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Reviewed by:
  • Archigram: Architecture without Architecture
  • Andrew Pickering (bio)
Archigram: Architecture without Architecture. By Simon Sadler. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Pp. 242. $35.

The 1960s went away and now they're coming back. "Archigram is a marvelously fitting choice for a Royal Gold Medal" (p. 1) read the citation in 2002 when the Royal Institute of British Architects gave its major prize to a group that had once defied all its conventions. Archigram was a band of radical British architects—Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, Michael Webb—but it was even more the name of the newsletter/magazine the group produced between 1961 and 1970. Simon Sadler's subtitle, Architecture without Architecture, is a double entendre. On the one hand, to a first approximation, the group never built anything. Early on, some of its members were involved in the design of the South Bank Arts Centre in London (1960–64); in the early 1970s the group was commissioned to design an Entertainments Centre in Monte Carlo (a project which collapsed, with little explanation given in this book). Between those dates, Archigram—the magazine—was the vehicle for an architecture of the imagination, rendered in striking graphics—and this gets us to the second sense of "architecture without architecture."

Archigram members aligned themselves against the canon of conventional architecture, especially the idea that the architect's job is to design a fixed form for buildings and cities. Instead, their object was adaptive architecture—architecture that could somehow change shape to accommodate the emergent needs and desires of its users. Ron Herron's 1964 designs for the Walking City are emblematic: pictures of a city as a single, vaguely [End Page 661] organic, engineered unit on legs. If the city loses the rationale for its location, well, it can just stroll off somewhere else. A crazy idea, but I wouldn't complain if Urbana-Champaign edged toward Chicago.

Other Archigram visions were more realistic, though wild enough. Peter Cook's Plug-In City imagined a world of interchangeable dwellings, easily moved from one location to another, plugging into readily available services—an image of the city as fluid and capable of, again, quasi-biological growth, always responsive to its evolving environment. Later in the 1960s, Archigram's imaginary tended toward "the shed," as Sadler calls it—the building as a big box, endlessly reconfigurable inside, providing all sorts of services, including information, to its inhabitants. As it happens, the greatest shed of all was not an Archigram affair; it was Joan Littlewood's Fun Palace, for which Cedric Price was the architect (on which see Stanley Matthews's admirable 2002 Columbia University dissertation). An enormous amount of planning was done on the Fun Palace in the early 1960s, but a site was never found, and when it was reincarnated as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, its architect conceded that his version was "not very dynamic" (p. 167).

Sadler's book is a tightly focused history of Archigram from the early 1960s until the eventual demise of Archigram Architects as a formal concern in the mid-1970s, with Archigram magazine as its key object, especially the images to be found there—and, for me, the 128 illustrations it contains are its single most desirable feature, aesthetically as well as historically. (Search the web for "archigram" to see what I mean.) But this is not to diminish the value of Sadler's text. The book is, I would say, a well-contextualized history of images. Sadler does a good job at getting at the substance of the enormous diversity of projects that Archigram imagined and laid out (though many of the technological details remained vague in their original conception, alas), but he also situates the group and its imaginary along several axes: the modernist architectural establishment and 1960s Brutalism from which Archigram distinguished itself; postwar planning; swinging London and the new pop art; the Situationist International (Sadler's other book is The Situationist City [1998]); an odd enthusiasm for America; cybernetics (vaguely grasped); a feminist critique of those 1960s girls in little skirts who tended to show up in Archigram's montages.

Sadler explores interestingly the deliberate and...

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