform with respect
to its chemical composition and physical state.
At typical temperatures and pressures, water is
liquid, but it becomes solid ice if the temperature
is lowered below 273 K and gaseous steam if the
temperature is raised above 373 K. Such numeric
thresholds, equivalent to the case of water, were
carefully applied by Caine to achieve the func-
tions of energy supply. In this sense, Caine’s
series of digesters in the Eco-­House, aside from
an assemblage of machines, suggest a theory of
space and matter under constant reformation.
Caine was far more invested in the procedure
of assessing and channeling organic matter as
a design process than with the conventional de-
sign of structure and envelope. Inside the house,
substances were nurtured, grown, and developed
until the moment of their “deliberate death,” to
be transformed to energy and food for plants
(Figure 9). One could argue that the Eco-­House,
with its assemblage of interconnected machines,
was a type of life form. The architect’s design in-
tentions were focused on the controlled growth
of living tissue, step by step, until substances
would reach a certain threshold of performance.
Therefore, the design of the Eco-­House has lit-
tle to do with the construction of an enclosure
and more to do with the design of a parametric
biological system, where thresholds, ranges, and
domains of performance constitute the major de-
sign criteria.
Previous to his work on the Eco-­House, Caine
startled the British wing of the profession when
he entered a 1971 competition for a self-­growing
bamboo shelter, announced as the “house that
grows itself.”24 In his competition entry, Caine
proposed to raise giant Japanese bamboo, which
can grow to a height of twenty meters in three
months, to be trained into shape for the frame-
work of a home. The entire bamboo house was
estimated to cost between four hundred and five
hundred pounds. This particularly low budget
was based on the idea that the house would grow
itself, rather than being constructed, thus re-
ducing the cost of labor. The architect proposed
three main stages to grow the house: In the first
Figure 9. The Eco-
House, as published
in Garden News (May 5,
1972). Courtesy of
Grahame Caine and
Peter Crump.
lyd ia kal l i pol iti, F rom Sh it to F o o d | 95
 stage, bamboo would grow and the main drain-
age would be laid to a communal service area. In
the second stage, the bamboo was aligned to a
formwork and curved into a dome with a wooden
frame covered by flexible PVC (polyvinyl chlo-
ride), until it finally took shape.25 In the third
stage, when the bamboo had grown into place,
the growing box would be removed and the bot-
tom of the bamboo sealed and cast into small
concrete pad foundations.
Caine’s research for the bamboo house and
his overall investment in engineering organic
processes evolved into the prototype of the Eco-­
House. Excerpted from Howard Mattson’s article
“Keeping Astronauts Alive,” Caine underlined
and rewrote the word “chemosynthesis” in his
research papers.26 The reference was to NASA’s
conversion diagrams for space cabins, though
Caine’s efforts focused on developing a molecu-
lar type of design process through moderating
chemical compositions.
In chemical engineering, chemosynthesis her-
alded a new biological approach, which was eclips-
ing algae. Living microorganisms­— hydrogen
monads­—were used as hydrogen-­eating bacteria,
assimilating carbon dioxide and urea as they
grew; their cell stuff could (theoretically) serve as
a protein-­rich diet without energy from sunlight.
The whole reaction could take place in the dark.
At the time, Mattson described “chemosynthesis”
as a “black box” in the closed ecology of the space-
craft, since it did not provide oxygen directly. The
water needed to be subsequently broken down in
the electrolytic systems to hydrogen (recycled
to the biosystem) and oxygen (two-­t hirds to the
bacteria, one-­t hird to the astronaut).27 Overall,
the approach labeled as “chemosynthesis” car-
ried out the hypothesis that matter could be seg-
mented, going down many scales, in the hope of
refiguring substance at an atomic level or at least
in the hope that all solid waste could be decom-
posed to a powder-­like state. NASA’s conversion
machines treated all human waste chemically
and aimed to dissolve matter into base data, such
as the prime strings of proteins and eventually to
atoms that could potentially be reconstructed in
new combinations.
96 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2
Following this line of thinking, the interior
space of the Eco-­House was an environment that
was nurtured and was dependent on the subtle
fluctuations of materials’ phase changes and the
growth of living substances. For Caine, this frag-
ile process was an evolutionary design practice
with unexpected outcomes. Even though certain
experiments failed to convert all input into us-
able output, it becomes evident from the archi-
tect’s confessions that recycling is not just about
optimized material conversion but about the
journey of transference and the migration of one
thing to another.
