Eye Candy

Anyone can throw on bell bottoms and a flower crown, but the real devotees to the hippie scene back in the ’60s and ’70s had much stronger roots in the cause. They built and lived out of treehouse-like structures, transforming vegetation, bric-a-brac, and remnants of condemned buildings into a type of organic architecture—with a few helpful hints from DIY hippie building guides, of course. Their creations may not have weathered the decades since, but they’re now on view in “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia,” an exhibition chronicling the Bay Area’s role in the counterculture movement of the ’60s and ’70s, at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) from February 8 to May 21. Peer inside their surprisingly upscale assemblages, here.