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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Archigram | 3/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archigram | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T16:38:11.381677+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Plug-in City, Peter Cook, 1966 === Plug-in City was a project that acts as a representation of a complex communication system of a computer into an urban network. Compared to Herron's Walking City, it remains a long standing reference for the avant-garde It in Archigram's unique scale. As a mega-structure with no buildings, as a massive framework into which dwellings in the form of cells or standardized components could be slotted. Feedback taken from Japanese avant-garde "[W]hich had found itself, in Peter Cook's summation, 'sometimes ... treated with very harsh criticism by the European elite of Team 10. One visitor to the Team 10 meetings, the architect Kenzo Tange had embarked on upon megastructural schemes of such ambition that Plug-in City seemed modest." Because of this, the concept of Plug-in City had to prove itself against "metabolism," or the design of "long-term structures" and "short term components" altogether. Despite this criticism, Plug-in City remains precedent to the Metabolist Group with Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower. Another example as well is Habitat 67, using a system of concrete forms with the aim to "create 'a building which gives the qualities of a house to each unit – Habitat would be all about gardens, contact with nature, streets instead of corridors.'" The concept of Plug-in City's support structures and modular capsules is the furthest Archigram has gotten to an architectural project.
=== Instant City, Peter Cook, 1968-70 ===
In graphic representation, Instant City represents one of the highest points of Archigram's fictional design. It steps the furthest out of a history of building by using new lightweight materials. "However, although it is true that their proposals continue today belonging to the field of architectural fiction and, despite the apparent frivolity of their graphic representations, we must not forget the critical discourse that, exploring their own repertoires drawn from popular culture, art and science, pulsates within it." Instant City is a mobile technological event that drifts into underdeveloped, drab towns via air (balloons) with provisional structures (performance spaces) in tow. The effect is a deliberate overstimulation to produce mass culture, with an embrace of advertising aesthetics. The whole endeavor is intended to eventually move on, leaving behind advanced technology hook-ups.
=== Other projects === Tuned City: Archigram's infrastructural and spatial additions attach themselves to an existing town at a percentage that leaves evidence of the previous development, rather than subsuming the whole. The Living Pod: David Greene's capsule house is a unit that could be plugged in similarly to how their megastructures implement it. "The Living Pod is a structure designed from two kinds of components: a continuous envelope, executed in reinforced plastic (GRP, glass-fibre reinforced polyester resin), and a fragmented assembly of aggregate machines. An airtight and comfortable capsule - or pod - with internal compartments for multiple uses." The French fashion line Sixpack France dedicated their Summer Spring 2009 Collection to this movement.
== Influence and legacy == The group served as a source of inspiration for early works by Norman Foster, Gianfranco Franchini, and Future Systems and, most memorably, the Pompidou centre (commissioned 1971, opened 1977) by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, an arresting example of High tech, a.k.a. structural expressionism. "The building is obviously a realization of the technological and infrastructural rhetoric of Archigram," writes Frampton, "and while the full consequences of this approach are becoming evident through everyday use, it is apparent that certain paradoxical achievements may be claimed on its behalf." In the first place, it is an outstanding popular success—as much for its sensational nature as anything else. In the second, it is a brilliant tour de force in advanced technique, looking for all the world like an oil refinery whose technology it attempts to emulate. Frampton concedes, however, that the Pompidou seems "to have come into being with the minimum regard for the specificity of its brief—for the art and library holdings it was destined to house. It represents the design approach of indeterminacy and optimum flexibility taken to extremes."