Paul Dobraszczyk on Graham Caine’s Street Farmhouse eco-structure from the early 1970s:

Even though Caine intended the eco-house to be a model for a new kind of society that embraced self-determination as a fundamental tenet in all aspects of life, it nevertheless failed because of its vulnerability to disorder. The ways in which humans occupy houses is fundamentally unpredictable and thus any regenerative system put in place is at risk of failing. In coming to the conclusion that the only way to be radical is to separate oneself entirely from the corrupt society around you, Caine fell into the trap of seeing self-sufficiency as a strategy for emancipation rather than the reverse. Borrowing his ideas from contemporaneous experiments by NASA to develop space colonies, Caine’s ‘closed-system’ was precisely that – a dead-end of autonomy that could not help but fail because it didn’t allow anything from the outside to enter in. In the end, such connection – compromising and sullying as it undoubtedly is – is in fact vital for a house to grow because, to continue to be healthy, we always need feeding from the outside as much as from within.