Avant-garde collectives lived and worked in cluttered communal spaces as creative hives.

Evidence

As Slugs’ performances were unique, so was the Sun Palace. Walking upstairs, one first entered a large room lit by a huge, illuminated ball suspended from the ceiling. John S. Wilson, who had developed an appreciation for Sun Ra since catching him at the Charles, visited the Sun Palace and found it a bit chaotic. The five-room floor-through was impossibly cluttered. The apartment was “piled high with a stacked, packed clutter of stringed instruments, drums, cases, phonographs, boxes, microphones, cymbals, broken umbrellas, costumes and suits in a jumble disarray.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 897