Archigram: designs on the future

Archigram was christened in 1961, when a group of dissident British neophyte architects - Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Mike Webb - joined forces to produce an alternative architectural broadsheet as a venue for their drawings and collages. In keeping with their enthusiasm for the immediacy of information-age electronics, they called the new publication Archigram, liking the title's association with "telegram" and "aerogramme." When critics like Reyner Banham began referring to the work of the Archigram Group, the name stuck and this architectural collaboration was born.

Archigram's agenda was to inaugurate a "new generation of architecture" that at once developed and critiqued Modernist precepts. Like the group's Modernist forebears, the members of Archigram were careful readers of culture, their work shaped by the question of how architecture could keep pace with and respond to social change. But Archigram differed from mainstream Modernists on one fundamental count that had far-reaching implications for their practice: they wholeheartedly embraced what many of their countercultural contemporaries shunned - postwar consumer culture.

Archigram's vision of technology in particular was framed through mass culture; they updated the Modernist's love of mechanics with a James Bond-like fascination for (some might say fetishization of) electronic gadgetry. Projects like Living 1990 incorporate inflatable beds, hoverchairs, and robots, all run by a Master Control panel-sophisticated boy-toys that put Hugh Hefner's bachelor pads to shame. Archigram was even more enthusiastic over vehicles than their Modernist predecessors, treating these mass-market products not merely as models for architecture but literally as architecture. If Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye was as efficient as the car parked in the front drive, Mike Webb's Drive-in Housing goes one step farther, literally merging car and building into a single hybrid structure.

Popular culture registers in other ways as well. Warren Chalk's 1963 prize-winning competition entry for Montreal Tower shares affinities with the architecture of NASA control stations; even its manner of graphic presentation (Ben-day dots with slogans reading "Zoom . . . into a pop-up world") is indebted to comic books filtered through the eyes of Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and James Rosenquist. Later drawings by Ron Herron from 1969-70 shamelessly employ photomontage, air brush, and psychedelic pattern/graphic techniques borrowed from Milton Glaser-designed album covers.

Archigram's most radical innovations, however, were inspired by their ambition to create an architecture that did not so much capture the look of consumer capitalism as obey its logic. "The prepackaged frozen lunch is more important than Palladio," quipped Peter Cook in 1967. The most memorable projects take as a point of departure merchandising concepts like expandability, planned obsolescence, and consumer choice - principles that rocked the very foundations of a profession grounded in notions of permanence and good taste. These spirited proposals obsessively investigate the question posed by Cook: "What happens if the whole urban environment can be programmed and structured for change?" Rather than increased profits, Archigram's vision of a throwaway architecture was fueled by the promise of personal freedom. Acknowledging the precarious state of modern subjectivity was a source not of consternation but of celebration. The group's ideal client - sadly, they never realized a single building - was a modern nomad, always on the move.

Archigram's earlier and perhaps most renowned projects, created in the first years of the '60s, facilitate this itinerant lifestyle through vast visionary proposals for alternative cities. Reversing the normal hierarchy, Archigram was more interested in infrastructure than rooms, and they were one of the first to reveal the service elements - structure, utilities, and mechanical systems - that architects normally conceal. Projects like Plug-in City envision vast sprawling megastructures, giant skeletal frames that accept prefab removable dwelling units (modeled after NASA space capsules) hoisted into position by giant rooftop cranes. In one of the great drawings of modern architecture, Walking City New York, 1964, Ron Herron pushes the idea of mobility to the hilt: forty-story anthropomorphic buildings equipped with telescoping legs literally move across the landscape.

Of course, these visionary proposals were fiddled with contradictions: the infrastructure becomes obsolete just as rapidly as the capsule units it supports; the megastructures were every bit as monumental and totalizing as the static buildings they were meant to replace. Archigram's optimistic embrace of consumer capitalism and consumer choice was naive at best - seemingly unaffected by the ideological critiques launched by their contemporaries that outlined capitalism's amazing capacity to shape rather than merely respond to desire.