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"Archigram: Experimental Architecture, 1961-1974" can be seen at the Thread Waxing Space, 476 Broadway, New York, until April 25. (Courtesy Pratt Institute Library) |
| Long before high tech was a recognizable movement, six English
lads concocted visions of an architecture influenced by space
travel, cartoons, and underground culture. In his debut column, Michael Sorkin revisits Archigram's work, currently seen in a traveling exhibition. 1964 was the year of the great British Invasion. Capped by the historic appearance of the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, a deluge of male rock groups, including not just the Fab Four but the Rolling Stones, the Searchers, the Animals, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Herman's Hermits, took control of the charts and held on for almost a decade. The British Invasion was, among other things, the return of the repressed. In the post-Elvis years, American rock and roll had become anemic and stupid, filled with Fabians and Bobby Rydells--Elvis wanna-bes whose music was almost completely disconnected from the blues-based sources at the foundation of Elvis's own great leap. Independently, the Brits rediscovered Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and earlier blues titans like Howlin' Wolf and Big Bill Broonzy, and reconstituted, electrified, and transformed a tradition that we had squandered. At the same time, they Europeanized rock by introducing their own sonorities, and opened the door for globalized production. But rock and roll wasn't the only restoration happening in Britain. In 1963, Archigram--a collaboration of Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, Ron Herron, David Greene, and Mike Webb--coalesced and began an inventive run that in many ways paralleled that of the Beatles, including the ultimate (and, in their case, amicable) split and the continuation of a number of solo careers. Like the Beatles, Archigram wasn't founded on clarion principles but came together almost casually, six lads with a childhood in common and the urge to jam. And, like the Beatles, Archigram reconnected with a squandered tradition, reinvestigating a number of sites mainstream architecture had written off--machines in the garden, the joys of consumption, the family of the object, the carnival of new ideas. That they were lads was not entirely irrelevant to what they became. Archigram's work is filled with both a boy's love of technology and a certain masculine confidence. The group was squarely a part of a historic British movement visible in a line of engineered structures running through the Crystal Palace, the Dreadnought, the Firth Bridge, the Sopwith Camel, and the E-Type Jag. The avatar of this school of British design, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was the great nineteenth-century engineer and builder of, among other things, much of the British railway system. Brunel was a systems thinker who joined the forms of metallic construction to the global reach of the British imperium. By the end of the nineteenth century, this movement had roared past a mainline architectural tradition that had fallen into nostalgia. But what happens to such megalomania when leavened by the Beatles and the Goons, by the simultaneous skepticism and optimism that marked the Sixties? Early Archigram was not shy about Bucky-style scope. Archigram's projects were big-scale: vast "plug-in" cities (skeletal metal armatures ready to receive air-transported, crane-mounted living pods that could be relocated and reconfigured at the whim of their inhabitants) and "walking cities" (megastructures on mighty metal legs designed to prowl the Earth in search of congenial sites to pass the time). Although the politics of such massive projects was problematic in realistic terms, the vision was clearly democratic: for Archigram, these cities were propaganda for choice. Bewitched by nomadic fantasies, Archigram argued that an architecture based on mobility and malleability could set people free. This notion of consumer choice combined optimized technology, a post-Beat hitchhiker's sense of freedom, and the giddy styles of customization found in Detroit. Of course, functionalism--the received architecture of the day--had advanced a similar agenda. But, because of its philosophical roots in the utopian socialist tradition, the forms it revered were those with a narrowly industrial content, and the lifestyle it idealized was a drab good-taste proletarianism, workers' flats furnished from the MOMA gift shop. By Archigram's inception, a deep, cookie-cutter dreariness dominated British and world architectural culture. Gone were the fervent days of modernity when architecture was imbued with the aura of progress and social amelioration, linked to the unalloyed good of technology. What was new was the New Brutalism, manifested either in an aggressive parsimony or in a Corb-influenced heavy concrete style. Although there was much intelligence in this work, there was little joy. This was the architecture of angry young men (and women). Archigram--never angry in either mood or form--was clearly thinking about something else: Gropius could not have imagined the Cushicle, architecture distilled to a pneumatic suit, carried in a suitcase and popped open to cocoon its tenant. Much of their early work was enthralled with the big constructions of the era, the skyscrapers and moon shots and refineries. But it was tempered by another set of images, which included the Spitfires and Meccano sets of their common childhoods as well as the architecture of the funfair, with its roller coasters and parachute jumps, a highly elaborated and refined technology of construction devoted to the production not of material goods but of pleasure. And Archigram's members were un-posh Brits, frank exponents of a friendly petit-bourgeois sensibility. Archigram started not only from an embrace of the refinements of metal joinery, but from a love for the Britain of toby mugs and caged budgies, of flying aspidistras and Callard & Bowser toffees. Indeed, this may be the group's strongest contribution: the loving domestication of technological possibilities and the complete courage of their own taste. Archigram made architecture that was simply... cheerful, festooned with appurtenances and fuzz, instantly (as their current exhibition so elegantly shows) recognizable. Perhaps more than any