In the spring of 2009, I drove into the depths of the Sarasota, Florida, suburbs to visit a building known as Arcturus. I had a lot of decisions to make at the time. I was graduating from college, and something called a mortgage-backed security had significantly limited my life’s prospects. I didn’t know where I was going to live, but a house begun in 1975 by the founder of the foremost research organization on psychedelics seemed as good a place as any to figure it all out.

Like practically all things in Florida, my destination was approached by car. The house sits at the end of an otherwise unremarkable, dead-end suburban street, closer to the road than the rest of the homes, which have ample front yards divided by yawning concrete driveways. Arcturus has only a rough curve of mulch that brings you to a pair of hulking wooden doors held up by thick bands of wrought iron. The entire house is essentially a timber-sided right triangle pointed to the northern sky. The first floor walls’ vertical wood paneling merges almost seamlessly with the privacy fence that surrounds the wooded lot. Attached to the triangle just off center is a turret with windows all around that also connects to a sundeck. You’re only 15 minutes away from the nearest Walmart, but here, under the live oaks draped in Spanish moss, it feels like you’re looking at a spaceship landed in a secluded glade, a place just for you and your chosen family to touch the face of God and each other.

Inside the four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath, two-story home, you step onto a river-gravel floor. Nestled among the smooth stone set in polyurethane is a single penny that looks like you can reach down and pick it up—one of many “jokes” hidden in the house. Look up and you can marvel at a stained-glass mural titled The Discovery of Nuclear Energy, which depicts a woman holding a man by the wrist, his opposite hand reaching above her. Her other hand is wrapped around a blue ball. A rainbow enters the top of the man’s head before inverting its colors and exiting beneath him.

“Nuclear, as in ‘nuclear family,’ ” explains Rick Doblin, the executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, which he founded in 1986. Rick undertook Arcturus roughly a decade earlier with the help of a few “motorcycle-riding, pot-smoking, LSD-taking lapsed Mennonites who had really good carpentry skills,” as well as his girlfriend at the time, Sharon Boothe, who would use her pottery skills to make custom switch plates all over the house, some of them mushrooms, some with more elaborate references. The stairs—constructed with no nails, just pegs, glue, and notches—take you up to the turret, which houses the master bedroom, or what Rick calls the “central control area” of the house. This is his favorite part, so I will let Rick describe it himself: “The master bedroom was where I thought the main trips would take place. It’s a hexagon, and it has windows all around and very high ceilings so that you have light, but you can stand up and you’re protected. No one can see you.”

When Rick lived in the house—in 1988 he also began renting it to friends—there was a big waterbed with a rope ladder that would take you up to the sundeck. “Sometimes I would leave the skylight open, and I would go to sleep, so I could be directly under the stars,” he recalls. It was romantic, until one of Florida’s sudden rainstorms would threaten to put more water on the bed than there was in it. One night, on the sundeck, he and his friends gazed up and saw a star that was brighter than all the others. Checking it out later, Rick was delighted to find it was the house’s namesake, burning bright in the constellation Boötes. He hadn’t planned that at all; in fact, it had taken him years to notice.

The house was named after A Voyage to Arcturus, a sci-fi book published in 1920 by Scottish novelist David Lindsay, who counted C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as fans. The story follows a human named Maskull, who, after a séance, is persuaded by two men to join them on an interstellar voyage to Tormance, a planet that orbits the eponymous star. Everything about Tormance is reminiscent of a Sunday trip: Cool, clean water slakes thirst and soul. The plants and animals can tell you what they need and feel. There is inescapable harmony, bright light, exquisite heat, and when someone touches you with their fifth appendage you feel a sexless intimacy that is incompatible with shame.

There’s a dark side too. Maskull is psychologically tortured and manipulated while his body transforms to contain all the alien limbs and organs, which gives him new powers of sense and empathy. Amid his own agony he leaves a trail of death, destruction, and insight in search of the living god who will eventually kill him. As for why the house is named after such a book, Rick can only say, “I felt like building a house was this spiritual journey as well.”

It takes a bit of backstory to understand why Rick cares so much about privacy and intimacy, both in his choice of books and in his home design. Richard Elliot Doblin grew up in the Chicago suburbs in a 1960s house designed by Don Erickson and Dennis Stevens, two former students of Frank Lloyd Wright. Erickson and Stevens inherited their teacher’s love of natural materials and horizontal forms, building low-slung homes with light brick, exposed wood beams, and river-gravel floors. The roof is the most distinctive element, as it vaults straight up like a circus tent, a style borrowed from the vernacular architecture of Jamaica. The beams that hold up the roof sit lightly in only a few key spots, allowing for clerestories all around the house. Rick tells me that this home was “incredibly inspirational to me, and it promoted certain kinds of open thinking—this blending of the inside and outside. We had two atriums in the house, with trees growing in them, 22-foot ceilings with skylights, so from my bed I could see the stars at night, see the moon sometimes.”

