Princeton Architectural Press New York
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Princeton Architectural Press 37 East 7th Street New York, NY 10003 212.995.9620 © 1999 Princeton Architectural Press isbn 1-56898-194-5 All rights reserved. 03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1 PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA. REVISED EDITION
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher except in the context of reviews. Project editor: Eugenia Bell Special thanks: Ann Alter, Jan Cigliano, Jane Garvie, Caroline Green, Beth Harrison, Clare Jacobson, Mirjana Javornik, Leslie Ann Kent, Mark Lamster, Sara Moss, Annie Nitschke, Lottchen Shivers, Sara Stemen, and Jennifer Thompson of Princeton Architectural Press —Kevin C. Lippert, publisher For a free catalog of books published by Princeton Architectural Press, call 800.722.6657 or visit www.papress.com 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
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A comment from Arata Isozaki
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A comment from Peter Reyner Banham A comment from Hans Hollein A comment from Peter Blake 1 Architecture
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2 Expendability and the consumer 3 Living City 4 Zoom 5 Plug-in
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6 The capsule
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7 Bursting the seams
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8 Control and choice
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9 Open ends
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10 Instant City
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11 Features: Monte Carlo 12 Gardener’s notebook
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13 Mound, ground and hidden delights 14 Dreams and manifestations The Archigram Group Chronology
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Boys at Heart Whatever was it all about? Between 1961 and 1974 nine issues of the Archigram magazine appeared; the BBC aired a movie and two television programs about us, and an Archigram opera was staged. We held conferences and gave lectures all over the place—you name it, we did a chat there. Countless sketches and models of the various projects were executed. But it was the drawings, over 900 of them in all, that remain most emblematic of Archigram’s output. In their execution we found ourselves intimating that the purview of an architectural drawing might extend beyond the mere (and very cautiously do I use the word) twodimensional 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, transparent color overlays, and finally. . . b ack to the printer for the plastic lamination that would entomb for eternity the fragile layers comprising the drawing; not unlike the varnish layer the old masters applied to their finished 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 beneficent 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 drawing—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 purpose 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 tomorrow could be viewed but rather as a representation of a hypothetical physical environment made manifest simultaneously with its two-dimensional paper proxy. This is how things would look if only planners, governments, and architects were magically able to discard the mental impedimenta of the previous age and embrace the newly developed technologies and their attendant attitudes. 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, semantically at least, from certain key words like ‘flexibility.’ There was much talk in the air at that time regarding the adaptation of buildings 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 Guggenheim 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 solution to what you have been told is an architectural problem—remember, the solution may not be a building’ warned Archigram. A conventional building, being a lasting amalgam 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 messianic 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 ‘architecture’ of the new exurban landscapes surrounding American cities not as an embrace of a technological world but a refuge from it. In the successful competition entry for the Monte Carlo Entertainment Center Archigram proposed creating a giant underground 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 command and assembled together to form anything from an art exhibit (no need for the bleachers) to a small hockey arena (bring back the bleachers!) or alternately the setting for a movie premiere or fancy restaurant. 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 palpable. It was a geist universal at that particular zeit. With enthusiasm and much innocence, 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
the term given to the stars producing architecture today; the ‘f’ in referential could well be changed to a ‘v.’ If architecture got smaller with us it may, if we’re not careful, soon disappear altogether. —‘Spider’ Webb New York, June 1999
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