Domesticated Machines
In the unpublished addendum to Street Farmer
2, a photograph of the Eco-­House with a trac-
tor shown next to it are referred to as a “space-
ship” on earth. Though ironic in its deliberation,
Caine recurrently used NASA’s terminology to
describe the Eco-­House as a fully regenerative
“life support system.” His personal archive was
replete with NASA papers for manned space
missions, bioastronautics, and aviation medicine
on the ecology of closed systems and reports on
the feasibility of NASA’s living simulators, sup-
ported with mathematical equations for water
reclamation from urine.28 The collection of these
essays addressed a readership of chemical engi-
neers and microbiologists, and therefore Caine
went through exhaustive study in order to under-
stand these papers in detail and implement their
findings. The Eco-­House could not have existed
without citations on methods and techniques
like electrodialysis, closed-­cycle air evaporation,
vacuum compression distillation, or measured
substance reclamation from man’s waste prod-
ucts in weightless conditions.29
Caine also studied the American scientific
bibliography on space heating, including George
Lof’s General Report on the Use of Solar Energy.30
Most of these papers originated from United
Nations reports on global energy consumption
for heating, which accounted for 20 to 30 percent
of total energy consumption.31 The confluence of
papers from NASA and the United Nations was
no accident. Caine laboriously worked toward as-
sembling a database with accurate information
on global ecosystems in order to provide “a re-
alistic alternative to the exploitational vision of
the environment” in the form of a house that
“steals” natural resources and reuses captured
energy to power itself as a life-­support system.32
Caine was staunchly critical of the archi-
tect’s ceaseless desire to “architecturalize” the
universe philosophically and endow all design
products with logos; he was pointedly apathetic
to figurative metaphors and ideational associa-
tions with spaceships. Rather, he espoused the
Eco-­House as “a shed” that actually performed
like a regenerative system. As he speaks of his
research anthology, “the only agencies with the
capacity to monitor global ecosystems, with ac-
cess to statistics, to relate these findings and
handle all the data are the state agencies: state
propped universities, the military, NASA, etc.
who aren’t going to give out good news anyway,
at least without conditions.”33 Reprocessing all
this technical information for a different cause,
Caine domesticated all the circuits and machines
in the Eco-­House with the objective to sustain
life perpetually by fine-­t uning cyclical material
interdependencies.
The Eco-­House included solar collection pan-
els that collected heat and filtered rainwater, a se-
ries of tanks and digesters that converted human
and vegetable waste to methane gas for cooking
and nutrients for soil cultivation, as well as a fish
pond that acted on the fringe of the cycle as a
heat sink, like an extra water storage tank and
a source of protein.34 It was this performative
utility that brought Caine’s activist ideas to frui-
tion, to the extent of receiving financial endow-
ments from public authorities like the London
Environmental Council. The Eco-­House was lit-
erally a productive machine that performed more
functions than simply to shelter; it collected or-
ganic and environmental dross­— sun, rainwater,
organic waste, wind­— and returned gas, food,
heat, hot water, clean water, and electricity. The
engineering value of the processing machines­—
primary digesters, algae digesters, algae tanks,
solar flat plate collectors, rainwater collection
tanks, soilless (hydroponic) vegetable beds, wind
generators­—made a strong rationalist case for
Caine.35 Even though Caine was carefully imple-
menting technical means to broadcast a socially
activist agenda, eventually he acknowledged that
it was the Eco-­House’s network of machines that
provided him with funding and that popularized
the project to a broad audience. He wrote:
Even just the physical “goodies” of the Ecological
House should make it desirable to a lot of people
within the present value system. The thought of
free gas, heating, and food with no sewerage and
water rates is appealing, to say the least, so it would
not only be dug by “eco-­freaks” who are already
into it, but perhaps by a lot of straight people.36
In many respects, the Eco-­House was a “liv-
ing machine,” which, along the lines of compa-
rable experimental facilities such as John Todd’s
Living Machines in the New Alchemy Institute,
conduced to a critique of Le Corbusier’s meta-
phor for a “machine for living.” Caine, who
consistently evaded any connections to the ide-
ologies of the modern movement, was bemused
when confronted with the reflection of ecology
announcing a new type of modernist ethos.37
For Caine, it is clear that the pervasive recovery
of ecological concerns in contemporary design
debates is of different political and ideologi-
cal orientation compared to those of the 1970s.
