Gene Logsdon, "The Barn Raising," The Contrary Farmer (blog), December 24, 2008, ➝.
Barn Raisers, directed by Kelly Rundle and Tammy Rundle (Moline, IL: Fourth Wall Films, 2017), DVD documentary video. (29:33).
Daily Register-Gazette (Rockford, Illinois), November 9, 1897: 5. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers.
Carlisle Weekly Herald (Carlisle, Pennsylvania), June 3, 1875: 3. Newspapers.com.
Morning Star (Rockford, Illinois), October 27, 1899: 3. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers.
“Crushed To Death. One Man is Killed and Four Others Are Fatally Injured at a Barn Raising Near Bellaire,” Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio), August 14, 1897: 1. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers.
“Albany, Oct. 14.,” Columbian Centinel (Boston, Massachusetts), no. 4020, October 19, 1822: 2. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers.
Lancaster Examiner and The Semi-Weekly New Era, October 15, 1884: 6. Newspapers.com.
Carlisle Weekly Herald.
Lancaster Examiner.
Tyrone Daily Herald (Tyrone, Pennsylvania), May 19, 1894: 2. Newspapers.com.
New-Albany Argus (New Albany, Indiana), February 27, 1840: 3. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers.
“Michigan News,” Jackson Citizen Patriot (Jackson, Michigan), June 17, 1869: 1. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers.
As a collective practice Ant Farm restructured ideas of authorship in architectural production, furthering this through their Inflatocookbook (1971), a D.I.Y. how-to instruction manual that offered “recipes” and technical information for building your own inflatable structure. For more on the collective’s practice and its relation to Halprin’s workshops and RSVP Cycles see Felicity Scott, Ant Farm, (Actar Publishers, 2008). The design-build studios taught by Charles Moore with Kent Bloomer at Yale University beginning in 1967 and still taught today were anticipated by initiatives developed decades earlier, from Robert Taylor’s vocational building programs at Tuskegee Institute to Karl Linn’s organization of the community-oriented Neighborhood Renewal Corps at the University of Pennsylvania. For more on Robert Taylor at Tuskegee see Ellen Weiss, Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington (Montgomery: New South Books, 2011), and Maura Lucking, “Settler Campus: Racial Uplift, Free Labor, and Land Tenure in American Design Education, 1866-1929,” (Doctoral diss., UCLA, 2023), ➝. For more on Karl Linn see Anna Goodman, “Karl Linn and the Foundations of Community Design: From Progressive Models to the War on Poverty,” Journal of Urban History 46, no. 4 (2019): 1–22, and Anna Goodman, “A History of Community Design/ Build in the United States in Four Moments,” in 102nd ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings, Globalizing Architecture/Flows and Disruptions (ACSA Press, 2014), 503–12. Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group at MIT were developing computer-aided participatory design models that redistributed authorship to the architect, the machine, and the user, and also reconceived the participant as co-designer, see Nicholas Negroponte, Soft Architecture Machines (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1975), for more on this see Theodora Vardouli, Graph Vision, Digital Architecture’s Skeletons (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2024), 140–91 and an interview with Nicholas Negroponte, “Terms and Conditions,” e-flux Architecture, May 2019, ➝.
On the turn from object to action and the move away from spectatorship through participation, see Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (Routledge, 2005), 6–13, 22–32 and Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012).
Kaprow wasn’t the only artist working on happenings. Many at the time including Yoko Ono, John Cage, George Segal, Carolee Schneemann, and Claes Oldenburg for example would also reconceive of art through this form, though each had their own position on what it proposed to do. For Oldenburg, for example, the status of the artist should be maintained, and the artwork should never fully dissolve into the everyday, diverging pointedly from Kaprow. For more on this disagreement see Eva Ehninger “What’s Happening? Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg Argue about Art and Life,” Getty Research Journal, no. 6 (2014): 195–202.
For more on the link between 18 Happenings in 6 Parts and modernist art pedagogy see Emily Ruth Capper “Modernist Pedagogies in Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts,” Selva: A Journal of the History of Art 6 (Spring 2025): 59–85.
Allan Kaprow, transcript of interview by Dorothy Seckler, 10 September 1968, 34–35, Dorothy Gees Seckler Collection of Sound Recordings Relating to Art and Artists 1962–76, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, quoted in Catherine Spencer, “Allan Kaprow’s Lesson Plans,” in Beyond the Happening: Performance Art and the Politics of Communication (Manchester University Press, 2020), 37.
For more on the difference between scribe rule and square rule see Jack Sobon, Historic American Timber Joinery: A Graphic Guide (Becket: Timber Framers Guild, 2002), and earlier texts that mention the two distinct techniques include Edward Shaw, Civil Architecture (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1831), 116 and S.E. Todd, Todd’s Country Homes and How to Save Money (Hartford: Hartford Pub Co, 1870), 255–58.
Gloucester Telegraph, 30 October 1869: 1. Readex: America's Historical Newspapers.
For Dewey learning begins with what he calls a “problematic situation.” He defines this as a moment of uncertainty where action is required but the outcome isn’t clear. The inscription of marriage marks, for example, converts a problematic situation (the task of raising a barn: which piece first? which face out? which joint where?) into an “end-in-view” (a goal that can be carried out).
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.
While barn raisings were in a lot of ways exclusionary, they did provide the infrastructures that allowed for participation, even if limited to able-bodied men, and even if women, in their care-giving capacity, were seen only as part of the infrastructure. For more on the infrastructural conditions of assembly see Judith Butler, “Introduction” and “Gender Politics and the Right to Appear,” in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 1–65. 2015.
