Chip Lord, cofounder of the experimental architecture collective Ant Farm, will reflect on his participation in one of the Halprins’ early collaborative workshops and the influence that this experience had on his later work.

Chip Lord was trained as an architect and was a founding member of the experimental art and architecture collective Ant Farm (1968-1978). Dedicated to finding alternatives to mainstream architectural practice, Ant Farm worked at the fringe of architecture, producing inflatable structures, organizing performances and media events, and exploring nomadic design.  Ant Farm achieved widespread notoriety in the 1970s for such projects as House of the Century (1972), a ferro-cement weekend House in Texas, which won a Progressive Architecture Design Citation in 1971, and Cadillac Ranch (1974), an iconic work that is both public art and entropic sculpture and crosses disciplinary boundaries. Ant Farm also produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame, both in 1975. Following his involvement with Ant Farm, Lord continued to work in video and produced single channel tapes and installations, often collaborating with other artists. Lord has taught at the University of California, San Diego and the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is Professor Emeritus in Film & Digital Media.

Image: The Clean Air Pod by Ant Farm at U.C. Berkeley on the first Earth Day, 1970. Courtesy Chip Lord.

For more information on the exhibition, Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971, click here.