Archigram

Archigram (of Architecture and telegram ) was a group of British architects their designs published from 1960 to 1974 from the living capsule to the " Living City " in the same journal. For Archigram were Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb. Archigram represented a flow of the utopian avant-garde architecture of the 1960s in Western countries. The Group exercised its influence not based on real buildings, but by the publication of the drawn designs.

Formation

At the beginning of the 1960s, see David Greene, Peter Cook and Michael Webb from a common sense of frustration together on the conservative views of the British architectural establishment. Keep the time is ripe for a rethink. In order to get their ideas heard, they enter 1961, the first issue of their magazine Archigram out. Drawings utopian city designs are blended with comic acts and poetic poems.

Excerpt of 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 did built the Forth Bridge - They Did not worry ".

300 copies will be printed on a single full-size sheet cheap paper and sold at nine pence apiece. Readers are especially architecture students and young graduates. Established architects hold the magazine for an insignificant student work. Peter Cook says today: " Everybody thought it would the a natural death. " ( "Everyone thought it would die a natural death. " )

The following year, a second more comprehensive edition is printed. It comprises several stapled pages and includes designs, ideas and thoughts of other young architects, including the trio of Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton and Ron Herron, who work together at the London County Council and had drawn attention to himself by success in competitions. A little later, David Greene, Peter Cook, Michael Webb and her new comrades Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton and Ron Herron will be invited to exhibit their works and designs at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. You use the exhibition to stage their view of a city as a living organism that is more than a collection of buildings, and give her the subject of Living City. At the opening of the architectural critic Reyner Banham 1963 is aware of the Archigram architects, they were pioneers of a new Poparchitektur, thus creating the conditions for international recognition of the magazine Archigram and their publishers.

Members

Archigram consisted of six very different characters, their ideas, visions and utopias each developed from different interests and individual forms of expression found out, draw and publish. While David Greene was the poet of the group, summed up his thoughts on the future of architecture in essays and verses, Peter Cook preferred three-dimensional architectural drawings and the style of the comic. He also determined for the most part the communication of the group to the outside. Warren Chalk, skeptic and pessimist, and Ron Herron, observers and unshakable optimist, worked together in large format colorful drawings and collages. Michael Webb preferably built futuristic models and staged experiments with sleeves, tubes or balloons. The technology convinced Dennis Crompton created especially scientific -looking drawings and texts, to which regarded his enthusiasm for science fiction and space travel.

Projects

But this is not the group managed to take an informed social criticism opinion. On the contrary, they developed an unrestricted technology optimism associated with a undistanzierten media fascination. Inspired by the then space the capsule played a central role. In all designs, the living capsule is the ideal mobile element, which may be to large-scale stationary carrier systems, the so-called plug- in -Cities, docked. The by Peter Cook thus intended global mobilization of the population could be surpassed again with Ron Herron's Walking City draft because transfers the mobility of the individual plug-in capsule here to the entire city and thus evokes a complete change of the populated earth's surface. All criticism that have to put up such a utopia, but should not lead to those alone to leave the field of architecture, consider the city of the future as a result of pure efficiency calculations of investors, this was the conclusion of that time.

In 1972, Archigram were the utopian design The Orchard Place ( 1972) participants in Documenta 5 in Kassel in the department Parallel visual worlds: Utopia and planning.

• Plug-in City, Living Pod and Instant City Airship (Peter Cook 1964-66 )
• Walking City and Instant City (Ron Herron 1964-70 )
• Trickling Towers and Layer City ( Peter Cook 1978-82 )
• Residential capsule Peanut and high-rise Coexistence ( Future Systems 1984)