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© 1999 Princeton Architectural Press

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Archigram / edited by Peter Cook ; with a new foreword by Mike
Webb.
New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.
p. cm.
NA680.A68 1999
1568981945 (alk. paper)
Originally published: Basel ; Boston : Birkhäuser, 1972.
Archigram. Archigram (Group)
Architecture, Modern—20th century.
Architecture—Research.
Other authors: Cook, Peter.
Other authors: Archigram (Group)
99039255
LC
Contents

Boys at Heart, by Mike Webb 2

A comment from Arata Isozaki 4
A comment from Peter Reyner Banham 5
A comment from Hans Hollein 6
A comment from Peter Blake 7
1 Architecture 8
2 Expendability and the consumer 14
3 Living City 18
4 Zoom 26
5 Plug-in 36
6 The capsule 44
7 Bursting the seams 48
8 Control and choice 68
9 Open ends 74
10 Instant City 86
11 Features: Monte Carlo 102
12 Gardener’s notebook 110
13 Mound, ground and hidden delights 120
14 Dreams and manifestations 124
The Archigram Group 140
Chronology 142
Boys at Heart
Whatever was it all about? Between 1961
and 1974 nine issues of the Archigram mag-
azine appeared; the BBC aired a movie and
two television programs about us, and an
Archigram opera was staged. We held con-
ferences and gave lectures all over the
place—you name it, we did a chat there.
Countless sketches and models of the vari-
ous projects were executed. But it was the
drawings, over 900 of them in all, that
remain most emblematic of Archigram’s out-
put. In their execution we found ourselves
intimating that the purview of an architectur-
al drawing might extend beyond the mere
(and very cautiously do I use the word) two-
dimensional representation of the building
that wishes to be; might, in fact, limn the life
lived that the building engenders or, for that
matter, the building the life engenders.
Between us we must have kept dye line
printing companies in business well beyond
their predicted life span. This is how it went:
first you take your drawing (drawn in ink on
tracing paper) to the printer and ask for the
now defunct True to Scale or TTS. With this
type of reproduction the inked areas would
appear as the solid color of your choice
printed on the paper of your choice. You
then got to work with the airbrush, transpar-
ent color overlays, and finally. . . b ack to the
printer for the plastic lamination that would
entomb for eternity the fragile layers com-
prising the drawing; not unlike the varnish
layer the old masters applied to their fin-
ished oil paintings.
Let us now enter the world depicted in one
of these drawings: figures suggestive of
young, healthy and hard-bodied men and
women—mostly women I have to say—
have been cut out of magazines and pasted
on the surface. There is a bovine quality to
them. They remind one somewhat of the
Eloi in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. They
are all happy, healthy, and have health
insurance bestowed upon them by a benef-
icent Labour government although they are
beginning to look—how shall I put it—a bit
faded, even jaundiced, over the last few
years. They probably work no more than a
three day week and are undoubtedly ‘with
it’; a quaint phrase from the sixties that
when used today shows the speaker to be
anything but.
These figures probably occupy about a
quarter of the surface area of any given
page—highly unusual in architectural draw-
ing—nevertheless an architectural drawing
is without doubt what its author, the young
master, understood himself to be making. In
all other such drawings the figures, if they
are present at all, exist merely to provide
scale. The bits of building featured in the
drawings seem only to act as a backdrop for
the activities of our bovine friends or as a
frame upon which to hang expensive and
beautifully designed equipment. The pur-
pose of a theatrical backdrop is to provide in
spatial terms what we assume is going on in
the plot; we would be confused if the set of
HMS Pinafore were used in a performance
of Death of a Salesman. And so, in order to
reinforce the sense of who and what these
young people are, the building design has
been appropriated from the ultimate in ‘with
it’ sources: the domes of Bucky Fuller, the
space frames of Konrad Wachsmann, and
the inflatable structures being developed at
the time by us and by others.
The drawing was never intended to be a
window through which the world of tomor-
row could be viewed but rather as a repre-
sentation of a hypothetical physical environ-
ment made manifest simultaneously with its
two-dimensional paper proxy. This is how
things would look if only planners, govern-
ments, and architects were magically able
to discard the mental impedimenta of the
previous age and embrace the newly devel-
oped technologies and their attendant atti-
tudes. Just as Watteau had represented in
his oil paintings life at the court of the Sun
King so we attempted to reveal in pantone
vignettes life in an idealized England. To us
such an embrace was constituted, semanti-
cally at least, from certain key words like
