a guide to wearing

ARCHIGRAMS
ECOLOGIES

by Andrew Buck and Alec Perkins

Cover Image: Archigram Cover - Peter Cook

How to use this guide

This guidebook should be viewed in conjunction with the
Archigram Ecologies Suit. While the suit will illustrate the
key Archigram Images and quotes from the members, this
guide will be accompanyment with in-depth explanations,
lesser known images and analysis.

Suit Key
Each section of the suit

Each Image on the suit will have a

number associated that will tie to the
image and section in this guide.

Whats in the Guide

Contents
There are three critical lenses necessary to examine the
biologic significance of Archigrams work: representation/
distribution of ideas, apparent parallels, and conceptual or
process parallels. We analyzed around a dozen archigram
projects and in every instance, we found we could draw a
clear parallel to at least one of the aforementioned scales. In
fact, more often than not, the parallels between Archigrams
projects and thier biological/ecological counterparts proved
to be surprisingly deep and nuanced.

Introduction
Representation:
The Living City Exhibition, London, June 1963
Apparent Parallels:
Plug-In City, 1962-1966
Plug-In/Capsule, 1964
Walking City, 1964
Walking City/Living Pod, 1965
Conceptual Parallels:
Instant City, 1969
Conclusion

Introduction

In the aftermath of WWII, there was a growing
awareness of the interconnectedness of geopolitics, cultures,
and economies, thus a new view of the world comparable to
that of an ecosystem began to develop. The destruction of the
war created unprecedented opportunities for the rebuilding
of cities, and along with it, a critical rethinking of how people
related to these new environments. This was the world in
which the members of the British architecture group Archigram were educated and coalesced.

Ones first contact with Archigram might well take
the form of a poster of Ron Herrons Walking City, one of the
iconic images of that group. In a glance, it is a mechanical
fantasy, superstructure, a vision of turrets and technology,
unseen mechanics powering telescoping legs that carry it
over the land and seas. These first impressions come across
as mechanistic and technological to the extreme, and it is
easy to simply characterize Archigram as a technology-driven
group. However, on a closer look, one realizes that the
Walking City was redefining the future relationship between
people, cities, and the earth in an ecological and biological
framework.

The word redefining is interesting here as the
critical element as Archigram and their contemporaries were
pushing to develop not only new ways of looking at urban
environments, but new ways of doing. With contemporary advances in technology in mind, they proposed well-developed
solutions for a new way of living. This life would be separate,
different from the pre-war human condition. A life of limitless
possibility, unfettered by the static confines of dead buildings.

Their work and ideas were more than a redefinition of the

way people interacted; but a re-execution of this definition.

Archigram is commonly misunderstood in this
regard. While they frequently borrowed the visual language
of technology, they used technological devices to express
biological paradigms. As architects reacting to the rapid pace
of change in cities and societies, biological, not technological, models could provide a viable framework for the flux
and complexity of contemporary life. Additionally, as a group
reacting to the rationalist Modern program which viewed architecture and urbanism as issues of object and optimization,
a biological model is complementary to Archigrams notion of
architecture as process as opposed to product.

We here use the term biological, ecological, and
metabolism loosely; in the strictly scientific sense, metabolism is the process by which cells power themselves and how
they construct macromolecules. (Hultgren, p.54). However,
these concepts have understood connotations that concern
the cycles of interconnectedness that occur within a complex
organism, and as such, are incredibly useful for characterizing
the dynamism and complexity of Archigrams work.