In spite of the Doblins’ desire to make this house their home, Rick’s parents met a lot of resistance as they moved from the Jewish enclave of Skokie to the posh North Shore. Jews were discouraged from buying land in Winnetka, so they had to seek out and coordinate with a sympathetic gentile who would sell a subdivided portion of a larger plot. The unique house, and the circumstances under which his parents had to purchase the land it sat on, made a big impression on early-teenage Rick. Amid animosity and prejudice, one could build a beautiful setting for a family.

The more I learned about Rick while researching this story, the more I saw myself in him. Having grown up in South Florida, I was also surprised to realize late in life that my fellow chosen people were decidedly in the minority and still contended with anti-Semitism. Rick and I also shared a 12-going-on-40 childhood demeanor that was manifested in an early dalliance with conservative politics before we took a hard left and ended up at New College (now New College of Florida) in Sarasota.

Just like Rick, I didn’t know the first thing about the new challenges and enchantments that came with psychedelics. In the book Acid Test: LSD, Ecstasy, and the Power to Heal, author Tom Shroder recalls Rick describing his early trips as emotionally difficult puzzles that presented him with a “riotous, roiling reality” of himself as a stunted, overeducated boy unable to become a man in control of his own destiny. I had been a high-achieving student but also a bit of a shut-in with a depressive streak. If there were a rubric and a grading schema, I’d follow them to a tee. But at New College there were no grades but lots of drugs, and without the former, time to figure out what to do with the latter.

Rick first went to New College in the early ’70s but dropped out during his first year. He was allowed to stay on campus, though, and build a handball court for the college while also acting as caretaker of a 1920s bayside Mediterranean Revival–style mansion donated by the Caples family. (Ralph and Ellen Caples helped put Sarasota on the map and established it as a favorite winter destination for the rich and famous.) There he ate simple meals in a grand dining room, practiced archery, and tripped till dawn. After successfully building the handball court, he got a contractor’s license and started work on Arcturus. In the ’80s he finished his degree, went on to get a PhD from Harvard, and started a career that would seek to change American drug policy forever.

To date, MAPS has been at the forefront of medical marijuana legalization and sponsored observational studies of ayahuasca and ibogaine. Through its public benefit corporation, MAPS has established arguably the most famous science-based training program for MDMA (ecstasy)-assisted therapy to treat PTSD. (Though in recent years, as psychedelics have become of increasing public interest, it has weathered criticism of its research design.) As Rick and MAPS attempt to change clinical psychology, they are seeing years of work come closer to fruition, and the seriousness with which they are regarded to match.

When I arrived at New College in 2005, Rick’s life was nothing short of legendary, and on my very first trip—an eighth of psilocybin mushrooms that I handled like a champ—I walked with friends to that very same bayside mansion and watched them play in the water. The visuals were fun, almost something I could pick up and put back down, but what stuck with me was how I saw myself in others. It was as if for the first time I understood that each person around me was another autonomous bundle of meaning, flesh, love, and memory. Something shook loose inside of me and to this day it rattles in my head, setting off sparks of creativity and compassion. (I also never realized I could have that much fun vomiting.)

I was so thankful for these psychedelic experiences that I wanted to hear from Rick himself, so I emailed him and organized a talk on campus. The administration was nervous about its psychedelic prodigal son and the attention he would draw; in the intervening years from Rick’s graduation to my matriculation, New College had become an independent public institution answerable to the Republican governor, Jeb Bush, and his appointees. My friends and I had reserved a lecture hall for Rick’s talk, but the dean’s office stopped it. A campus police officer came in asking for the paperwork and, rather than fight with him over it, we moved quickly to another room that the student government had scheduling authority for. It was a well-attended event, a cherished memory, and the first of many lessons on the capriciousness of authority.

