A GUIDE TO ARCHIGRAM 1961-74:
EXPERIMENTAL ARCHITECTURE 1961-74
Dennis Crompton [Curator]
Dennis Crompton [Curator]: A GUIDE TO ARCHIGRAM 1961-74: EXPERIMENTAL ARCHITECTURE 1961-74. Taipei: Garden City, 2003. First edition thus. parallel text in English and Chinese. Thick quarto. Printed wrappers. 488 pp. Fully illustrated in color and black and white with examples from the Archigram Archives. An unread copy of this big little book: still in Publishers shrinkwrap.
5.625 x 4.9375-inch softcover book with 488 pages fully illustrated in color and black and white with examples from the Archigram Archives assembled for an exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum 15 March 2003.
In the decade of the Beatles and the moon landing, cybernetics and megacities, an ambitious group of young British architects burst on the scene with a bold manifesto for urban building. The Archigram group pioneered a playful brand of architecture that was visionary, utopian, and grounded in social need. Through a provocative series of publications and exhibitions, the avant-garde cooperative challenged an architectural establishment they felt had become reactionary and self-serving. They advocated a complete rethinking of the relationships between technology, society, and architecture, rightly predicting today's information revolution decades before it came to pass. A Guide to Archigram 1961-74 is a compact history showcasing the group's most interesting and influential schemes, from walking cities and plug-in universities to inflatable dwellings and free time nodes. This book, the most comprehensive guide to Archigram's voluminous output, collects the critical responses of the period, in addition to hundreds of drawings and photographs.
Archigram [United Kingdom, c. 1961 – 1974] was an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s that was neofuturistic, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist, drawing inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was solely expressed through hypothetical projects.
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. Designer Theo Crosby was the "hidden hand" behind the group. He gave them coverage in Architectural Design magazine (where he was an editor from 1953–62), brought them to the attention of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, where, in 1963, they mounted an exhibition called Living City, and in 1964 brought them into the Taylor Woodrow Design Group, which he headed, to take on experimental projects.
The pamphlet Archigram I was printed in 1961 to proclaim their ideas. Committed to a 'high tech', light weight, infra-structural approach that was focused towards survival technology, the group experimented with modular technology, mobility through the environment, space capsules and mass-consumer imagery. Their works offered a seductive vision of a glamorous future machine age; however, social and environmental issues were left unaddressed.
Archigram 1, the first issue of a magazine – if a single sheet can be called that – that was to grow in pagination and significance. Its price was sixpence, in old money. “You couldn’t give it away,” says Cook, “only friends and numbskulls would buy it.”
Now, it will be literally worth its (small) weight in gold, or more, for this flimsy tablet of stone, this home-made harbinger of a technological future, is rare and collectible. It gave its name to the group of young architects who made it, a loose bunch whose interests ranged from the everyday to the extraterrestrial, who sometimes collaborated and sometimes didn’t, but the magazine gave them a common identity. They, people and publication together, would be some of the most influential of the second half of the 20th century.
Archigram agitated to prevent modernism from becoming a sterile and safe orthodoxy by its adherents. Unlike ephemeralisation from Buckminster Fuller which assumes more must be done with less material (because material is finite), Archigram relies on a future of interminable resources.
“Form follows function,” wrote another Archigrammer, David Greene, repeating a modernist slogan in order to knock it down, “no it doesn’t it follows idea, it follows a desire for architecture to be cheerful.”
The works of Archigram had a neofuturistic slant being influenced by Antonio Sant'Elia's works. Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman were also important sources of inspiration. The works of Archigram served as a source of inspiration for later works such as the High tech 'Pompidou centre' 1971 by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, early Norman Foster works, Gianfranco Franchini and Future Systems. By the early 1970s the strategy of the group had changed. In 1973 Theo Crosby wrote that 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".
“The period,” says Cook, “was joyfully acquisitive. Someone might be talking about powder puffs, or cranes, or enviro-pills. It was all interesting.” And so, for example, Webb came up with the “cushicle” and the “suitaloon”, fusions of shelter, vehicle and clothing, which would allow their wearers to travel around in comfortable personalised environments. Archigram wanted architecture to be as mobile, dynamic and “pulsating”, to use one of their favourite words, as the society they saw around them. They proposed buildings that moved, that shone in the dark, that could be changed at their users’ will.