Living City Exhibition

Archigram, June 1963
One of the most critical projects in Archigrams portfolio
was actually a representation of their work. The Living City
exhibition was the first project undertaken by the entire
Archigram group. This exhibition was held at the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in London and was meant to express the
vitality of city life, rather than suggest a plan for a new city.
(Peter Cook, Archigram p.20)

Suit Location
Images
Living City Exhibition Layout of Interior
Spaces

Section 1
Section 2
Plan

Photographs of Interior Space 1

Gloop
Gloop
Gloop
Gloop

1
2
3
4

Layout Model Photograph

Living City Logo

Living City Exhibition

Archigram, June 1963

Purely a representation of ideas, the Living City, was
not intended to create a real city; rather it was commentary
on the life of the city. A biologicmodel reveals itself through
the form of the exhibit, and the ideas of the city as a focus of
the body. Represented in the both drawings and mock-ups
the exhibit layout mimics the inside of the body through organ shaped spaces. This biological translation was not intentional as these spaces are based on the form of the triangle,
and its abilitiy to twist itself around spaces. The resulting
organ-like forms illustrate that through an application of the
technical, the biological is actually created.

At the spatial core of the Living City are Gloops,
they are areas of the exhibit that consider the separate issues
of the Living City and form the giant brain. The issues are
survival, crowd, cosmopolitan scene, movement, objective,
man, communications, place, and situation. Again, like the
use of triangles, these forms are not meant to be biological per se; but through perpetuating the ideas of the Body,
flexibility and movement, they inherently become so. For
example, the Man Gloop is organism housing, an attempt to
understand how humans will live and what their needs will be
in the future.

Suit Location

Section 1

Section 2

Layout Model Photograph

Living City Exhibition

Archigram, June 1963

Suit Location

Although the forms of the exhibit appear biological,
the true biologic model of the exhibit, the vitality of the city,
is evident in the arrangement of images, spaces and ideas of
the Living City. The city is an entity of vitality, with the Body
as the center of this vitality. The Body as an element is the
critical biological model of Archigrams Living City, because it
is us, the model through which we live. The space of the city
is an extension of us and thus becomes a biologic model as a
result of vital interconnectedness of the us within the city.

Abbreviated Gloop Image Collage

Plug-In City
Peter Cook, 1962-1966

Plug-In City, one of the most developed Archigram
projects, did not emerge at once as a isolated single projectrather it coalesced and evolved out of several smaller projects
that explored various aspects of the concept in greater detail.
Throughout 1962-1966, projects, texts, and sketches were
created that explored various aspects of the Plug-In City,
including studies of plug-in housing, how the cities might
grow across the landscape of England, and its potential as
urban infill.

There are obvious technological references in
this project- the name itself suggests units that plug into a
larger system in the same way electrical appliances plugin to the electrical system, but a deeper reading shows
that the structure, functioning, and growth of Plug-In City
are fundamentally closer to biological models rather than
technological ones.

Suit Location

Images
Plug In City Axon - Iconic Plug-In City Image

Plug-In City Drawings

Section 1

Section 2

Correlation Image

Coral Reef

Plug-In City
Peter Cook, 1962-1966

Suit Location

The Plug-in City is inconsistent from drawing to
drawing, depending on the aspects under consideration
in each project -Peter Cook remarked that there was no
definitive project- but there emerges a clear set of ideas
explored in the Plug-In City. The main ideas explored and
developed were expendable architecture, the large scale
networked structure, variety as requirement for vitality, and
hierarchies of permanence, use, speed, and growth

One of the basic elements of Plug-In City was
the plug in module, which took the form of store, house,
workplace, etc. These were designed with the idea that they
could be easily replaced and serviced with cranes depending
on the changes of the users lifestyle. Warren Chalk was the
first of the Archigram group to coin the term capsule in
1964 while the group was part of the Taylor Woodrow Design
Group (Archigram, p.44). Throw away architecture was one
of the earliest ideas explored in the Archigram 2 and 3, and
Peter Cook explains that after that, it was then inevitable
that we should investigate what happens if the whole urban
environment can be programmed and structured for change.
(Archigram, p.28). By building expendable units into larger
systems, notions of architectural transience were transformed
into architectural ecologies. The throw-away became the
metabolic.

