This article, written for the Christian Science Monitor News Service, appeared in The Daily Herald, a local newspaper serving multiple suburbs of Chicago. By 1977, the influence of the Integral Urban House was no longer confined to the Bay Area, nor to the counterculture.
The headline labels the house a “test in creative living” — an allusion to Flight from the City: An Experiment in Creative Living on the Land by Ralph Borsodi, a Great Depression-era New Yorker who experimented in self-sufficient living. The author mentions this “return to simpler technologies and rural values” in his article. In a way, this evokes images of an idealized rural life, creating a connection to an audience with a historically rural background, and drawing them into the article. How can we bring ideas of “living off the land” into the city?
The author was quite impressed by the house, noting how it drew, on the same day of his visit, “groups from the federal Energy Research and Development Administration and the Swiss International Farming and Organic Agriculture Movement”.
The article is appreciative of the fact that the house draws upon cost-effective, beneficial ways to improve one’s living conditions, through technology that recalls a distant rural past.
