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View of the Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria. A landmark of Blobism, it was designed by Archigram founders
Peter Cook and Colin Fournier three decades after their collective shut down. // AP

The Prophetic Side of

Archigram
DARRAN ANDERSON NOV 15, 2017

It’s easy to see the controversial group’s influence in left field architecture from High-
Tech to Blobism 50 years later, but it’s easier still to see it in emerging technologies and
the way we interact with them.
A giant city crawls across the land like an insect. Airships drop cultural
attractions onto unsuspecting villages. A hovercraft expands into an inflatable
settlement. These visions, sparked by sci-fi novels and comic books, belonged
to the collective Archigram, which existed from 1961 to 1974.

Even in a semi-mythic 1960s London in thrall to glamour, psychedelia, and

“the white heat of [technological] revolution” espoused by the Prime Minister
Harold Wilson, Archigram was controversial. Derided for their futuristic
frivolity as much as they were admired at the time, half a century later,
Archigram prophesied the future in ways they may not have even fully
foreseen.

Archigram can be seen as part of several trends that influence metropolitan life
to this day. One was the Pop Art movement, where color, dynamism, fashion,
and disposability were presented in graphics as understated as a passing
billboard. Pop Art was bold and blatant. Yet there was always a hint of
ambiguity whether the artists were celebrating consumer culture or satirizing
it, allowing them to appear as outsiders even while ensconced on the inside.
Archigram followed in the wake of British art pioneers like Eduardo Paolozzi,
who were fascinated by mass production while still trying to meaningfully
merge the personal with the technological.
They emerged in an age of provocative and performative avant-garde
architecture groups like Superstudio and Ant Farm. They shared several traits
with their contemporaries such as a vaguely countercultural sensibility, an
interest in nomadism, and debts to visionary predecessors like Buckminster
Fuller and Bruno Taut. One crucial difference with other groups of the time
was that Archigram didn’t rail against modernity so much as they wished to
accelerate it. They acted against what they saw as a tediously conservative
environment, not because of radical political sentiments, but because of the
inability of art and architecture to keep pace with the products, lifestyles, and
machinery that were already part of daily life. The age of Dan Dare, Revolver,
and Carnaby Street required more than many of their dogmatic traditionalist
and Brutalist contemporaries were offering. “We are seeking the living city,”
they claimed, not palaces or concrete hulks.

Archigram

There’s a temptation to suppose that Archigram was speaking metaphorically

or satirically. Ron Herron’s Walking City (1964) could be a thought-provoking
inquiry about the increasing mobility of our lives as “traveler-workers” as one
rendering suggests, or how cities rely on outside resources and the
surrounding environment.
Sometimes, however, a Walking City is just a Walking City. Reading their
publication Archigram 5 (the “Metropolis Issue”), the sincerity is striking. A
sense of fun and dystopian provocation certainly permeates the visuals but the
texts are full of erudite references to predecessors like Antonio Sant'Elia and
Tony Garnier, contemporaries like the Japanese Metabolists, and boundary-
pushing architecture like the movable rocket support structures at Cape
Kennedy. In the issue, they ask questions such as, “Are cities still necessary?”
and examine the flaws in metropolises that have outlived their original
functions. Their desire to provoke was ultimately successful.

If their spray housing and anti-gravity pads failed to arouse indignation, then
their statements would. “Architecture is probably a hoax…” Warren Chalk
once wrote to fellow Archigram member David Greene, “an attempt to
rationalize the irrational.” Their playful incitements functioned, as Peter Cook
described it, as “a search for ways out from the stagnation of the architectural
scene.” Unfortunately, the extravagance of their propositions and the resistance
they met obscured the fact that the questions they were asking were valuable
and are still largely unanswered.

