Editing Archigram (section)

==History==

===Origins: 1960-61===

Based at the [[Architectural Association School of Architecture|Architectural Association]] in [[London]], the main members of the group were [[Peter Cook (architect)|Peter Cook]], [[Warren Chalk]], [[Ron Herron]], [[Dennis Crompton]], [[Michael Webb (architect)|Michael Webb]] and [[David Greene (architect)|David Greene]]. Archigram formed in late in the year 1960, shortly before the first issue of their magazine of the same name, which appeared in 1961. Designer [[Theo Crosby]] was the "hidden hand" behind the group.<ref>Simon Sadler, ''Archigram: architecture without architecture'', MIT Press, 2005, p.161</ref> He gave them coverage in ''Architectural Design'' magazine (where he was an editor from 1953 to 1962), brought them to the attention of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, where, in 1963, they mounted an exhibition called ''Living City'',<ref>Crosby raised the money for this from the Gulbenkian Foundation, and subsequently edited its publication in the ICA's ''Living Arts'' magazine: Sadler, ''op cit'', p.207</ref> and in 1964 brought them into the Taylor Woodrow Design Group, which he headed, to take on experimental projects.<ref>Peter Cook, ''Archigram'', Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, p.44</ref> The pamphlet ''Archigram I'' was printed in 1961 to proclaim their ideas. The group experimented with modular technology, mobility through the environment, space capsules, and consumer-culture imagery. Their projects offered a seductive vision of a glamorous, high-tech future. Social and environmental issues were, however, left largely unaddressed.

The group tapped into the zeitgeist captured by Richard Hamilton in his "[[This Is Tomorrow]]" exhibition in 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, by Pop Art, by the turned-on, tuned-in psychedelic counterculture, and by the gnomic pronouncements of the media theorist [[Marshall McLuhan]]. Then, too, some of its guiding principles were premonitory of what the politically radical French avant-garde would later call [[Situationism]]. In the Living City exhibition, Archigram "collected images from any part of the city&mdash;the accepted Pop iconography of spaceman, superman, robotman, and woman&mdash;but presented them in a way and with a message that was new to architecture," Jencks writes, in ''Modern Movements in Architecture''.

<blockquote>The city was seen not as architecture (hardware), but as people and their "situations" (software). It was these infinitely variable and fleeting situations which gave the real life to the city: in this sense "the home, the whole city, and the frozen pea pack are all the same." Not only are they all expendable, but they are all products which interact with man in the same level, ''the situation''.<ref>Charles Jencks, ''Modern Movements in Architecture'', Anchor Books, 1973, p.288</ref></blockquote>
 
Archigram agitated to prevent modernism from becoming a sterile orthodoxy, rendered safe by its adherents. Contrary to [[Buckminster Fuller]]'s notion of "[[ephemeralization]]," which assumes more must be done with less and less (because material resources are finite), Archigram presumes a future of inexhaustible resources.

===Mid-'60s===

According to Jencks, Archigram's "extraordinary inventiveness" and delirious, Pop sci-fi imagery attracted international media attention throughout 1963–65. The group designed cities "that looked like computers and molehills, that crawled on the shoots of a telescope like [[Eduardo Paolozzi]]'s Bug-Eyed Monsters, that bobbed under the sea like so many skewered balloons, that sprouted&mdash;swock!&mdash;out of the sea like a Tom Wolfian, hydraulic umbrella, that zoomed down from the clouds flashing 'Destroy-Man! Kill-All-Humans,' a space-comic-robot-zaap, that clicked into place along pneumatic tubes, a plug-in plastic layer cake, that gurgled and spluttered over the old city like creeping, cancerous, testubular, friendly [[Daleks]]."<ref>Charles Jencks, ''Modern Movements in Architecture'', Anchor Books, 1973, p.290-91</ref>

"The strength of Archigram's appeal," wrote the architecture critic and historian [[Reyner Banham]], "stems from many things, including youthful enthusiasm in a field (city planning) which is increasingly the preserve of middle-aged caution. But chiefly it offers an image-starved world a new vision of the city of the future, a city of components on racks, components in stacks, components plugged into networks and grids, a city of components being swung into place by cranes."<ref>Charles Jencks, ''Modern Movements in Architecture'', Anchor Books, 1973, p.291</ref>

===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."<ref>Charles Jencks, ''Modern Movements in Architecture'', Anchor Books, 1973, p.295-6</ref>

===1970's===

By the early 1970s, the group had changed its strategy. In 1973, wrote Theo Crosby,<ref>in ''How to play the environment game'', Penguin, p.49</ref> 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."

{{Cquote|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<ref>Crompton, Dennis (ed.) (1999). ''Concerning Archigram...'' London: Archigram Archives; prologue</ref>}}

The group was supported by mainstream architects, such as [[David Rock (architect)|David Rock]] of [[Building Design Partnership|BDP]]. Rock later nominated Archigram for the [[RIBA]] [[Royal Gold Medal]], which they received in 2002.<ref>[http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/people/showcase/01-02/archigram.htm ''ARCHIGRAM - RIBA Royal Gold Medalists 2002''] {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110526115137/http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/people/showcase/01-02/archigram.htm |date=26 May 2011 }} Citation by '''David Rock''' retrieved 11 April 2007.</ref>