In the past, ecology embodied an alternative
to mainstream political action, while today it
stands as a defense mechanism for the rescue
from late capitalism.
At the time that the Eco-­House was conceived,
designed, and constructed, the assemblage of
technological apparatuses was viewed as a liberat-
ing toolset for the individual. The connection be-
tween the Eco-­House­—a three-­dimensional col-
lection of domesticated machines­— and Reyner
Banham’s famous “environmental bubble” col-
lage is evident.38 However, for Caine and the
Street Farmers, self-­sufficiency was understood
as a political statement against consumerism and
capitalism. The productivity of the Eco-­House, in
terms of its payoff in food and energy, embodied
for its builders a grain of resistance against the
lyd ia kal l i pol iti, F rom Sh it to F o o d | 97
 state’s networks of centralized control. According that in its turn produces food, gas, and heating,
to Caine, capitalism could be illustrated in a lin- represents an alternative political reality of cycli-
ear scheme, while the recycling of organic mat- cal behaviors where material can be used and re-
ter, the collection of rainwater and sunshine used perpetually.39

Figure 10. Unpublished

addendum to Street
Farmer 2 (1972–1973),
featuring the Eco-House
under construction.
Courtesy of Peter Crump.

98 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2

“From Here We Grow”
The Eco-­House carried a large hand-­w ritten ban-
ner in its façade that read, “from here we grow.”
The same logo appeared on BBC’s open program
for television, as well as in several publications in
the press (Figure 10). The phrase was inspired by
Murray Bookchin’s Post-­Scarcity Anarchism and
his definition of liberatory technology as a means
of endowing “power to the people.”40 It also ap-
peared on the cover of Anarchy in 1971 (Figure
11). Featuring the growth of new roots, the logo
implied that with the intelligent use of technol-
ogy, each person can create living environments
and habitation islands in the city, detached from
the centralized networks of energy distributed by
the state’s authorities.
Wrath against the government, policymaking
for the distribution of resources, highlighting
the inequality of living standards, and decrying
institutionalized education were vivid in numer- Figure 11. The Eco-House
able proactive manifesto drawings of the Street in Oz (November 1972).
Farmers and statements idealistically calling for Courtesy of Grahame
Caine.
freedom. Caine drew tractors demolishing build-
ings, the statue of liberty wearing an oxygen
mask, and a fist growing out of the land with the
inscription “up against the hedge” (Figures 12,
13). His sketches were coupled by rarified reports:
“Caine, to free people from what he fears may
soon be a massive grid of centralized control.”41
In another statement he declared, “We seek in-
dependence from wasteful, dirty public power.”42
Although veiled behind facts and hard science,
the Eco-­House cannot be separated from political
ethics. It announced an ideology that the only way
to be free is to detach oneself from the govern-
ment. In this sense, it is deeply ironic that NASA’s
regenerative life-­support systems opened the
ground for an ecological fantasy in the promise
lyd ia kal l i pol iti, F rom Sh it to F o o d | 99
Figure 12. Unpublished
Street Farmer conceptual
drawing for the TV
documentary “Clearings
in a Concrete Jungle,”
broadcast in 1973.
Courtesy of Grahame
Caine.
Figure 13. Unpublished
Street Farmer conceptual
drawing for the TV
documentary “Clearings
in a Concrete Jungle,”
broadcast in 1973.
Courtesy of Grahame
Caine.
100 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2
of freedom. In the context of Britain’s counter­
culture in the early 1970s, the “closed system”
was imagined by Caine to be the only way out.
Caine and the Street Farmers were locked in
fury, and that fury necessitated a credible prac-
tice. 43 In many respects, the Eco-­House was anger
articulated in the form of a house; it not only ex-
pressed a radical reaction against the alienating
reality of inanimate gray blocks but was also built
on hard science. Even though the Eco-­House has
often been described as revolutionary, in refer-
ence to its technical concepts, Caine fervently in-
sisted all along that his intention was to twist the
hard data into a revolt against the existing social
and political situation. 44
It is critical to observe that the revolt did not
begin from the streets and the official demon-
stration squares but from the interior of the
urban tissue, the very fabric within which one
lives. 45 The Street Farmers imagined the core
of the social and political revolution would start
from the domestic interior of the house, with
a design based on a new way of inhabiting the
land. In this sense, the Eco-­House was an in-
strument of what Caine, Crump, and Haggart
called “co-­operative liberation” by means of the
indi­vidual’s manipulation of biological cycles.