Archigram’s perceived tendency towards anti-architecture brought many of

the same criticisms of indulgence that anti-artists like Fluxus faced at the time.
On hearing the group had won a commission, an unnamed architect was
quoted in the Architect’s Journal September 1970 issue, “So it’s goodbye to all
that plug-in crap, now Archigram have to design a real building like all the rest
of us.”
Much of the derision came not just from their outlandish concoctions or
declarations, but from a view that they’d dodged the risks and responsibilities
that came with building actual buildings. Though progressive, Archigram
avoided directly committing to the social initiatives of the time, with Peter
Cook celebrating the This is Tomorrow exhibition for exorcising “themselves of
the morality of ‘people’s architecture,’” The proliferation of female pin-ups as
scalies in their renderings did little for their credibility. At the same time, Cook
denied their work lacked a social conscience. “We are not politically
overdeveloped as a group,” he said, “but there is a kind of emancipatory drive
behind most of our schemes.”

Searching through their archives, it’s apparent that Archigram did indeed
locate the city of the future, implicitly rather than explicitly. This began, it
seems, with Cook’s Come and Go Project in 1963, which imagined a city as an
integrated network of services and communications. This led to Cook’s hugely-
ambitious Plug-In City (1964). This contained many well-worn science-fiction
ideas; some of which have been adopted universally (escalators) or survive as
retrofuturistic relics (monorails).

The questions they were asking were valuable and are still largely
unanswered.
While the design appears like a vast Meccano set of cranes and scaffolding, it
was built on a sound consideration of urban obsolescence. Changes over time
render different aspects of cities (bathrooms, workplaces, shops) redundant at
different rates. The Plug-In City could adapt by removing and replacing
components. The structures would be computer-controlled; an idea adapted by
Dennis Crompton in his Computer City Project (1964), which was a
“speculative proposal for a computer system detecting and facilitating patterns
of activity amongst a ‘city’ area of 100,000 people.” Their collective aim was to
see “what happens if the whole urban environment can be programmed and
structured for change.” What they anticipated was today’s Smart City in the
early 1960s.

While a high-tech city like Songdo in South Korea has a much more
recognizable skyline than the perpetual building site of the Plug-In City, there
are distinct parallels with energy, transport, and waste being synchronized
“ubiquitously” via pipes, cables, sensors,less and circuit boards. Songdo seems
to fulfill Cook’s ambition of “using the electronic summoning potential, [to
make] the whole thing responsive on the day to day scale.” There is little sense
in either, however, that the Smart City might be the hackable city. For all its
anarchic appeal, those who operate the infrastructure of the Plug-In City
would be the new masters, whether officially or illegally.
 Peter Cook: "Archigram Designs Were Always Meant to Be Built"

The ability of a city to change, in space and time, was at the center of
Archigram’s work. They were influenced by many forms of temporary
architecture from big-top tents to the space program. They called their work
“anti-heroic” because they rejected the egotism of architecture that aimed for
eternity. They had learned this from their compatriot Cedric Price, who was
both an architect and a member of the National Federation of Demolition
Contractors, as well as the much earlier Futurists but rejected the destructive
philistinism associated with the Italian group. For all their assertions that
previous generations should not impose redundancy upon those of the future,
Archigram was not averse to preservation, declaring in Archigram 3, “We shall
not bulldoze Westminster Abbey.”
Change was simply an inevitability that too many ignored. It was also unfairly
denigrated, “Fashion is a dirty word, so is temporary, so is flashy,” Archigram
contended in Living Arts Magazine, “Yet it is the creation of those things that are
necessarily fashionable, temporary or flashy that has more to do with the
vitality of cities than ‘monument buildings.’” Archigram’s much-overlooked
egalitarianism dealt with people as they actually were and not as they ought to
be. They would uncover what the population wanted and would give it to
them, however glitzy and garish. This chimed with their contemporaries
Venturi and Scott Brown’s studies of oft-dismissed architecture seen in Las
Vegas. While not strictly postmodern (even at their most surreal, there was
always an emphasis on utility and underlying systems), Archigram clearly
took Venturi’s “less is a bore” belief to a maximalist conclusion.

