Examining Archigram's Ideas and Their Pursuit of Style
Europe in the 1960’s was the incubator for the emergence of young, provocative, and avant-garde architecture radicals including Archizoom, Superstudio, Ant Farm, and UFO. These groups rebelled against traditional architecture dogma in favor of exalting tropes that celebrated counterculture ideals, and an interest in designs that could extend both time and space. Archigram, the London-based faction of this movement, didn’t try to reinvent modernist principles, but instead tried to accelerate them and push the conservative climate to become more future-proof. Rightfully so, they felt that art and architecture was falling behind with their inability to keep up with products and technological advancements that were already a part of daily life. While Archigram’s ideas and drawings were often criticized as being frivolous, the group’s prophecies about the future have been realized in many ways, and still largely influence architectural discourse in the present day.
Archigram, a word derived from the combination of “architecture” and “telegram”, was founded in 1960 at the Architecture Association by six young designers: Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb, and David Green. Only a year later, they released their preliminary manifesto in the form of a single sheet magazine filled with poems and sketches encouraging voices of the younger generation to invent new forms that retain modernist ideals while also projecting them forward into the future.
Archigram’s lifeblood and notoriety comes from their explosively colorful sci-fi-esque drawings that reflect the energy from the forced consumerist culture of their time. Their attitude was similar to that of the Pop Art movement, defined by bold graphics of mundane, mass produced products, with a hint of double-entendre about if the art was celebrating consumer culture or parodying it. The group also utilized heretical collage effects, which until this point, were rarely seen as a device to describe architectural design. These images looked like torn advertisement pages from catalogs that evoked their obsession of space exploration and urban thrills with images of swimming pools, fast cars, beautiful women, spaceships, and hot air balloons. Archigram’s illustrations underscored their mantra that form did not follow function, but that it follows creativity, and a strong desire for architecture to be cheerful, responsive, dynamic, and pulsating. They claimed that their work bridged a gap between what was already built, and what might be built.
Working in parallel with Japanese metabolists who saw the need for more flexible and deconstructible architecture, Archigram proposed buildings that were highly mobile and had the ability to be transformed based on the inhabitant’s needs. Two of their most well-known concepts are the Walking City and the Plug In City.
The Walking City, designed by Ron Herron in 1964, invented a new way of pastoral life as a counter to modernism’s descriptions of suburbia. It’s insect-like illustrations responded directly to the idea of increasing mobility and how we might be able to move from place to place as a response to various environmental conditions. These giant robots that represented a literal Corbusian machine for living contained housing pods that had the ability to roam across land, and trek through oceans. The context for Herron’s idea was a future world completely destroyed as a result of a nuclear war.
Plug-In City, also ideated in 1964, imagined a completely new approach to urbanism with how a city’s infrastructure interacted with its inhabited buildings. Illustrations show a fantasy city filled with modular units that “plug-in” to a central framework. The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Japan most resembles this idea in the current built environment. The Plug-In City was not so much a city as we traditionally define it, but an evolving megastructure that moves residences, mass transportation, and essential services with enormous cranes. These designs could be added to, subtracted from, and truly reinvented at any moment.
Perhaps more significant than their proposals themselves is the influence and mark that they have maintained through generations of students who study and practice today. Well-known architects such as Nicholas Grimshaw and Rem Koohaas all drew inspiration from Archigram’s ideas and incorporated their outlandish credo into their own work. Some critics argue that even Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s High-Tech style Parisian landmark of the Centre Pompidou was largely influenced by the mechanical nature of Archigram’s attitude.
Overall, Archigram understood that times change, lives change, and architecture and urbanism should have the ability to respond and change just as quickly. Whatever architects do, we must do it with creativity, conviction, and unwavering belief that even the most eccentric ideas might become a future reality.
2020-03-28 10:06:14Z
https://www.archdaily.com/936154/examining-archigrams-ideas-and-their-pursuit-of-style
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