Caine’s underlying supposition was that by con-
trolling our biology, we could eventually repos-
sess control of the enveloping social and urban
sphere. As Caine argued,
By treating shelter as energy system to provide a
basic life support system it is hoped to reduce the
individual’s dependence upon a centralized power
structure, and this increase the choice of the indi-
vidual’s area of contribution within the context of
a life killing culture. 46
 Upon the house’s completion, Caine moni- Within the institutionalized political arena of
tored day after day and with great precision the the city, the Eco-­House is like an “island.” This
biological performance of the house. He kept literal and conceptual detachment from the main
numerous tables with the altitude of the sun’s urban supply networks represented a collective
zenith on a monthly basis; spectral transmit-
tance diagrams with glass, teflon, weatherable Figure 14. Diagram
mylar, and polythene; diagrams of spectral en- monitoring the
ergy percentage transmittance (based on the environmental efficiency
of the Eco-House,
angle of solar incidence on different materials);
Grahame Caine,
measurements for the optimum pitch of glass- 1972–1974. Courtesy
house angles (for the maximum winter gain of Grahame Caine.
from the sun’s spectral energy); and diagrams
of energy wavelength spectrums with various Figure 15. Diagram
monitoring the
sun altitudes (Figures 14, 15, 16). Like his own
environmental efficiency
body, the house was a laboratory table, which of the Eco-House,
Caine called a “test-­bed.”47 Nevertheless, Caine Grahame Caine,
poignantly characterized all his experiments as 1972–1974. Courtesy
a kind of “semi-­science”: a calculated scientific of Grahame Caine.
methodology driven by political motivations to
Figure 16. Diagram
overturn the very structure of society. 48 As the
monitoring the
Street Farmers wrote in their self-­published environmental efficiency
Domeletter, “We are not so much concerned with of the Eco-House,
providing alternative means of servicing exist- Grahame Caine,
ing systems, as changing these systems, the 1972–1974. Courtesy
of Grahame Caine.
very logic of which precipitated ecological di-
saster.”49 In fact Caine had little, if any, interest
in the optimization of results and the servicing
of the grid’s supplies. Technical studies were a
valid enough pretense for convincing the au-
thorities to borrow the land for experimentation.
The Eco-­House was never intended as an eco-
logical remedy for environmental catastrophes.
It was neither a tool of ethical restoration in de-
sign thinking, nor a technical solution to envi-
ronmental problems. Rather, the house was at
once an ontological and scientific problem, com-
bining in a single space numbers along with a
vision for a new society. This becomes prescient
in the following quotes:

We don’t intend to become white-­coated full-­time

laboratory workers, rather amateurs producing
energy just as gardeners on allotments produce
food . . . For the purpose of this report, we might
describe ourselves as occasional liberatory tech-
nologists (if the term had meaning to anyone other
than ourselves).50

lyd ia kal l i pol iti, F rom Sh it to F o o d | 101

 renunciation of the urban condition, which was
portrayed as a catastrophic environment that re-
strained individual imagination and freedom. In
the minds of the Street Farmers, the abundant
resources of nature constituted a substitute net-
work that the built environment could tap into,
rather than into the veins of the man-­made
manufactured network of energy distribution.
Murray Bookchin’s phrase, “from here we grow,”
was dear to the Street Farmers as it rendered a
visual analog to a reconstituted political reality.
Being self-­reliant, the Eco-­House was an island,
uprooted from the urban context, like its own
planet. We may perceive this detachment, out-
Figure 17.
“Transmogrification,”
the Street Farmers,
1972; published in Street
Farmer. Courtesy of
Grahame Caine.
102 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2
lined as an ecological and political imperative, as
a fundamental reorientation of the house in rela-
tion to its urban condition. The Eco-­House sug-
gested a new network of interrelationships with
the natural elements, a network that would be su-
perimposed on the existing grid of supplies and
would challenge its authority, like a parasitic web.