The move from citizen to consumer would be a costly one. Warren Chalk’s
definition of “housing as a consumer product” and Archigram #3’s desire to
move “towards throwaway architecture” required abundance. It was also
predicated on a culture of expendability that not only potentially diminished
the idea of home but would produce boundless waste. “The prepackaged
frozen lunch is more important than Palladio,” Cook declared in Perspecta, a
statement that might be true but was more an indictment of an age than a
celebration. The environmental awakening taking place globally during the
group’s existence would mean that sustainability and resilience would be focus
of the future, not expendability. If the Walking City was a symbol of the future,
it might be the city as a parasite draining the earth dry.
It would be unfair, however, to claim the group were ignorant of
environmental issues. A certain degree of recycling is implied throughout.
They pursued a synthesis of urban and rural that would be sympathetic to
both, and to the inhabitants. What this looked like varied, with Peter Cook’s
Hedgerow Villages and Crater Cities attempting to smuggle metropolitan areas
into the unspoiled countryside through concealment. Furthermore, as
potentially damaging as their reliance on plastics was, they recognized that
consumption was pushing society towards the brink; humanity “is on the
precipice of really realizing [its] potential or passing out of existence
completely.”

Even their supporter Reyner Banham admitted they were “short on

theory, long on draftsmanship and craftsmanship.”

With its focus on transformation and utility, Archigram can be seen as pioneers
of modular architecture. Again, they stuck closely to people’s desires and
behaviors. Commonplace structures of housing were simply too rigid to enrich
modern life. People’s needs in terms of space changed dramatically with the
birth of a child, the urge to be alone or to study, or the desire to simply throw a
party. In response, Archigram’s Living 1990 designs for the Weekend Telegraph
predicted furniture that could inflate and deflate when needed, with
robotically operated screens for privacy. Walls moved. Floors became hard or
soft depending on the required function. Houses would become expressions of
the owner’s wishes rather than obstacles. “In the past, the indulgence of the
mind and intellect (as applied to artifacts) was the privilege of the rich...” ran
the editorial of Archigram #8, “it is now reasonable to treat buildings as
consumer products and the real justification of consumer products is that they
are the direct expression of the freedom to choose.”
This democratic imperative was a step towards the liberating technology that
might allow everyone to one day be an architect or at least an interior designer.
However, it should be remembered that “the privilege of the rich” that
Archigram sought to spread had resulted in at least as many follies as
architectural glories.

For all their fixation on cities, it’s arguable that Archigram’s work was actually
more suited to the wilderness. Their wearable architecture from the suitaloon
to the cushicle, their living-pods and air-habs seem designed for areas with
extreme conditions: fire shelters, Antarctic bases, Alpine huts, and emergency
sanctuaries after natural disasters. In less dramatic situations, the uses still
focused on seasonal refuges. There was an acknowledgement of this when
Peter Cook suggested his Blow-out Village “can be used everywhere to rehouse
people hit by disaster, for workmen in remote areas, and as fun resorts sited
permanently or seasonally at the seaside and near festivals.” The plan for their
Plug-In City to span the English Channel on a network of stilts, craneways and
hovercraft stations reveals a fascination with unconventional architecture like
Maunsell Forts, oil rigs, and Kenzo Tange's 1960 plan for Tokyo Bay. But the
results seem more inclined to resemble the industrial platform city of Neft
Daşları on the Caspian Sea rather than Venice, Queen of the Adriatic. When we
encounter a city that is moved in real-life, it tends to be a collapsing mining
settlement like the Swedish Arctic town of Kiruna.
Within the cityscapes of today, we might see descendants of Archigram’s
designs in so-called parasitic architecture on rooftops, shipping-container
structures, prefab skyscrapers, or temporary refuges for the homeless, but a
certain utopianism seems lost with such stopgaps. The most radical feature in
their “Free Time Node Trailer Cage” (1967) is not the multi-story parking
garage-esque structure or the modified camper vans, but rather the proposal of
a 2-to-3 day workweek. The mutual fascination between Archigram and the
Metabolists encouraged both in pod schemes, which are now often regarded as
an intriguing dead-end. Though the likes of the remarkable Nakagin Capsule
Tower failed to inspire generations of buildings, the idea has not gone away
from the “social network with a physical address” of PodShare in Los Angeles
to the distinctly dystopian “coffin homes” of Hong Kong. Comparing these to
Archigram reveals a sense of individual dignity contained in the group’s
housing plans that is easily missed and all too-often absent today.