“There was no fake this or that, no Formica—it was reassuring elements.”
—Rick Doblin, designer and resident

When I got to Arcturus, a friend—let’s call them J—showed me around. They had spent some hard times in Connecticut and came to Florida to escape a far less productive relationship with drugs. “Psychedelics probably saved my life when I was younger, because a lot of my friends didn’t get into psychedelics. They got into opiates and other drugs, and it ruined their lives,” J recalls now. They were working in Sarasota when, by chance, they met someone living at Arcturus. J and this person became friends and eventually J moved into Arcturus, becoming a caretaker/resident, sometimes paying rent, other times keeping the kudzu at bay and doing minor upkeep when money was tight. “Encountering the MAPS house,” J told me, “seemed a good sign for me that I was on the right track and actually helped reorient me toward studying ways in which to help the world.”

That’s what I was hoping for, too, but after the long drive and along, hard stare at The Discovery of Nuclear Energy, I realized that what I needed wasn’t a spaceship stranded in the swamp. I needed people to integrate me. I had to see myself in others, not out on Arcturus. Or Tormance.

Despite my never having actually lived there, Arcturus had a big impact on me, and, I suspect, through much more indirect ways, it has and will influence millions more. Rick said that his intention was “that the house was filled with natural materials, that everything was what it was—there was no fake this or that, no Formica—it was reassuring elements. Also, that the structure and the skin was outside, and you can see the structure of it together. That is sort of truth in building: ‘Here’s exactly how it’s held up.’”

That yearning for such honesty in the collective unconscious must have recently returned, because as Elise Taylor wrote inVogue last March, “Among the avant-garde, 1970s interior design trends are making a definitive comeback.” She cites a 2022 survey of designers, many of them seeing a marked rise in ’70s-inspired interiors. But this time around, it’s more laid-back. Think less coke, more psilocybin.

The 1970s predilection for natural tones and materials is a soothing antidote to a modern world, but despite the distinctive style, the concept was in constant flux. The private spaces of bedrooms and bathrooms were expanding as the communal areas melted together into great rooms where modern working parents could watch increasingly fewer children. “The 1970s was a period when architects were traveling from their common starting place,” writes David Heathcote in The 70s House, “...but they didn’t have a clear sense of where they were going.” This confusion of what was to come is evident in the disconnections between the industrial forms of the buildings’ exteriors against the cozy furnishings of the interiors. Sue Barr’s accompanying photography in Heathcote’s book does a valiant job of making these houses look inviting, but no amount of flattering natural light can make them feel less than as if a Bond villain with a penchant for macramé had repurposed a dentist’s office for his lair. Like Arcturus, these homes have cedar-lined walls, big windows, and the honesty of exposed joists, but unlike Doblin’s house, they retain the austerity of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and (of course) Frank Lloyd Wright.

So it makes a certain amount of sense that a man seeking—as he put it in a 1999 MAPS newsletter—to use “the building of a home as a symbolic means to create a semblance of order in my internal world” would absorb the collective unconscious of the period. The architects of the ’70s, according to Heathcote, “still favored internationalism and the idea of universal solutions to individual problems.” The profession would not fracture in a postmodern tapestry of self-referential irony and regional vernaculars for another 10 years. But Rick was, in his own words, nothing more than the “youngest and dumbest contractor in all of Florida,” and so he had only his once-removed, personal relationship to Wright’s work and a desire to build something that was safe and inviting to trip in to guide him. The result is much more than what Gary Greenberg in Rolling Stone called “Frank Lloyd Wright–on–acid design.”

Le Corbusier had this infamous phrase: A house is a machine for living in. It was a cold, utilitarian approach to the most intimate places humans can build. Rick’s approach was the opposite: A house is a womb to discover yourself in, a place that’s safe to do something as dangerous as to be vulnerable while your mind expands and your body vibrates. I also can’t help but understand Arcturus as a democratic surround, a phrase used by the Stanford University professor of communication Fred Turner to describe media-rich environments popular in the mid-20th century that were built into museums and expos. Because there was so much to see and hear, everyone was able to riff on the same shared experience. The result would promote togetherness while still nurturing individualism. The hippies of the ’60s internalized this concept of shared consciousness but saw psychedelics consumed on remote communes and in “be-ins” as the more effective (not to mention fun) alternative to traditional partisan politics, where individuals square off in debate. This idea of shared experience was eventually imported into Silicon Valley through the likes of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, WIRED magazine, and John Perry Barlow, who was both a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. In a speech in Berlin, Fred Turner summarized this 20th-century project thusly: “The dream of disembodied community facilitated by computers is an echo of an earlier dream: a dream of disembodied communities of consciousness to be lived out on communes as an alternative to the political state and an alternative to politics in general.”

