Editing Archigram (section)

===The Walking City, Ron Herron, 1964===

The [[Ron Herron#Walking City|Walking City]] is constituted by intelligent buildings or robots in the form of giant, self-contained living pods designed to roam freely. The form derived from a combination of insect and machine and was a literal interpretation of [[Le Corbusier]]'s aphorism that a house was a "machine for living in." The pods were intended to be independent yet parasitic, since they could "plug into" way stations to exchange occupants or replenish resources. The imagined context for these ambulatory, high-tech structures was a post-apocalyptic future in which the urban landscape lay in ruins, devastated by a man-made catastrophe.

Archigram was interested "in the Armageddon overtones of survival technology," Frampton claims. "For all their surface irony, [Herron's "Walking Cities"] were clearly projected as stalking across a ruined world in the aftermath of a nuclear war. ... [T]hey suggest some sort of nightmarish salvation, rescuing both men and artifacts after a cataclysmic disaster."<ref>Kenneth Frampton, ''Modern Architecture: A Critical History'', third edition, revised and enlarged, 1992, p. 281.</ref>