Capsule Home , Warren Chalk 1964

Plug-In City
Peter Cook, 1962-1966

In any complex cellular organism, cells live, die,
and are replaced by new cells in the metabolic arc of life.
Apocryphally, after seven years, the human body has
completely replaced all of its cells. Whether this is accurate or
not, it does nicely illustrate the idea of the cellular life cycle in
the larger organism. In the same way, Plug-In City is made up
of units with short lifespans relative to the larger structure.
This metabolism was a new way of looking at urban design:
at its center was a push to redefine the house as separate
from the traditional folk art of housing that had existed
prior to World War II. (Archigram, p.44).

Archigram developed a hierarchy of permanence/
use/speed. The lifespan of each unit was relative to the
amount of direct human contact. Bathrooms, living room
floors, kitchens, and boutiques were replaced every three
years, while more servicing components such as car silos and
roads were envisioned for 20 years of use. (Archigram, p.39)
Similarly, the human cells most exposed to the wear-and-tear
of daily life, hair, skin, and fingernails, have the fastest rate of
replacement and growth, while the cells that have the least
replacement make up the servicing infrastructure of the
nervous system.

This hierarchy allowed the greatest responsiveness
of the city to change where the city inhabitants tastes and
preferences change the most. Peter Cook commented that
The...advantage is that being a self-destroying, self-building
system it is easily pushed into the shape people want it to
be rather than its pushing people into shape. (Peter Cook,
Sunday Times)

Suit Location

Plug-In City, Section 1

Plug-In City, Section 2

Plug-In City
Peter Cook, 1962-1966

Self-erecting might also be added to the
description, in light of the service cranes and hovercraft. This
structure is represented in slightly different ways across the
various drawings that comprise Plug-In City, but, as stated
before, the concepts remain consistent. In some drawings,
such as Peter Cooks sectional study from 1964, the city
superstructure is comprised of a vertical grid rotated 45
degrees. In the Plug-In Office Stacks and Housing for Charring
Cross Road project, the units aggregate around vertical spines
in inverted cones. In the Archigram periodical, the city takes a
variety of combined forms, but still consistent with the stated
idea.

By appearance, the variations of the form of the city
suggest many different biological inspirations. As organized
cellular life tends to be organized hierarchically, many systems
and organisms tend to express that hierarchy in their physical
structure. Upon closer study of the large scale, network
structure, the coral reef emerges as a clear model, with
parallels that go beyond structural similarities.

Suit Location

Plug-In City, Self Constructing Section

Plug-In City, Section

Plug-In City
Peter Cook, 1962-1966

Suit Location

Coral reefs consist of corals, which are small, simple animals,

that live together in large communities within a structural
framework of their own secreted calcium. (CloudslyThompson, p.75) As the corals die, they leave behind their
calcium deposited structures to be inhabited by new polyps
or other organisms, and new coral also grow on top, much
in same way that Plug-In City builds itself up by means of
lifting modules into place. Over extended periods of time,
the coral reefs can grow so large that even as the land they
grew around subsides or the water level rises, they can form
ringing atolls. In fact, the Great Barrier Reef could be seen
as megastructure that far surpasses the scale of even the
most ambitious Plug-in City span across England. The coral
polyps are very much like the Plug-In units in their metabolic
relationship with the overall structure. The coral reefs,
however, are not just coral- the established calcium structure
acts as building surface, defensive shelter, and transportation
network for a wide variety of life that live in the reef. This
communal use of the hard coral as infrastructure parallels its
use in Plug-In City.
Coral Reef

Walking- City
Ron Herron, 1964

Plug-In City was not the only proposal by the
Archigram Group to explore changing paradigms in how
cities were formed and how they functioned. In terms of
biological models three projects in addition to Plug-In City
present themselves as prime examples. The first two are
linked and generate one, if not the, most visually recognizable
of Archigrams work, Ron Herrons Walking City and David
Greenes Living Pod.

