It’s easy to see the controversial group’s influence in left field architecture from High-Tech to Blobism 50 years later, but it’s easier still to see it in emerging technologies and the way we interact with them.
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They emerged in an age of provocative and performative avant-garde architecture groups like Superstudio and Ant Farm. They shared several traits with their contemporaries such as a vaguely countercultural sensibility, an interest in nomadism, and debts to visionary predecessors like Buckminster Fuller and Bruno Taut. One crucial difference with other groups of the time was that Archigram didn’t rail against modernity so much as they wished to accelerate it. They acted against what they saw as a tediously conservative environment, not because of radical political sentiments, but because of the inability of art and architecture to keep pace with the products, lifestyles, and machinery that were already part of daily life. The age of Dan Dare, Revolver, and Carnaby Street required more than many of their dogmatic traditionalist and Brutalist contemporaries were offering. “We are seeking the living city,” they claimed, not palaces or concrete hulks.
There’s a temptation to suppose that Archigram was speaking metaphorically or satirically. Ron Herron’s Walking City (1964) could be a thought-provoking inquiry about the increasing mobility of our lives as “traveler-workers” as one rendering suggests, or how cities rely on outside resources and the surrounding environment.
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