![]() ![]() Their projects offered a seductive vision of a glamorous, high-tech future. The group experimented with modular technology, mobility through the environment, space capsules, and consumer-culture imagery. The pamphlet Archigram I was printed in 1961 to proclaim their ideas. 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. Designer Theo Crosby was the "hidden hand" behind the group. Archigram formed in late 1960, shortly before the first issue of their magazine of the same name, which appeared in 1961. Archigram's subsequent commitment to a 'high-tech,' lightweight, infrastructural approach (the kind of indeterminacy implicit in the work of Fuller and even more evident in Yona Friedman's L'Architecture mobile of 1958) brought them, rather paradoxically, to indulge in ironic forms of science fiction, rather than to project solutions that were either truly indeterminate or capable of being realized and appropriated by society." History Origins: 1960-61 īased 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. "Their attitude was closely tied to the technocratic ideology of the American designer Buckminster Fuller," Kenneth Frampton confirms, in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, "and to that of his British apologists John McHale and Reyner Banham. Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman were also important sources of inspiration. ![]() Neofuturistic, anti-heroic, and pro-consumerist, the group drew inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was expressed through hypothetical projects, i.e., its buildings were never built, although the group did produce what the architectural historian Charles Jencks called "a series of monumental objects (one hesitates in calling them buildings since most of them moved, grew, flew, walked, burrowed or just sank under the water." The works of Archigram had a neofuturistic slant, influenced by Antonio Sant'Elia's works. ![]() Their work draws heavily from pop culture imagery, introducing a technocratic vision of the future that remains optimistic, despite plans that might otherwise appear oppressive.UK-based architecture group which aimed to explore extreme alternatives to urban design Peter Cook presents Archigram's project of “Plug-in City”Īrchigram was an avant-garde British architectural group whose unbuilt projects and media-savvy provocations "spawned the most influential architectural movement of the 1960's," according to Peter Cook, in the Princeton Architectural Press study Archigram (1999). It was printed by a small-press printer, assembled at home by the group, and distributed to and by students at universities throughout the UK and at a limited number of booksellers throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States (including Barbara's Bookstore in Chicago).Īrchigram took a democratic view towards architecture, proposing a customizable, disposable, often mobile product, which the consumer could assemble, add to, and remove from as desired to modify according to changing needs. The Archigram Group published 9 1/2 issues between 19 (Issue 9 1/2 was devoted to the work done by the Archigram studio, rather than being conceived as a complete Archigram issue on its own). The suffix "gram" was meant to convey the collective's desire to stand apart from the architectural mainstream in publishing-to reflect the magazine's resemblance to a telegram or instant communication, rather than a traditional magazine. The new group founded a magazine of the same name. Cook described it as a reaction against "the crap going on in London, against the attitude of a continuing European tradition of well-mannered, but gutless architecture that had absorbed the label 'Modern' but had betrayed most of the philosophies of the earliest 'Modern.'" In 1961 a group of young London architects-Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb-formed Archigram out of dissatisfaction with the Modernist architectural status quo. ![]()
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