‘flexibility.’ There was much talk in the air at
that time regarding the adaptation of build-
ings to the change in user needs; needless
to say, Archigram injected flexibility with
amphetamines and envisaged adaptation
on a daily, if not hourly, basis (see House for
1990). Conventional buildings would spend
their working life just sitting around doing
nothing but while under construction
changed with every visit to the building site-
—and that was super. On some visits the
building would be clad in diaphanous,
translucent plastic sheeting only to be
replaced shortly thereafter by glass panels;
perhaps caught in the act of being lifted up
by the construction crane, now considered
part of the architectural ensemble and a
standard feature of Archigram projects.
There the crane would be—sometimes the
only permanent presence—lifting up and
moving building components so as to alter
the plan configuration, or replacing parts
that had worn out with a ‘better’ product (see
Plug In City). It is probably of interest that
whereas Archigram tried to make what is
essentially an inert object, a building, into
something fluid the formal evolution of a
contemporary building such as the Guggen-
heim at Bilbao is the result of a fluid process
arrested to create an inert object.
The measure of the building came to be
viewed by us not so much in terms of
whether it was deemed beautiful or ugly,
monumental or intimate, or whether it did or
didn’t fit in with its neighbors but in terms of
the service it performed. Did the building
satisfy the user’s or the client’s needs? Did
the client even know what his needs would
be in this new world that seemed about to
explode? Cedric Price tells of being invited
to supper at the house of a married couple
ostensibly to discuss the new home they
wanted him to design; by the end of the
evening he felt the best service he could
possibly provide them is to suggest they get
divorced. ‘When you are looking for a solu-
tion to what you have been told is an archi-
tectural problem—remember, the solution
may not be a building’ warned Archigram. A
conventional building, being a lasting amal-
gam of forces, preoccupations, and desires
of the age in which it was conceived, was
deemed unable to adapt to the demands
placed upon it by a rapidly changing society;
hence the Cushicle Suitaloon, Manzak, and
the obsession with the nomadic. With mes-
sianic zeal and what I hope will be viewed as
but a naïve optimism we neglected to realize
the supposed need of people to escape the
modern world. The existence of that need
may be the only way to explain the ‘archi- the term given to the stars producing archi-
tecture’ of the new exurban landscapes sur- tecture today; the ‘f’ in referential could well
rounding American cities not as an embrace be changed to a ‘v.’ If architecture got small-
of a technological world but a refuge from it. er with us it may, if we’re not careful, soon
disappear altogether.
In the successful competition entry for the —‘Spider’ Webb
Monte Carlo Entertainment Center New York, June 1999
Archigram proposed creating a giant under-
ground room with a domed roof. Stuffed into
this room were components such as toilet
and coatroom modules, banks of bleacher
type seating, movie screens, bars, and even
a model of the Monaco Grand Prix track. All
or some these could be rolled out on com-
mand and assembled together to form any-
thing from an art exhibit (no need for the
bleachers) to a small hockey arena (bring
back the bleachers!) or alternately the set-
ting for a movie premiere or fancy restau-
rant. The interior was lit in such a way that
the dome tended to disappear (similar to the
phenomenon that occurs upon entering the
Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, Utah
where you proceed from the exterior. . . t o
another exterior, but one that is one desert
like!). At Monte Carlo the platform is the
shape of the world; a world free of heavy
and ponderous buildings that ‘just get in the
way’ to quote the Archigram movie. Instead,
mechanized and robotic guardian angels
keep a respectful distance, nurturing and
nourishing our presumably gallic Eloi from
earlier, now seen vacationing at there. This
is the world of Rockplug, Logplug, and
robotic lawnmowers. Architecture gets
smaller and smaller. In 1969 David Greene
proposed a moratorium on all new building
saying that if we were to make better use of
buildings that already exists we wouldn’t
need to build new ones. Could the phrase
‘better use’ have anticipated, perhaps,
Warm Bed apartments and Hot Desking?
The engine behind Archigram’s output was
excitement over what this new world was
going to look like. The excitement was pal-
pable. It was a geist universal at that particu-
lar zeit. With enthusiasm and much inno-
cence, being boys at heart, we involved
ourselves in society and its supposed
needs. In that sense it was truly a plebian
movement. Architecture today, at least the
high end, glamorous part of it, seems to
have lost that connection. ‘Self referential’ is
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