Archigram was an avant-garde British architectural group (1961-1974) whose unbuilt projects and media-savvy provocations "spawned the most influential architectural movement of the 1960s," according to Princeton Architectural Press study Archigram (1999). Using paper architecture (or visionary architecture), they imagined physically adaptive cities heavily embraced by modernism.
The group (while not working together directly in many occasions) addressed the changing world in a post-industrial society. With the rapid evolution of technology, building techniques, and cultural shifts (increased class-consciousness), Archigram curated a philosophy that first served as a wild imagination of how the profession of architecture can respond to changing needs. According to Santiago Lillo and Pedro Molina-Siles in "The Imagined City. Futurism, Utopia and Archigram": ...[A] reflection was established on the relationship between architecture and technology, the dissociation of the ecological problem, ... Through the assimilation of the consumerist model and through a chaotic visualization of the future, they proposed architectural and urbanistic models that would allow the incorporation of more useful technology, using synthetic, disposable and industrial materials and creating mobile, assemblable and even obsolescent structures." By 1970, their depictions shifted to dystopian implementations of technology, as another reflection to a disdain of futurism by the public. The works of Archigram had a tendency to fall into the neofuturistic, influenced by Antonio Sant'Elia's works, Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman's thinking. "Their attitude was closely tied to the technocratic ideology of the American designer Buckminster Fuller," Kenneth Frampton confirms, in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, "and to that of his British apologists John McHale and Reyner Banham. ... Archigram's subsequent commitment to a 'high-tech,' lightweight, infrastructural approach (the kind of indeterminacy implicit in the work of Fuller and even more evident in Yona Friedman's L'Architecture mobile of 1958) brought them, rather paradoxically, to indulge in ironic forms of science fiction, rather than to project solutions that were either truly indeterminate or capable of being realized and appropriated by society."Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, third edition, revised and enlarged, 1992, p. 281.
Archigram was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2002.
History
Origins: 1960-61
Based at the Architectural Association in London, the main members of the group were Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene. Archigram formed late in the year 1960, shortly before the first issue of their magazine of the same name, which appeared in 1961. Designer Theo Crosby was the "hidden hand" behind the group.Simon Sadler, Archigram: architecture without architecture, MIT Press, 2005, p.161 He gave them coverage in Architectural Design magazine (where he was an editor from 1953 to 1962), brought them to the attention of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, where, in 1963, they mounted an exhibition called Living City,Crosby raised the money for this from the Gulbenkian Foundation, and subsequently edited its publication in the ICA's Living Arts magazine: Sadler, op cit, p.207 and in 1964 brought them into the Taylor Woodrow Design Group, which he headed, to take on experimental projects.Peter Cook, Archigram, Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, p.44 The pamphlet Archigram I was printed in 1961 to proclaim their ideas. Their first magazine experimented with modular technology, mobility through the environment, space capsules, and consumer-culture imagery. On release, they were highly praised for their optimistic inspirations of a glamorous, high-tech future. Social and environmental issues were, however, left largely unaddressed.
The group tapped into the zeitgeist captured by Richard Hamilton in his "This Is Tomorrow" exhibition in 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, by Pop Art, by the turned-on, tuned-in psychedelic counterculture, and by the gnomic pronouncements of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Then, too, some of its guiding principles were premonitory of what the politically radical French avant-garde would later call Situationism. In the Living City exhibition, Archigram "collected images from any part of the city—the accepted Pop iconography of spacemen ... but presented them in a way and with a message that was new to architecture," Jencks writes, in Modern Movements in Architecture.
The city was seen not as architecture (hardware), but as people and their "situations" (software). It was these infinitely variable and fleeting situations which gave the real life to the city: in this sense "the home, the whole city, and the frozen pea pack are all the same." Not only are they all expendable, but they are all products which interact with man in the same level, the situation.Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, Anchor Books, 1973, p.288
Archigram agitated to prevent modernism from becoming a sterile orthodoxy, rendered safe by its adherents. Contrary to Buckminster Fuller's notion of "ephemeralization," which assumes more must be done with less and less (because material resources are finite), Archigram presumes a future of inexhaustible resources.
