Send Tissues, Chocolate Biscuits

There are genuine primitive technologies that (just like modern technology) meet standards of function, design, fitness, and acceptability to the users. At their best these technologies embody sound principles; their appeal to the hippie ethic was that they came without the cultural accretions of our latter-day — and ever-higher — high tech. It was the accretions, not the tech, that the hippies despised.
The very first hippies were practical about the skills of living. They knew how to make and fix things, or to learn how, or to exchange with someone who knew. It was a personal choice to favor simplicity and “low-tech.” They didn’t want to change society, but to live differently in it. Not unlike the later survivalists going off-grid. If they romanticized themselves sometimes as a “primitive” tribe living unnoticed in the shadows of a towering “civilization” — well, that was a fable told to amuse, or to tease out speculation: and must be taken lightly, or best not heed it at all.
But “the very first hippies” were very few in number. Definitely not a “movement.” That came from the flood of publicity in glossy fashion magazines like Esquire, Ramparts, Psychology Today. They weren’t, as they pretended, reporting on a trend, but drumming one up. After that, to be a hippie meant to wear the costume, smoke pot, flash “peace,” smile and say “groovy.”
I came along too late to have been an original hippie, if I was even inclined that way. But I met a few of the real ones. What they told me was, the hippie movement was over the minute it became a movement. At the time I put that down to old-timers chaffing a greenhorn. I wanted the hippie dream to be viable, even if it wasn’t for me. But they were right, those old freaks, God bless ’em, it was over.
Anything original, if it garners attention, gets imitated. A failed imitation, dying, can kill its original. A successful imitation cannot fail to kill its original. Sic transit and so forth.

I tried the simple life. I found it’s not so simple. I mean it’s not like I had to beg or borrow. But now I live life like there’s no tomorrow and all I’ve got I’ve had to steal. But that’s how it is…living at a pace that kills. Consequently I’ve got no love. Well no love you’d call real. Nobody waiting at home, anyway.

Hey WTP, now do ‘Beautiful Girls’, willya?

This looks like Hell

Munger Hall, in comparison, is a single block housing 4,500 students with two entrances

That cannot possibly satisfy the fire codes.
non-woke version of The Blurting
You’re not wrong. But as Mark Steyn says, politics is downstream from culture and we’ve reached the point where we’re expected to simply nod along with these inanities (insert Dalrymple quote here).
Social graces are a form of Geneva Convention: as long as we all agree to play by the same rules of courtesy we can avoid the kind of scorched-earth arguments that lead to broken relationships. The left abandoned that convention decades ago; we’ve been treating our POWS to coffee and chocolate biscuits while they’ve been shoving bamboo splinters under the fingernails of theirs.
It’s long past time to remind the Left of what the Geneva Convention originally meant: if you don’t use poison gas on the battlefields, we won’t nuke your civilian cities until they glow. But if you step over that line, we’ll come back across it with MIRV-armed ICBMs.

Uma’s Feet, so-called lifestyle coaching has been a marketing strategy since a little before the full-on 1980s. A smart cookie like Martha Stewart aimed for it. An honest broker, like Amy D., gets hoovered up. “Simplicity pumped for buying products,” the instances multiply. When they were high-end mail-order houses, Brookstone’s and Sharper Image offered desktop zen gardens, with a little brass rake for the certified pure sand. The mass popularity of yoga now is as an excuse to buy a cute new outfit….
Anyone remember the Whole Earth Catalogs
I do, thank you, and that prompts thought of Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn (1994), in which he formulates an aphorism that can bear on the Munger Hall situation. A library doesn’t need windows, a library is a window. (He doesn’t mean a library building; he’s talking about a room used as a library.) And the bearing is this: the residence hall’s room-pods reminded me at first of my library carrel at university. A place to keep my books, and do a long-ish stretch of reading and writing in private. Long-ish and longer-ish: there were times I would have liked to stay overnight.
But that was in addition to my place of residence. It’s monstrous to deny students the dignity of A Room Of One’s Own.

criticized geodesic domes
I remember reading that but not where specifically — it fits Brand’s view though, so probably yes.
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson & Johnson Building leaked too, as I recall. In the Executive Conference Room to make it even better. I think when the firm’s directors complained, Wright advised them to buy a bucket.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson & Johnson Building leaked too, as I recall.
Yes. And his famous Fallingwater house had the notorious cantilever problem. I see now where Wright enthusiasts are wordsmithing Wiki to shift the blame from Wright to wherever they can, either Wrights engineers or the construction engineers. Kind of a metaphor for the whole mess. But if you dig into the source material, Wright’s ego appears to have been something of an obstacle. Some say short man’s disease was a factor.
I have a friend whose new beau builds/refurbishes domed architecture buildings. We may be getting together with them this week. This might be interesting. Depending on how sober they plan to be.

Don’t get me started on Frank Gehry.
With a cat o’ nine tails?