Walking City, like Plug-In, was an idea for a new type
of mobile living. The city would move across the landscape
gathering resources and connecting to other Walking-Cities
via long tubes. The interior would be a full service city,
containing housing, industry and commercial enterprises.
Once the city was free to move and lifted above the ground,
Earth and nature would be able to return to their natural
condition. The iconic image of this idea is Ron Herrons
Walking City in New York City. Walking City as biological
model is the most visually apparent of any of Archigrams
projects; it proposes a symbiotic relationship with the Earth,
using its resources but not negatively affecting the landscape.
Additionally, it forces the re-evaluation of the city as
organism, the human inhabitants riding and coexisting in its
micro-ecology, similarly to small animals such as fish or birds
living on the back of larger animals.

Suit Location

Images
Walking Cities in New York - Iconic Walking
City Image

Living Pod

Model Photographs

Plans

Section 1

Section 2

Correlation Image

Birds on a Rhino

Living Pod
David Greenes, 1965

A year after Walking-City David Greene developed
the idea of the Living Pod. The Living Pod was spin-off of
the idea of Walking City, a self contained environment. In
this case the scale was the Body. The drawings of this
work illustrate an intense focus on detail, development and
practical application which is evident in much of Archigrams
work. But, this focus actually creates a moving, functional
biological entity similar in concept to the Walking City.

Suit Location
Images
Living Pod

Model Photographs

Plans

Section 1

Section 2

Instant City
Ron Herron, 1969

The third example of this push towards the fringe
is Ron Herrons 1969 Instant City. During the 1960s (and in
fact, throughout history), large cities and urban centers have
defined cultural, social, and entertainment trends making
them focal points for visitors and creating a separation of
rural and urban life. The cultural power lies in the urban
centers, thus weakening the rural town. What if there was
a way to create a network of cultural centers, where rural
towns became homes of entertainment and social events
in addition to the existing urban centers? This is the idea of
Instant City.

Suit Location
Images
Instant City

Collage

Collage

Collage

Collage

Collage

Process Diagram
Viral Diagram

Instant City
Ron Herron, 1969

The Instant City is a mode of inserting culture and
vibrant city life into a situation that did not have it previously.
Balloons or Air ships controlled by a central entity would
bring culture to these unexposed areas; education, images,
television and events would create a fairground of city
culture. As the balloon leaves, the ideas and culture of the
fair continues to infiltrate that town, and actually takes over
the town building networks with cultural connections similar
to that of London, New York or the West Coast of United
States.

The Instant City follows the behaviors of a virus: the
airship, the viral agent, infects the sleepy village. It unpacks
its viral payload which then infects the city, hijacking the
mechanism of the city to produce event. The virus, the event,
and the instant city are phases of the same entity, and the
Instant City airship spreads to other sleepy villages, and one
could assume, followed (although this is never made explicit)
by other event/virus airships made by the village, towards the
goal of connecting and transforming the various villages of
the country. In this example, it is process and behavior itself
that qualify the biological.

Suit Location

Instant City

Instant City

Conclusion

References

Through the exploration of various Archigram
projects and the nature of the group itself, to consider their
work as primarily technologically-inspired fantasy would be a
massive oversimplification. Rather, by exposing the ecological
and biological models in their works, the solid ground upon
which the members of Archigram have claimed to have been
standing on the entire time, even as their cities stride, float,
and soar over the surface of the earth, is revealed.

Cook, Peter. Archigram.

Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY. 1999
Cook, Peter. The City, Seen as a Garden of Ideas

The Monacelli Press, Inc., New York, NY. 2003
Steiner, Hadas A. Beyond Archigram: The Structure of
Circulation.

Routledge Publishing, New York, NY. 2009
Exit Utopia: Architectural Provocations 1956-1976
Goldhagen, Sarah, Legault, Rejean. Anxious Modernisms

Metabolic City, Woofter Fall 2010

Bacl Cover Image: Archigram Back Cover Peter Cook