Mid-'60s
According to Jencks, Archigram's "extraordinary inventiveness" and delirious, Pop sci-fi imagery attracted international media attention throughout 1963–65. The group designed cities "that looked like computers and molehills, that crawled on the shoots of a telescope like Eduardo Paolozzi's Bug-Eyed Monsters, that bobbed under the sea like so many skewered balloons, that sprouted—swock!—out of the sea like a Tom Wolfian, hydraulic umbrella, that zoomed down from the clouds flashing 'Destroy-Man! Kill-All-Humans,' a space-comic-robot-zaap, that clicked into place along pneumatic tubes, a plug-in plastic layer cake, that gurgled and spluttered over the old city like creeping, cancerous, testubular, friendly Daleks."Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, Anchor Books, 1973, p.290-91
"The strength of Archigram's appeal," wrote the architecture critic and historian Reyner Banham, "stems from many things, including youthful enthusiasm in a field (city planning) which is increasingly the preserve of middle-aged caution. But chiefly it offers an image-starved world a new vision of the city of the future, a city of components on racks, components in stacks, components plugged into networks and grids, a city of components being swung into place by cranes."
Late '60s
By 1967, in works like Control and Choice Living (1967), the group had turned its attention to the question of exploiting, in architecture and urban planning, those "systems, organizations, and techniques that permit the emancipation and general good life of the individual" within "a high-density location," writes Jencks. "The solution was a minimal set of fixed elements which increased in flexibility from the permanent pylons to the completely flexible 'air-habs.' The latter invention was a combination un-house and blow-up satellite (that is, an air-inflatable satellite)" of seemingly infinite possibility. The inhabitant "could dial out a room or if this were not desired drive the electric car into it and sprout out a room within a room. In effect, the services robot is now decentralized to include every part of the house."Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, Anchor Books, 1973, p.295-6
At this point, Archigram lacked evidence of actualizing society in their cities. "Labor was, in general, absent from this show as was any discussion of the naturalization of the bourgeois male experience." They detailed the journals with cultural references to advertisements, a visual representation style that influenced a new generation of digital graphics, but, "without any recognition of the kind of work involved in creating objects of desire for the presumptively male consumer. These formal tactics and social blind spots are evidence of Archigram members' lack of interest in distinguishing between the political confrontation of architectural activists[.]"
1970s
By the early 1970s, the group had changed its strategy. In 1973, wrote Theo Crosby,in How to play the environment game, Penguin, p.49 its members had "found their original impulses towards megastructures blunted by the changing intellectual climate in England, where the brash dreams of modern architects are received with ever-increasing horror. They are now more concerned with the infiltration of technology into the environment at a much less obvious level."
Some saw implications of having grand moving mechanics, easily manufactured parts (concepts central to Archigram) as naive approximations of what the future might look like. Most projects that utilized moving parts and adaptable concepts fell short at the implementation of those ideas into society that expected buildings to remain static. "By 1972, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown could no longer take Archigram seriously," writes Simon Sadler, in Archigram: Architecture without Architecture. He quotes their landmark critique of postmodern architecture, Learning from Las Vegas, published that year: “Archigram’s structural visions are Jules Verne versions of the Industrial Revolution with an appliqué of Pop-aerospace terminology.”Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture, 2005, p. 193.
Supporters praised their ingenuity despite lacking practical uses. "Three years later," writes Sadler, the architecture critic Martin Pawley argued that Archigram "stood for 'an existential technology for individuals that the world will, in time, come to regard with the same awe as is presently accorded to the prescience of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, or the Marquis de Sade. Futile to complain (as many do),‘But they never build anything.’ Verne never built the Nautilus, Wells could hardly drive a car, and the Marquis de Sade?”
Projects The Walking City, Ron Herron, 1964
The Walking City is constituted by intelligent buildings or robots in the form of giant, self-contained living pods designed to roam freely. The form derived from a combination of insect and machine and was a literal interpretation of Le Corbusier's aphorism that a house was a "machine for living in." The pods were intended to be independent yet parasitic, since they could "plug into" way stations to exchange occupants or replenish resources. These come together in standard (housing and office) units, and special (hospitals, schools, government buildings) units. Altogether, they are connected by long spanning arms that move all people, things and knowledge between other walking cities. "The images that illustrate Walking City reflect the dichotomy of the expression of an idea lodged in the realm of fantasy, compromised in turn, through its projectual details, with a certain intention of verisimilitude. In this way, a kind of bridge is built between symbolism and reality, suggesting a new point of view for architecture. The aesthetics of Herron’s collages evoke both the iconography of science fiction comics and the mechanical devices produced by science and technology, such as underwater and oil platforms."
The imagined context for these ambulatory, high-tech structures was a post-apocalyptic future in which the urban landscape lay in ruins, devastated by a man-made catastrophe. Archigram was interested "in the Armageddon overtones of survival technology," Frampton claims. "For all their surface irony, [Herron's "Walking Cities"] were clearly projected as stalking across a ruined world in the aftermath of a nuclear war. ... [T]hey suggest some sort of nightmarish salvation, rescuing both men and artifacts after a cataclysmic disaster."
Plug-in City, Peter Cook, 1966