“I am collecting the history of our people as written into things their hands made and used,” declared Henry Ford upon opening his museum in 1929. “When we are through, we shall have reproduced American life as lived, and that, I think, is the best way of preserving at least a part of our history and tradition.” 2 Yet the museum’s display of hippie culture reveals a telling betrayal of Ford’s mission. On closer inspection it becomes apparent that the geodesic dome is a tightly crafted structure, its metal struts milled and joined with a precision that any industrial engineer would admire — but as such the dome is utterly at odds with the rag-tag contents and hardly representative of “communal living,” ca. 1973. To capture the hippie aesthetic would require the curators to have installed a very different dome, a more makeshift construction that reflected the do-it-yourself, hand-craft ethos of the era. As the social historian Iain Boal writes, in West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California:

The communes of the 1960s and ’70s were for the most part improvised, ad-hoc affairs. Almost all communal housing was adapted from existing structures and refunctioned to new collective projects — either Victorians or empty industrial buildings in the urban context or abandoned farmhouses beyond the city. Hippie architecture is a by-word for the bodged and half-built. 3

Not at all “bodged and half-built,” the exhibition at the Ford Museum seems merely a conventionalized symbol of countercultural lifestyle — a too neat reconstruction of hippie stereotypes and clichés, ca. the turn of the millennium.

Such clichés have, of course, proven remarkably durable; ...