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Archigram

Archigram was an avant-garde architecture group formed in the 1960s in London that imagined futuristic, mobile, and consumer-focused architectural projects. The group was inspired by technology and proposed hypothetical buildings and cities that were lightweight, modular, and could change over time according to users' needs. Their projects envisioned a dynamic future where resources were abundant and architecture was as mobile and adaptable as society. However, their ideas were criticized for being frivolous and ignoring social and environmental concerns.

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178 views

Archigram

Archigram was an avant-garde architecture group formed in the 1960s in London that imagined futuristic, mobile, and consumer-focused architectural projects. The group was inspired by technology and proposed hypothetical buildings and cities that were lightweight, modular, and could change over time according to users' needs. Their projects envisioned a dynamic future where resources were abundant and architecture was as mobile and adaptable as society. However, their ideas were criticized for being frivolous and ignoring social and environmental concerns.

Uploaded by

Chandni Jeswani
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Archigram was an avant-garde group formed in the 1960s that imagined architecture which was

neofuturistic, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist. It drew inspiration from technology to create a new
reality that was expressed through hypothetical projects.

The main members of the group were Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton,
Michael Webb and David Greene and were all based at the Architectural Association in London.
Archigram and its founders were committed to a 'high tech', light weight, infra-structural approach that
was focused towards survival technology. The group experimented with modular units, mobility through
the environment, space capsules and mass-consumerism imagery. Their works offered a seductive vision
of a glamorous future machine age; however, left out social and environmental issues.

Archigram agitated to break away from the sterile and dry nature of modernism. Unlike Buckminster
Fuller who assumed the finite nature of material, Archigram assumed that in the future, resources
would be infinite. Archigram wanted architecture to be as mobile, dynamic and “pulsating”, to use one
of their favorite 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. “In the 1960s,” Dennis Crompton noted,
“self-determination became an important thing. We were interested in how the consumer could be part
of the design process, not a recipient.”

Dismissal came from dour traditionalists and progressive elements alike. Some took their provocations
at face value as pranksters. Archigram’s ideas were depicted as frivolous and indulgent and the fact that
their plans went unbuilt were signs of delinquent cop-outs instead of conceptual trailblazing. Crompton,
for one, brushes off the unbuilt issue, claiming most of the designs could have been built and were
designed to if there had been the kind of audacity. Yet the very factors for which Archigram were
criticized—viral imagery, a merging of architecture and technology, the inclusion of fashion,
entertainment, escapism, and other elements of people’s lives deemed unworthy of serious attention—
seem to have endeared them to younger generations of designers.

By the early 1970s the strategy of the group had changed. In 1973 Theo Crosby, the designer who
helped get Archigram’s work published and brought them to the forefront, 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."

Their ideas and innovative drawings live on, however. “Form follows function,” wrote 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.”

Plug-in-City, Peter Cook, 1964

Plug-in-City is a mega-structure with no built buildings but a massive framework into which dwellings in
the form of cells or standardized modules could be slotted into. The machine had taken over work in
Cook’s imagination and people were the raw material being processed, the difference being that people
are meant to enjoy the experience.

The Walking City, Ron Herron, 1964


The Walking City is constituted by intelligent buildings or robots that are in the form of giant, self-
contained living pods that could roam the cities. This idea was inspired by the insect and machine forms
and was a reinterpretation of Le Corbusier’s adage – ‘a house is a machine for living in’. The pods were
independent, yet parasitic as they could 'plug into' way stations to exchange occupants or replenish
resources. The context was perceived as a future ruined world in the aftermath of a nuclear war in
which the citizen was a nomad.

Instant City

Instant City is a mobile technological city 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 and an activated happy town.

Other projects

Tuned City, in which Archigram's infrastructural and spatial additions attach themselves to an existing
town at a smaller percentage wherein evidence of the previous development is left and the whole is not
consumed.

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