In many respects, this initiative idealizes na-
ture as distinct from the man-­made world and re-
inforces a binary opposition between the “natu­
ral” and the “man-­made” that we may evalu­ate
as regressively romanticized or even naïve. How­
ever, looking deeper into Caine’s profound elabo-
rations on artificially altering natural resources,
as well as Haggart’s and Crump’s drawings, the
authors advocated for a genetically modified
state of nature’s integration into the built envi-
ronment. In Street Farmer, Caine, Haggart, and
Crump named this process of nature’s fusion
into the inanimate built space “transmogrifica-
tion.” Drawings, which also appeared in Caine’s
publications on the Eco-­House, illustrated pixels
of nature injected into buildings, altering their
material state; buildings appeared in a “meso-
phase” condition between a natural and an ar-
tificial condition (Figure 17). The etymology of
the word transmogrification, which dates back to
Francois Rabelais, depicts a strange or grotesque
transformation of the built environment, one
where buildings are overhauled by natural forces
almost in a vulgar manner. Likewise, the highly
satiric drawings remained at the level of iconic
figuration and visualized only a metaphor for
what the term could actually imply.
However, Caine’s experiments for the Eco-­
House pragmatically backed up these ideologies
and forecast an ecological approach distant from
the positivist sustainable agenda and techno-­
rational standards of contemporary practices.
This house alluded to the reinvention of physi-
ological and ontological interrelationships be-
tween the individual, the habitat, and the envi-
ronmental sphere, thus extending the oikos from
the body outward to the intricate waves of global
flows (Figure 18).

Conclusions
Weaving Caine’s political assertions with the
premises of NASA’s space probes, it is striking
to observe how the same cybernetic prescription
of a system migrates from governmental com-
plexes to a countercultural political theory medi-
ated through a different ideological lens. On the
one hand, NASA’s scenario for self-­sufficiency
combines a project of technological supremacy
with the aspiration to conquer a new frontier and
an underlying colonial modality. On the other
hand, the equipped interior of the Eco-­House is
fantasized as an “exterior” to the political reality.
The Eco-­House is envisioned as a strategy for po-
litical autonomy, enabling withdrawal from the
tentacles of society and the state’s organizational
infrastructure. NASA’s space probe and the Eco-­ Figure 18. The Eco-
House represent two very different political reali- House, in Colin
ties and existential problems, yet they came to be Moorcraft’s “Recycling”
section in Architectural
expressed by the same strategy of self-­reliance. Design (July 1972).
Recycling waste, either organic or inorganic, Courtesy of Grahame
was fundamental for the rising discourse of eco- Caine.
logical design. As a result of viewing the earth as
a closed system, the new ideal household system
of the 1960s and 1970s would be immune to ma-
terial and information loss. Leftovers and waste
were negated in a compulsive convergence of all
wasteful streams to useful ones. The re­cycling
of materials promised a new world in which one

lyd ia kal l i pol iti, F rom Sh it to F o o d | 103

 could regenerate materials perpetually and feed
all leftover substances back into cycles of produc-
tion; it spoke of the world as a perceivable com-
plete whole, very much in contrast to George
Bataille’s notion of excess and base materialism.
Such a view of the world is philosophically
problematic not only because it suggests a natu-
ral cosmic order but also because it is technically
unviable. The vast majority of regenerative sys-
tems and recirculatory houses failed to function
autonomously. Recycling systems are extremely
fragile closed systems that redirect all input into
output; they are more than likely to exhibit un­
predictable behaviors, such as the production of
new substances that are not predicted in the inter-
nal organization of the system. Robin Middleton
claimed that the Eco-­House at some point de-
railed from its normative cycle and produced its
own destruction, when Caine left the house be-
cause of an emergency. Normally, Middleton re-
calls, Caine would never leave the house in order
to assure that all systems were working properly.
