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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Archigram | 2/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archigram | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:38:11.381677+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== 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." 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, 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."
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 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.” 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."