The architectural collective Archigram shook up the design world in the 1960s and ’70s with their bold, futuristic plans. Now they’re working on a pop-up project in Hong Kong with the Design Trust
In 1964 a group of young British architects revealed plans for a remarkable building that could walk. Resembling a lumbering, land-bound airship, the squat building sat atop eight periscopic legs that could march it across land and sea, allowing its residents to escape wars and natural disasters, or simply to find pastures new.
This outlandish design appeared in an issue of Archigram, a magazine published in London irregularly between 1961 and 1974. In its pages, six young architects—Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb, David Greene and Ron Herron, who collectively went by the same name as the magazine—shared their plans for a better, brighter future. One issue featured a design for a city that could float from place to place, carried by a fleet of hot-air balloons. Another featured Plug-In City, a megastructure into which capsule-like apartments, offices and infrastructure could be introduced and moved around at will. One morning you could be on the first floor, the next a giant crane could move you to the top of the tower.
These may sound like futuristic fantasies, but the Archigram members are adamant that their unconventional drawings and collages tackled real issues. “Our work was experimental but we were trying to deepen our knowledge of certain ideas,” says Dennis Crompton. “To take one example: the idea that you should be able to take your environment with you. As an architect, how do you design an environment for somebody who wants it in a particular location at one point in their life but at some future point in their life they may want to take that environment with them to some other location?”
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This freedom to move unencumbered around the world was just one of the utopian ideas that Archigram explored; another fascination was how technology could be used to improve human health and happiness. “It was the 1960s; these ideas were all around us,” says Crompton.
Peter Cook goes one step further. He believes Archigram designs could have been made physical. “Archigram [designs] looked a bit unusual, but actually could’ve been built,” Cook said at the World Architecure Festival in 2016. “If you looked at [an Archigram design], it had handrails. It had toilets, and the toilets were the right size. The escalators were the right pitch.”
It wasn’t to be. Archigram collectively produced tens of thousands of psychedelic drawings and collages, hundreds of architectural models, 10 magazines, videos, exhibitions and more, but only a few minor buildings, among them a kitchen extension and a swimming pool enclosure for pop star Rod Stewart. But this lack of built projects hasn’t harmed their legacy, and many of today’s leading architects—including Rem Koolhaas, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and the late Zaha Hadid—have cited Archigram as a major influence. “By looking at Archigram’s work, you should learn to think as we think, not to do as we did,” says Crompton. “It’s the thinking that’s important.”
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