Media Artist and Visionary Architect

Doug Michels was an architect and media artist whose work explored the visionary fringe of the architectural profession. After graduating the Air Force Academy High School, he entered Catholic University and then spent 2 years at the Oxford School of Technology. He graduated from the Yale School of Architecture with a M.Arch. in 1967, having won already one of the most prestigous design awards in architecture-- a Progressive Architecture Award.

On a lecture tour of architecture schools in 1968 he met Chip Lord, a student at Tulane University and together they founded an alternative architectural practice. Envisioning their work as "underground architecture" they named it Ant Farm. The group is best known for creating the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas in 1974, (for Stanley Marsh 3), but they also designed and built a ferro-cement house outside Houston Texas in 1972 for Marilyn Lubetkin called "the House of the Century." This project won Michels his third Progressive Architecture Citation for Design Excellence.

Ant Farm relocated to San Francisco in 1973 and opened a studio there with other collaborators. In 1975 they staged two video performances that have become classics of the first decade of video art: "Media Burn" and "The Eternal Frame." "Media Burn" was a critique of television in which a customized Cadillac was driven through a wall of burning TV sets before a live audience of 400. (July 4, 1975, San Francisco) The iconic image created was distributed as a post card and a videotape. “The Eternal Frame,” produced by Ant Farm and another San Francisco art group, T.R.Uthco, restaged the Kennedy assassination in Dealy Plaza in Dallas. The 24-minute video has recently been restored by the Bay Area Video Coalition.

Other Ant Farm projects included a time capsule in a refrigerator for the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; “Convention City,” realized as a design workshop at Rice University in 1972; “Freedomland,” a free-form shopping mall under an inflatable roof proposed to a Houston developer, 1973; “The Citizen's Time Capsule” in a 1967 Oldsmobile station wagon, buried at Artpark, Lewiston, New York, 1975; and “2020 VISION”, a future exhibition at Houston's Museum of Contemporary Art, 1973/74.

Michels went to Australia in 1977 to pursue the Ant Farm Dolphin Embassy project and the group disbanded when a fire destroyed their San Francisco studio in 1978.

Following a post-graduate Loeb fellowship at Harvard University in 1985-86, Michels set up an independent studio in Washington, DC where he continued to work on progressive architectural works, including the “Bluestar” space station, “The National Sofa” landscape design project and “New America.” In 1999 he established his home base in Houston, TX. Michels was in Eden, Australia to consult on a film for Mel Gibson’s production company, Icon Productions.

(from the Houston Chronicle):
Michels worked as a senior designer (1979-82) for Philip Johnson in New York and for HOK in Washington, DC. Following a post-graduate fellowship at Harvard University in 1985-86, he set up an independent studio; in 1999 he established a home base in Houston.

Born June 29, 1943, Michels graduated from Yale University following studies at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Oxford in England. He had been a visiting professor at the University of Houston in 1969, and returned as adjunct professor and director of the architecture college's FutureLab design studio in 1999-2000. Among his projects during that time was the Computer Teleport for UH's Rudge Allen Media Center, an adaptation of the prototype he created two decades earlier for the home of Houstonians Rudge and Nancy Allen.

Over the years, the peripatetic Michels held teaching positions at Rice University, Texas A&M University and UCLA. He exhibited proposals and models for projects around the world, including Bluestar -- Space Station Architecture at the A.I.A. Octagon Museum in 1986 and New America -- Blueprint for the Future at the Library of Congress, 1991.

During the past year he had been working with partners Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier on a Museum exhibition of Ant Farm's work. The exhibit will open at the Berkeley Art Museum, Jan. 21, 2004 and travel to the Santa Monica Museum of Art; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston; and the Center for Media and Art in Karlsruhe, Germany.