If we consider for a moment Christo's seminal work – the 'wrapped cliff' – we might see it in one of two ways: as a wrapped cliff or; preferably, as the point at which all other cliffs are unwrapped. An Archigram project attempts to achieve this same altered reading of the familiar (in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller's question, 'How much does your building weigh?'). It provides a new agenda where nomadism is the dominant social force; where time, exchange and metamorphosis replace stasis; where consumption, lifestyle and transience become the programme; and where the public realm is an electronic surface enclosing the globe —David Greene
Archigram’s fascination with the technology of the moment, mostly from the US, is obvious. They loved the capsules and spacesuits that went with the Apollo moonshots, and wanted to transfer them to Earth-bound buildings. Their best-known projects – such as Ron Herron’s insect-like “Walking Cities” – look like sci-fi. Their interest in consumer culture came without the distancing irony of artists like Richard Hamilton; they were more interested in what it could achieve. “In the 1960s,” says Crompton, “self-determination became an important thing. We were interested in how the consumer could be part of the design process, not a recipient.”
At the same time they brought a British mindset to their creations, which owed as much to seaside piers as to Cape Canaveral. They drew on traditions of garden-shed tinkering and inventing, Cook says, “old gadgets, the boffin thing, Heath Robinson, bouncing bombs, funny cars”. They had a “shared sense of humour, which is a British thing. The world is so absurd, you can only make a joke or you’d collapse. You’re never as serious as when you poke fun at something.”
Cook also sees precedents in 19th-century Britain: “The Victorians were doing a lot of Archigram”, he says, in the way they combined new inventions with stylistic borrowings from wherever they fancied.
More specifically, Archigram’s was a provincial British attitude, as Cook likes to reiterate. He was born in Southend-on-Sea and studied in Bournemouth; Crompton was born in Blackpool and studied in Manchester; Greene was raised and educated in Nottingham. Cook describes how, “as a spotty boy up from the provinces”, he encountered in London the establishment culture of “English chaps… even if you were a Marxist you were an Etonian Marxist”. But “the spotties were more hungry”. They were more open-minded, more willing to learn from, for example, the lesser-known expressionist architects of 1920s Germany, rather than the canonical works of Bauhaus. Archigram, then, is partly a rebellion of the spotties against the “drearies”, as Cook and co called them, who were running the show.
The three men resist the most common charge against Archigram, that they dealt in unbuildable fantasies. “There’s nothing we couldn’t have done,” says Cook. For Greene, “We were trying to bridge the gap between what was built and what might be built.” Crompton, perhaps the most pragmatic of the gang, points to their proposals for applying light industrial techniques to building homes more efficiently, of which then, as now, there was a dire shortage. He challenges me to name an unbuildable Archigram project. Walking Cities, I venture. If you can build an ocean liner, he says, why not them?
What is the case is that there are few identifiable Archigram buildings. The Southbank Centre in London, on which Crompton, Herron and Chalk played leading roles, embodies many of their ideas. A swimming pool enclosure and kitchen addition to Rod Stewart’s country house was built. The translucent, tent-like roof of Herron’s 1990 Imagination building in London was a late flowering of Archigram’s love of lightweight structures. Cook has delivered buildings, such as a bright blue blob of a drawing school in Bournemouth, in which the curvy, organic shapes from the pages of the Archigram magazine become reality.
More significant is their influence, which has filtered through their teaching into generations of students, and through their publications and exhibitions into the practice of architecture. Architects such as Nick Grimshaw (for example with his Eden Project), Rem Koolhaas and the late Will Alsop all owed something to Archigram. Their influence is most famously evident in Piano and Rogers’s Centre Pompidou, whose visible pipework and promises of dynamic change owe much to Archigram, even if Greene, for one, is ambivalent about the Parisian landmark. “They stole the look without the content,” he says. “It looks as if it could move, but it doesn’t.”
Perhaps their biggest gift to architecture is an attitude. You can pick holes in Archigram’s thinking, in particular the assumption that dynamic, free lifestyles would be best served by buildings with lots of moving parts. Some of their contraptions look like terribly contrived and complicated ways to achieve their stated ends. Greene, a quieter and more subtle thinker than Cook, realises this well himself: “The question is not ‘Can you do it?’ but ‘Why would you want to do it?’”
But running through Archigram is the essential insight that buildings should respond to the lives that go on in and around them, and that when those lives change they should be able to change too. Also the belief that, whatever you do, you should do it with zest.
It was a baggy enough group to contain differences of opinion. If Greene is “less and less interested in what things look like, compared to what lies behind”, Cook is eternally enthralled by appearance. This diversity is also one of their strengths: “so our contributors aren’t taking the same line”, it says in Archigram 2, “but they’re each taking some sort of line.”
The group was financially supported by mainstream architects, such as David Rock of BDP. Rock later nominated Archigram for the RIBA Royal Gold Medal, which they received in 2002.
In 2019, the M+ museum in Hong Kong acquired Archigram's entire archive, despite purported attempts to block the sale to an overseas buyer. [wikipedia / The Guardian]