Archigram was genuinely ahead of its time was in the virtual realm and its
interactions with the physical world. Their Oslo Soft Scene Monitor (1968)
looks strikingly like an arcade machine cabinet while Ron Herron’s MANZAK
(1969) seems to anticipate both smartphones and Amazon:

Tired of supermarket shopping? […] MANZAK is our latest idea for a

radio-controlled, battery-powered electric automation. It has on board
logic, optical range finder, TV camera, and magic eye bump detectors.
All the sensory equipment information retrieval, and for performing
tasks. Direct your business operations, do the shopping, hunt or fish,
or just enjoy electronic instamatic voyeurism, from the comfort of
your own home.
At times, it appears as if they wanted to build a physical internet. In their Plug-
In University Node, we find a “center from which information is piped.” Even
their absurdist Instant City (1968-70), a blimp that would bring metropolitan
culture to supposedly deprived rural communities, has some semblance of the
need to disseminate culture remotely. Inspired by Richard Brautigan’s poem
“All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace,” they took this further
towards what would become the internet with their rokplugs and logplugs:

Plugs will increase the services to these communities and they will be
workplaces, schools, universities, libraries, theatres, unencumbered
by buildings, they build themselves conveniently when they are
wished for. The whole of London or New York will be available in the
world’s leafy hollows, deserts, and flowered meadows.

The merging of virtual space and cityscapes that we see increasingly arriving
with Augmented Reality can be discerned in Archigram slogans and ideas like
“50 percent personalized environment.” One of the services that would emerge
from the Instant City airship was Ron Herron’s Holographic Scene Setter,
which would allow “the holographic projection of environments.” This joined
Herron’s Enviro-Pill which proposed inducing imaginary architecture in the
mind and was followed by Cook’s Room of 1000 Delights the following year.
The thinking was not just to create spaces to escape to but to use them to
improve reality. “We shall really get somewhere when it has all cooled off a
little, and hard[ware] and soft[ware] become relative to each other rather than
in opposition,” the editorial of Archigram #8 anticipated before warning,
“Systems are not a panacea. They have a necessary place in the evolution of
intelligence.” But Archigram suggest it is human evolution and intelligence
that are the crucial factors.

It’s unjust to blame the group for the memes, unbuildable phantom
projects, and publicity-seeking architectural brands of today.
One of the lasting criticisms leveled at Archigram is itself prophetic; they
raised the immediate eye-catching image above everything else and helped
usher in the visual age that followed. Even their supporter Reyner Banham
admitted they were “short on theory, long on draftsmanship and
craftsmanship. They’re in the image business.”

It’s unjust to blame the group for the memes, unbuildable phantom projects,
and publicity-seeking architectural brands of today. The practice has long been
there in architecture and often has an important role, clearing conceptual space
for what technology might eventually enable. It raises public engagement and
encourages collaborations and development. “Draw the object and you can
discuss it; you can then change and develop it. Make it better,” as Peter Cook
writes in Perspecta, volume 11. Cook went on to assure that, though
Archigram’s dedication to change was central, there was always a concern for
the inhabitants at its heart:

I would like to assure everyone that we are not monsters. We are not
trying to make houses look like cars, cities like oil refineries [...]
Although this analogous imagery is very strong at this moment in
time, it will, we contend, eventually be digested into a creative
system, so that eventually a positive approach will emerge naturally.

The saving grace of Archigram is not that they fueled a thousand hare-brained
pavilions or impossible renderings, but that—when looking at how cities might
evolve—they thought firstly of the wants of the citizens and did so without a
snobbish disdain for entertainment, gadgetry, comfort, escapism, or style.
It’s easy to see their influence in left field architecture from High-tech to
Blobism but it’s easier still, and more rewarding, to see it in emerging
technologies and the way we interact with them. The human aspect was never
forgotten. You’re reading this, after all, on a medium—handheld or otherwise
—Archigram anticipated the need and desire for. No one said prophets have to
be entirely accurate or virtuous; just as no one said architecture needs to be
boring.

About the Author

Darran Anderson
@ONIROPOLIS /
FEED

Darran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities (University of Chicago Press) and the
forthcoming Tidewrack (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
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