3.4. Archigram

3.4. Archigram

Figure 14. Archigram - Control and choice dwelling (1967)

Archigram’s design intervention today, even after half a century has passed looks like

construction of the future. A lot of today’s concepts are based on their interpretation for

example- the plug-in city with modular units that rework themselves resembles to co working and co living spaces of today, or the Manzac11 that is uncannily similar to the

smartphones we have today. The walking city that deploys itself from city to city and brings in events refers to tactile urbanism12that helps our city rejuvenate in today’s age.

The London-based group anticipated the global inter-relatedness of culture and

technology and thus had an immediate influence on architectural discussions world-

wide. Archigram’s ideas responded to space travel and moon landing, subculture and the Beatles, science fiction and the new technologies of the sixties and seventies. Their historical inspirations came from architect/artists such as Buckminster Fuller, Bruno Taut

or Friedrich Kiesler.

“Resource constraints were just as real to us then as they are now, just different. These

unpredictable and unforeseeable changes (from the perspective of the 1960s, as from

today) were the basis of our experimental architecture, which was designed with the

11 Manzak is an idea for a radio-controlled, battery-powered electric automaton. It has onboard logic, optical range-finder, TV camera, and magic eye bump detectors. 12 Tactical urbanism includes low-cost, temporary changes to the built environment, usually in cities, intended to improve local neighbourhoods and city gathering places.

intention of producing systems that were capable of accommodating future change of

whatever character.”

-Dennis Crompton, Archigram

The living city exhibition

The “Living City” exhibition of 1963 tried to account for an urban experience unregistered

in the purviews of maps, plans, elevations, and statistical analyses. Hurriedly raiding shop

displays and ripping up magazines, Archigram’s own drawings, modernist texts, comics,

catalogues, and film posters. Archigram believed that the city was the single distinct

organism and the Living City Exhibition is a response to the city life. This exhibition

explored the micro level movements in an urban context. The group imagined releasing

building’s latent energy not through sculpting but through electrical and mechanical

impulses, dictated by social activity and projected by images and writhing vinyl.

Archigram then emerged with concepts of plug-in city, walking city, computer city,

underwater city etc in the year 1964.