I read this quote to Rick, who agreed that there was a lot of connection between hippies, Silicon Valley, and proponents of psychedelics. “But I think this idea of psychedelic mystical experience is this thought about how we are connected in these invisible ways, but it’s not disembodied,” he said. “It’s somehow or another using our bodies in ways where they pick up information that we don’t normally know how to access.” Psychedelics themselves might be a kind of technology, maybe even a kind of media, but it’s what our bodies do with drugs—and in turn what we do with our bodies when we’re on drugs—that is the real breakthrough of both MAPS’s successes and Arcturus’s splendor.

After all, if the body doesn’t matter, why build Arcturus in the first place? The whole point was to make something physical, not just for one man to integrate his own thoughts but to create a place where others could do the same, away from the riotous, roiling reality of the world and whatever it has lodged in our subconscious. Maybe that’s why the ’70s are coming back: not just because the natural materials and colors are soothing amid the plastic and metal of our workaday lives but because we yearn for shared, grounded experiences, ones that are meaningful to both the mind and the body.

Arcturus has had many iterations in both use and design. The house originally had one fewer bedroom and bathroom; more were added as need arose and money allowed. The original construction was financed by the Doblin family; first Rick received a sizable inheritance, then came a loan from his parents, and eventually, when the money had all dried up, Rick actually sold the house to his parents but continued to use it for decades. Arcturus cradled MAPS in its young days, from 1998 until 2006, on the organization’s 20th anniversary, when it moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. “Our 400-square-foot office space was bursting at the seams, and, though Sarasota had served us well, the lack of a supportive atmosphere was limiting,” read the announcement in the MAPS newsletter.

The move underscores the limitations of Arcturus—or any building, really—in insulating its inhabitants from the rest of the world. At the end of the day, what goes on inside the house has to have some relationship with the outside, and if your goal is nothing less than the reinvention of United States drug policy, then you’ll need more than a comfortable oasis. You need a formal, professionalized base of operations. But that’s not to say Arcturus didn’t have an immediate impact on the surrounding area. There were more cows than people in the neighborhood when Rick started building, but it nonetheless caught everyone’s attention.

“People came by to admire the house and one of them said, ‘Would you build a house for me?’ ” Rick recalls. While he loved how the house was turning out, he “felt like a failure in a sense. I hadn’t built it according to budget.” But a new start, with the pressure of a client other than himself, could offer redemption. There was also the very terrestrial concern that the house was too large for its location. The neighborhood would eventually catch up, and Rick’s home ended up being a prototype for a dozen or so houses. He even got to build another one across the street from Arcturus, which he called “the most successful example of blending some of the unique elements I had in my house with a more traditional construction that was less expensive.” A typical house built by Braxas (his contractor business—named after Abraxas, a deity he learned about in Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian who “contains both the luminous and the dark world”) has odd angles and lots of wood, though one of the capitulations to reality that Rick typically had to make was to hang drywall throughout most of the interior.

Still, Rick has a way of bending the world to his will. One element of Arcturus that you won’t find in other Braxas homes is what he calls “movable closets.” These massive pieces of furniture on wheels can be opened, closed, and shifted around so “you can take the space from the playroom and turn it into part of the bedroom.” This kind of flexibility is now becoming more in demand as more people work from home and change whom they live with.

In A Voyage to Arcturus, Maskull, having been utterly transformed by his hero’s journey, concludes, “I understand nothing, except that I have no self any more. But this is life.” One gets the sense at the end of the novel that the driving force of the universe is the mutual shaping of individuals and their surroundings: that the point of life is to be a change agent and, in turn, allow yourself to be altered. Imperfect beings’ lives are, paradoxically, the building material for an ever-perfecting reality—a story not unlike Rick’s journey with MAPS and the building that once housed it.

Rick’s best-known contribution will likely remain in the realm of psychedelics and mental health. Marijuana is legal in the majority of U.S. states for either medical or recreational use. Psilocybin may be next, having been effectively decriminalized in several cities and legalized for therapy in Oregon. But for now, Rick has his eyes (and his organization) set on MDMA, more commonly known as ecstasy. MAPS was integral in getting the drug designated a breakthrough therapy for PTSD, and the organization is currently screening patients for ongoing Phase 3 clinical trials. And once that is successful—and there’s no doubt in Rick’s mind that it will be—he may return to his spaceship, where it all began. “One day, after MDMA is a medicine, I may move back into that house and have a psychedelic clinic in Sarasota,” he says. “Take people to the beach to recuperate and integrate. I’m so grateful that my wife and I still own it.”

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