In Middleton’s own words, “Caine had a family
emergency and needed to leave England for a few
weeks; he then trained his favorite AA student to
take care of the house while he was gone. In the
meantime, the student who stayed at the house
got the flu, and the doctors gave him antibiot-
ics. The antibiotics came through the system in
his “crap,” and the crap was part of the whole re­
cycling system. The whole system was eventually
destroyed. It was amazing!” Middleton said, “The
antibiotics killed the house!”51
To conclude with this anecdote, and indepen-
dent of the success or failure of the Eco-­House
as a technical system, the real concern central
to this study is how biological and environmen-
tal processes invade the domestic realm and the
practice of everyday life, how the division and dis-
tribution of organic, growing matter is vital for
the sustenance of the house’s health. It is finally
critical to observe that in the rise of postwar eco-
logical design theories, recycling was more than
a technical task; it was a psychosocial position
for the migration of life via the phase change of
material substances. In this view, matter does
not come to an end; it is not wasted. Instead, it
changes state. Recycling, therefore, is not just
104 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2
about the formation of new materials but also
about the transference and migration of proper-
ties from one substance to another and all the
intermediate stages of a productive cycle.
au t hor bio gr a ph y
Lydia Kallipoliti is a practicing architect, engi-
neer, and theorist living in New York City. She
holds architecture degrees from the Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki in Greece and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is
completing her doctorate at Princeton University.
Currently, she is adjunct assistant professor at
the Cooper Union and Columbia University.
Kallipoliti is the editor of “EcoRedux: Design
Remedies for a Dying Planet,” a special issue
of Architectural Design. She is also the author of
the EcoRedux, an online nonprofit educational
resource for ecological experiments in the post-
war period; it was honored at the Fourteenth
International Webby Awards and won a silver
medal in the W3 competition of the International
Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
no t e s
1. Bruce Haggart, “Clearings of a Concrete Jungle,”
Street Farm Open programme for Television, in
BBC2. Broadcast on June 18, 1973, on the BBC 2 Street
Farmer Show and narrated by TV broadcaster Melvyn
Bragg.
2. Lydia Kallipoliti in conversation with Grahame
Caine in Ronda, Spain, January 8, 2008. In the inter-
view, Grahame Caine mentioned: “I remember that
the neighbors of the Eco-­House used to complain that
the house was an eyesore. They were really upset and
wanted it removed. Honestly, they accelerated the pro-
cess of pulling the house down . . . After the demoli-
tion, the land returned to its normal state, producing
nothing.”
3. The TV documentary was broadcast on June 18,
1973, on BBC 2, narrated by Melvyn Bragg. It was fea-
tured in the London Radio Times, June 16–22, 1973: 29.
4. Accounts of the Eco-­House were published in
the following: Glenn Barker, “A New Way of Living,”
Garden News, no. 780 (June 15, 1973): 2–3. Grahame
Caine, “A Revolutionary Structure,” Oz, November
1972: 12–13, supplemented by Mike Moore’s diagrams
based on Grahame Caine’s originals; Grahame Caine,
“The Eco-­House,” in Street Farmer, ed. Bruce Haggart,
Peter Crump, nos. 1 and 2 (London, UK: 1971–1972):
unpaginated; Grahame Caine, “The Ecological House,”
Architectural Design 42, no. 3 (March 1972): 140–41;
Grahame Caine, “Street Farmhouse,” in Survival Scrap-
book, vol. 5: Energy, ed. Stefan Szcelkun, unpaginated
(Bristol, UK: Unicorn Bookshop Press, 1975); Grahame
Caine, “The Eco-­House,” Mother Earth News, March/
April 1973: http://www/motherearthnews.com/
Nature-­Community/1973-­03-­01/The-­Eco-­House.aspx;
Grahame Caine, Bruce Haggart, and Peter Crump,
“Some Proposals on the Reservicing of an Urban Ter-
raced House,” Domeletter, No. 4, ed. John Prenis, 1–6
(Philadelphia, Penn: Self-­Published, 1972 and in the
archives of the Architectural Association, London);
Gerald Leach, “Living Off the Sun in South London,”
The Observer, August 27, 1972: 1–2; Eve Williams,
“The House That Grows” (based on an interview with
Grahame Caine), Garden News no. 722 (May 5, 1972): 13.
5. Author’s interview with Caine, 2008.
6. See Martin Spring and Haig Beck, “Cooperative
Autonomies,” Architectural Design 47 (January 1976).
These notes were published on the contents pages of
the magazine.
7. See Peter Sloterdijk, “Cell Block, Egospheres,
Self-­Container,” Log 10 (Summer/Fall 2007): 89–108.
