Baumer Lecture Series, Greg Castillo

Contemporary society faces a critical decision point in the “deteriorating state of our social imagination,” according to collective intelligence theorist Geoff Mulligan. As billionaires consolidate their power over media, they propagate imagined corporate techno-futures and dismiss grassroots visions of alternative tomorrows. “Outlaw Worldbuilders” dispenses with nostalgic readings of Bay Area counterculture to reassess its production of alternative social realities through physical construction and adaptive reuse of built infrastructures.

Based on essays in Design Radicals: Building Counterculture in the Bay Area, the talk examines the work of three communities of Californian “outlaw builders”—Native Americans, anti-patriarchal feminists, and Berkeley architecture students—as potential templates for our own challenge to reimagine the world anew.

Greg Castillo

Greg Castillo is a professor in the Department of Architecture in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, and an Honorary Associate Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning.

He is the author of Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (2010) as well as numerous essays in journals, anthologies, and museum catalogues. Castillo's work on Bay Area counterculture began with a role as a guest curator of the exhibition Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia (2017) at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and as a contributor to its exhibition catalog. With Lee Stickells, he co-edited the collection of essays Design Radicals: Building Counterculture in the Bay Area, currently in press. A collection of essays co-edited with Elaine Stiles, The American Model Home: Design and History, is forthcoming.

Part of the Autumn 2026 Baumer Lecture Series.