other architects, Archigram made a lunge at the thin-lipped aesthetic of Modernism, restoring the fun to functionalism. Before it was the name of the group, however, Archigram was the name of a magazine, an architectural telegram first issued by Peter Cook in 1961. Its graphic style was exuberant, immediate, and accessible, streets away from the straitlaced style of Modernist polemics. And it was very much of its time. In a fine catalogue essay for an earlier Archigram show, Barry Curtis excavates a famous Fifties comic book, The Eagle, as a source for the group's sensibility. Featuring Captain America--style images of a heroic sci-fi future, it was filled with moral and artistic hyperbole and techno-romance, as well as intoxicating cutaways of new technology, sections through the Morris Mini and the Comet. Particularly striking is Archigram's affinity not just for the imagery of The Eagle, but for the way it synthesizes analysis and fantasy. There's a beautiful, naive positivism about the seamless blend of contemporary innovations with an optimism about a future in which everyone will have super powers. For Archigram (both the magazine and the group), as for The Eagle, the technical (per Mike Webb's obsessive perspectives and fiendish compound curves, for example) was fused with the elasticity of the cartoon. Indeed, the cartoon--a vehicle for narrative--emerges as a primary instrument of meaning for Archigram. The pre-computer, pre-video (but high televisual) age in which Archigram grew was inter alia a time of rebirth and reappropriation for the depth of cartooning. In the U.S., R. Crumb--the Daumier of the dropout--produced what may be (along with a variety of psychedelic ephemera) some of the most enduring visual imagery of the era. Unconstrained by the hyperaestheticized standards of Modernism, the tyrannies of abstraction, or the decorous strictures of "good taste," Crumb somehow collapsed raunch and charm to noble effect. While Archigram can't exactly be called raunchy, its members certainly moved in the spirit of pop. And, like the Beatles, they went straight to its source. Strikingly, the Archigrammers are near-contemporaries of Robert Venturi, who plays a learned Fabian (in both senses) to Archigram's Beatles. Both aimed at an architecture that tapped into a vivid cultural lode, appropriating a set of images and procedures that were just entering the pale of art. Archigram's appropriation, though, was all innocence: this was their culture. Venturi took a more mediated, anthropological approach, journeying like Richard Burton to the Mecca of Vegas. He wound up an astute wielder of the signifier in the best postmodern sense. Archigram was never much interested in signification, but in objects. And in fantasies both gentle (not genteel) and exciting. In fact, Archigram's gentle style may have been its undoing. The group's trajectory became more and more arcadian, more and more invested in the hippie mode, less and less edgy. By the late Sixties, Archigram's work was increasingly preoccupied with its own invisibility, with a weightless nomadism. The various manifestations of a "bugged ground" (pastoral landscapes in which rocks and tree stumps concealed electrical outlets and communications jacks) included the technological insinuations of the so-called Rockplugs and Logplugs and the Quietly Technologised Folk Suburbias, the camouflaged housing of the Crater City and the Hedgerow Village, and the Prepared Landscape. They all symptomized a crisis in optimism that was surely informed by the misuse of technology on the "electronic battlefield" of the Vietnam war, where the romance and potential beneficence of the machine were coopted for murder. As we defoliated Asia, the movement for a more rational sense of global ecology was being born. Archigram must have concluded that the only logical means of resistance was to leave things pretty much alone. At least on the surface. The end of Archigram began in a perverse moment of success and failure. In 1969, they won a competition to design an entertainment center in Monaco. The project they proposed was a big, domed, circular hall buried underground in a park along the Mediterranean. All the essential Archigram ideas were there: the building disguised in the landscape, the double-tiered overlay of technology and arcadia, the population of helpful machines. Within, the building was completely flexible--seats, toilets, lighting were all autonomous, wheeled creatures ready to be reassembled at a moment's notice to accommodate new uses and configurations. It was a wonderful realization of Archigram's master fantasy: the Circus. The bestiary of parts, the rock palace--big top filled with its synesthesia of cathode and strobe, the throngs at play--all had been made ready for the real. Unfortunately, the project was never funded, and with its collapse the energy went out of Archigram. It's a widely noted irony that Archigram's obvious masterpiece was eventually constructed by someone else: Piano and Rogers' Beaubourg Center in Paris. Here, finally, was the built version of Archigram's heroic early program. The Beaubourg, a monument to Archigram's hyper-serviced, mechanical, metallic shed, was premised on the idea of flexibility that informed so much of the architecture designed at the time. If Beaubourg (built in France) was the founding monument of British high tech, Archigram (built in air) was the founding sensibility, the first to create the persuasive image. Archigram may have been the last great architects of the nineteenth century. There's no doubt, however, that they were also midwives for the architecture of the twenty-first. Environmentalists avant la lettre, Archigram deeply disturbed architecture's flow, eliding it with fields of objects and dreams. For Archigram, there was no need for all those tired tensions between consumption and self-determination, between malleability and stability, between expendability and conservation, between high culture and low, and between freaks and swells. The proof was in the drawing, and for a generation--mine--those drawings changed everything. Michael Sorkin, an architect and writer living in New York, was the architecture critic for the Village Voice for 10 years; he is the author of Exquisite Corpse: Writing on Buildings and the editor of Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, as well as other books on architecture and urbanism. |
Keywords:
Archigram, British