8. As Caine writes in Mother Earth News, “The archi-
tect becomes his own ideal guinea pig.” See “The Eco-­
House,” Mother Earth News (March/April 1973): n.p.
9. Author’s personal interview with Robin Middle-
ton, New York, N.Y., August 1, 2007.
10. Author’s interview with Caine, 2008.
11. Caine, “A Revolutionary Structure,” 12.
12. Caine, “The Eco-­House.”
13. Caine, “The Eco-­House.”
14. Author’s interview with Caine, 2008.
15. See Alexander Kira, The Bathroom (Ithaca, N.Y.:
Center for Housing and Environmental Studies, Cor-
nell University, 1966).
16. “Gobar” is the Hindi word for “cow dung.” For
a standard bibliography on methane generators, see
Ram Bux Singh, Generating Methane from Organic
Wastes; “How to Generate Electric Power from Gar-
bage” Mother Earth News, no. 3 (1967): http://www
.motherearthnews.com/Renewable-­E nergy/1970-­
05-­01/How-­To-­Generate-­Power-­From-­Garbage.aspx;
“Interview with Ram Bux Singh”; M. A. Indiani,
C. M. Acharye, “Biogas Plants: Their Installation,
Operation, Maintenance, and Use” (research paper
issued by Indian Council of Agricultural Research,
New Delhi, 1963); A. Ortega, “The Ecol Operation,”
research paper produced at the School of Architecture,
McGill University, Montreal Canada, 1972; “Gobar
Gas: Methane Experiments in India” Mother Earth
News, no. 12 (1969): http://www.motherearthnews
.com/Renewable-­Energy/1971-­11-­01/Gobar-­Gas.aspx.
17. “Interview with Ram Bux Singh” in Mother Earth
News, no. 18 (1973). See http://www.motherearthnews
.com/Nature-­Community/1972-­11-­01/The-­Plowboy-­
Interview-­Ram-­Bux-­Singh.aspx.
18. Ram Bux Singh, Generating Methane from Or-
ganic Wastes (Research paper, Gobar Gas Station in
Ajitmal, Etawah, India, 1973), 2.
19. “Interview with Ram Bux Singh.”
20. Sulphur is an abundant tasteless, odorless, mul-
tivalent nonmetallic element, best known in yellow
crystals. It occurs in many sulphide and sulphate min-
erals and even in native form. See Witold Rybczynski,
“People in Glass Houses . . . Shouldn’t Throw Away
the Bottles,” On Site no. 5/6 (1974): 84–85; Witold
Rybczynski, “From Pollution to Housing,” Architec-
tural Design 43, no. 12 (1973): 785–90.
21. Author’s interview with Caine, 2008.
22. See David X. Manners, “Invisible Wall That
Purifies Water,” Science Digest, June 1971: 70–71.
23. See Day Charoudi, “Buildings as Organisms,”
in Soft-­Tech: A Co-­Evolution Book, ed, Jay Baldwin and
Stewart Brand, 40–45 (San Francisco: Waller Press,
1978).
24. See Williams, “The House That Grows,” 13.
In the article, the journalist wrote: “A giant bamboo
structure is covered with double plastic skin, hydro-
ponic beds for growing fruits and vegetables, and a
fishpond. Towards the back wall of soil or clay slurry
is a staircase leading to the sleeping quarters and
housed in the central retreat area too are the cooking
and storage facilities and water filtration and storage
plant. Also included are solar flatplate heat absorbers
for heating the digester and domestic hot water sup-
ply. . . . By the initial organization of piped services,
all organic refuse could then be centralized into a
small anaerobic digester, providing a methane source
adequate to run a composting stabilizer. The product
of this should be adequate for hydroponic culture and
thus, waste is turned into resources to reproduce and
sustain life.”
lyd ia kal l i pol iti, F rom Sh it to F o o d | 105
 25. See Barker, “A New Way of Living,” 3.
26. Howard W. Mattson, “Keeping Astronauts
Alive,” International Journal of Science and Technology
54 (June 1966): 28–37.
