Editing Archigram (section)

===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.