Ant Farm was a collective of radical architects and media experimenters active in the United States from 1968 to the late 1970s. Founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michels, the group became known for its inflatable structures, nomadic communes, performance interventions, and critical media works. Their projects blurred the boundaries between architecture, art, and activism, showing that design could be ephemeral, satirical, and politically sharp.
Best remembered for works like Cadillac Ranch, a row of half-buried cars in Amarillo, Texas, and Media Burn, in which a customized Cadillac crashed through a wall of flaming televisions, Ant Farm staged America’s obsessions with cars, consumerism, and screens as both entertainment and critique. Their inflatables invited people into soft, temporary architectures that rejected permanence and property in favor of collective inhabitation.
Among their most striking architectural experiments was House of the Century, an organic ferrocement residence near Houston that looked more like a lunar landing than a suburban home. It fused countercultural living with sci-fi futurism, embodying Ant Farm’s refusal of functionalist norms and its search for forms that felt alive, strange, and unbound by convention. Alongside their inflatables (portable, communal bubbles assembled at festivals and communes), the house shows the collective’s range: from playful impermanence to visionary built form.
Photos from Chip Lord, Larry Harris, Inflatocookbook, Hidden Architecture, Dallas News, Calisphere, Bubblemania, and Flash Art.