27. See Mattson, “Keeping Astronauts Alive,”36.
28. Two research papers in Caine’s personal ar-
chive (in Ronda, Spain), both thoroughly underlined,
specifically focus on NASA’s Langley and Douglas liv-
ing simulators. The theme of the first paper referred
to the NASA Langley simulator. See Mattson, “Keep-
ing Astronauts Alive,” 28–37. The second paper was
a report on the performance of the Douglas simula-
tor for the Advanced Biotechnology Department of
Douglas Missile and Space Systems Division under
Independent Research and Development Program
Account No. 81645-­400. See Captain Willard R.
Hawkins, USAF (MC), “The Feasibility of Recycling
Human Urine for Utilization in a Closed Ecological
System” presented on March 24, 1958, at the twenty-­
ninth annual meeting of the Aeromedical Association
in Washington D.C.
29. Caine thoroughly studied Leonard Elikan’s
Aerospace Life Support volume published in the
Chemi­c al Engineering Progress Symposium Series
by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. It
included papers such as, “Space Vehicle Water Rec-
lamation Systems,” “A Flight Prototype Water Elec-
trolysis Unit,” “An Approach to Water Management
for Long Duration Manned Space Flights,” and “Con-
tinuous Atmosphere Control Using a Closed Oxygen
Control.” See Leonard Elikan, ed., Aerospace Life Sup-
port (New York: American Institute of Chemical En-
gineers, 1966).
30. George Lof was a consulting chemical engineer
at Denver, Colorado, and a research associate at the
University of Wisconsin and Resources for the Fu-
ture, Inc.
31. See George O. G. Lof, John A. Duffie, and Clay-
ton O. Smith, World Distribution of Solar Radiation
(Madison: Solar Energy Laboratory, University of Wis-
consin, 1966). This study was study supported by Re-
sources for the Future, Inc. and produced in cooperation
with the University of Wisconsin Extension Division.
32. Caine, “Eco-­House,” n.p.
33. Caine, “Revolutionary Structure,” 12–13.
34. See Grahame Caine’s interim report to the
Greater London Council in the summer of 1974, two
years after the Eco-­House was constructed. The scope
106 | B ui l di n g s & L a n dsc a p e s 1 9, n o . 1 , sp r i n g 201 2
of this report was to determine the Eco-­House’s de-
gree of success, in terms of its energy self-­sufficiency
from London’s supply networks. In order to renew
Caine’s license to experiment on the land, which had
been loaned to him by the London Greater Council,
he needed to comply with certain standards of water
quality, energy generation and so on. Brochure in
Grahame Caine’s personal archives, Ronda, Spain.
35. The primary digesters received all liquid and
organic waste from the household, processed and sepa-
rated different organic substances of human excreta,
eventually channeling the decomposed substances to
the algae digesters and the algae tanks. The algae digest-
ers broke down algae in order to produce gas for cook-
ing and an organic nutrient solution fed to vegetable
beds in the greenhouse. The algae tanks received the
displaced liquid effluents from the primary digesters.
36. Caine, “Revolutionary Structure,” 13.
37. Author interview with Caine, 2008.
38. The “environmental bubble” appeared in Rey-
ner Banham’s “A Home Is Not a House” (illustrated by
Francois Dallegret), first published in Art in America
53 (April 1965): 70–79. The same article was repub-
lished by Clip-­Kit and in AD 39, no. 1 (January 1969):
45–49.
39. Author interview with Caine, 2008. He men-
tioned: “For me, the reciprocal, cyclical process of
recycling of the Eco-­House represents an alternative
political system, a kind of liberal anarchy. The cyclical
system certainly cares; it is a caring system. I don’t
think it necessarily represents a political party but per-
haps an alternative social consciousness.”
40. Murray Bookchin, Post-­Scarcity Anarchism
(Berkeley, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1971).
41. Barker, “A New Way of Living.”
42. Caine, “Eco-­House.”
43. Haggart, “Clearings of a Concrete Jungle.”
44. Caine, “Revolutionary Structure,” 12.
45. Caine, “Revolutionary Structure,” 13.
46. Caine, “The Ecological House,” 140.
47. Caine, Haggart, and Crump, “Some Proposals
on the Reservicing of an Urban Terraced House,” 1–6.
48. Author interview with Caine, 2008.
49. Caine, Haggart, and Crump, “Some Proposals
on the Reservicing of an Urban Terraced House,” 7.
50. Caine, Haggart, and Crump, “Some Proposals
on the Reservicing of an Urban Terraced House,” 1–4.
51. Author interview with Middleton, 2007.