Doug Michaels
Posted on September 1, 2010 10:09 am
I’ve had the good fortune to know and work with a number of great architects, designers, and personalities over the years. Doug Michaels founded Ant Farm with Chip Lord in 1968. Ant Farm was a subversive art and design collective (a practice modeled more on a rock band than a corporate entity) that staged happenings, made films, and created installations and architecture. Their best known works are Cadillac Ranch (Amarillo Texas, 1974), celebrating the rise and fall of the great American tail fin, the House of the Century (with architect Richard Jost, 1972), and Media Burn (1975), in which astronaut-clad Ant Farmers drove a Cadillac through a wall of flaming television sets. Somewhat less well known is their film The Eternal Frame (1975), a frame-by-frame reenactment of the Zapruder film, in which Doug played Jackie Kennedy, complete with pink suit and pillbox hat. Doug has been described as part Buckminster Fuller and part Abbie Hoffman. Ant Farm disbanded in 1978 following a fire that destroyed their San Francisco studio. I met Doug in 1979 when I joined the New York office of Philip Johnson and John Burgee Architects. Doug, the quintessential counter-culture provocateur-artiste-wildman transformed himself, for a while anyway, into a buttoned-down corporate architect. The real Doug revealed himself one day when he appeared at the Seagram Building office in head-to-toe green leather believing, incorrectly, that Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee were traveling that day. Doug later established his own studio where he continued to pursue interesting and provocative projects. In 1996, he created a design for Lafayette Square, across from The White House. The National Sofa was a landscape design project that included a curved marble “sofa” and giant pop-up television screen. Doug said that “the sofa is sort of an American icon – a disarming, friendly, social setting. Americans like to just sit on a sofa and hang out.” Doug died in a fall while climbing to a whale observation point in Eden, Australia in 2003. Stanley Marsh, the Amarillo-based art patron, had the Cadillacs of Cadillac Ranch painted black upon Doug’s death.
