Archigram

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Archigram (from ARCHItecture and teleGRAM) was a group of British architects who published their designs from 1960 to 1974 from the living capsule to the " Living City " in the magazine of the same name. To Archigram were Peter Cook , Warren Chalk , Dennis Crompton , David Greene , Ron Herron and Michael Webb . Archigram embodied a flow of the utopian avant - Architecture of 1960 years in Western countries. The group did not exert its influence through real buildings, but through the publication of the drafts.

Emergence

In the early 1960s, David Greene, Peter Cook and Michael Webb came together out of a shared sense of frustration with the conservative views of the British architectural establishment. You think the time is ripe for a rethink. To make their ideas heard, they published the first issue of their Archigram magazine in 1961. Drawings of utopian city plans are mixed with comic stories and poetic poems.

Excerpt from a poem by David Greene: “ You can roll out steel - any length. You can blow up a balloon - any size. You can mold plastic - any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge - they didn't worry. "

300 copies are printed on a large sheet of inexpensive paper and sold for nine pence each. The readers are mainly architecture students and young graduates. Established architects consider the magazine to be an insignificant student work. Peter Cook says today: “ Everybody thought it would die a natural death. "(" Everyone believed it would die of natural causes. ")

A second, larger edition is printed the following year. It has several stapled pages and contains designs, ideas and thoughts from other young architects, including the trio of Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton and Ron Herron, who work together for the London County Council and who have attracted attention through successes in competitions. A little later David Greene, Peter Cook, Michael Webb and their new comrades Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton and Ron Herron are invited to exhibit their works and designs at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London. They use the exhibition to stage their conception of a city as a living organism that is more than a collection of buildings and give it the theme of Living City . When it opened in 1963, the architecture critic Reyner Banham became aware of the Archigram architects, describing them as pioneers of new pop architecture and thus creating the prerequisites for international recognition for Archigram magazine and its editors.

Members

Archigram consisted of six very different characters who developed their ideas, visions and utopias out of different interests and found individual forms of expression to represent and publish them. While David Greene was the group's poet who summed up his thoughts on the future of architecture in essays and verses, Peter Cook preferred three-dimensional architectural drawings and the stylistic devices of comics. He also largely determined the group's external communication. Warren Chalk, doubter and pessimist, and Ron Herron, observer and unshakable optimist, worked together in large-format, colorful drawings and collages. Michael Webb preferred to build futuristic models and staged experiments with covers, tubes or balloons. Technology-savvy Dennis Crompton created primarily scientific-looking drawings and texts that showed his enthusiasm for science fiction and space travel.

Projects

Presentation of the plug-in city

However, the group did not succeed in adopting a well-founded, socially critical opinion. On the contrary, they developed an unrestricted technological optimism combined with an undistant media fascination. Inspired by space travel at the time, the capsule played a central role. In all of the designs, the living capsule is the ideal mobile element that can be docked onto large-format stationary carrier systems, the so-called plug-in cities . The global mobilization of the population intended by Peter Cook could be outbid once again with Ron Herron's draft of a walking city , because the mobility of the individual plug-in capsules is transferred to the entire city and thereby evokes a complete change in the populated surface of the earth. All criticism that such utopias have to put up with should not lead to leaving the field of architecture alone to those who see the city of the future as the result of pure efficiency calculations by investors, so the summary of this time.

In 1972 Archigram took part in Documenta 5 in Kassel in the department Parallel Imagery: Utopia and Planning with the utopian design The Orchard Place (1972) .

literature

  • Justus Dahinden : Urban structures for tomorrow , Verlag Gerd Hatje 1971, ISBN 3775700110
  • Justus Dahinden: Acro-Polis. Frei-Zeit-Stadt / Leisure City , Verlag Karl Krämer Bern / Stuttgart 1974, ISBN 378281018X
  • Peter Cook : Archigram , Birkhäuser Verlag Basel 1991, ISBN 3764324473
  • Elenora Louis, Toni Stooss: Archigram , Ritter Druck 1999, ISBN 3854152167
  • Simon Sadler: Archigram. Architecture Without Architecture , MIT Press 2005, ISBN 0262693224
  • Hadas Steiner: Beyond Archigram: The Structure of Circulation , Routledge 2007, ISBN 0415394775
  • Philipp Sturm, Peter Cachola Schmal: Yesterday's Future - Visionary Designs by Future Systems and Archigram , Munich 2016, ISBN 9783791355757

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