Archigram

Architecture monograph engages with production and marketing instruments to exist within the system of our image-driven society. Challenging its conventional understanding, this article aims to uncover the contemporary monograph as a site of plurality, heterogeneity, divergence, and fragmentation. The paper forms a critical reading of two books in particular: Content (2004) by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), led by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, and Yes is More: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution (2009) by the Danish practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

In the early 1960s, two avant-garde contenders for the future of world urbanism represented equally brilliant and problematic alternatives. Plug-in City, by Archigram's Peter Cook, and New Babylon, by the former Situationist Constant, were megastructures drawn and designed in markedly different ways, promising dissimilar spatial experiences and different socio-economic strategies—Plug-in City's was pragmatic and market-based, New Babylon's was of an existential, non-market idealism. Though both proposals would be swept away by the post-modern turn, the dialectic they presented is still present in architecture a half century on.

An advance caution to readers: this is a rare instance of an academic piece beginning with a profanity.

The impact of 'non-planning' upon mainstream construction in the 1960s, an era of high-rises and city-centre reconstruction, was marginal at best. But in experimental work, non-planning was played out upon the printed page and in the studio with a fervency unmatched before or since, spurred on by the social and cultural debates about the nature of freedom that characterized the period. This chapter offers a genealogy of non-planning from elaborate architecture systems to counterculture.

Written for the MAK Center exhibition "Everything Loose Will Land:
1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles" (curated by Sylvia Lavin), this essay argues that LA's reputation as a futuristic urban model was something of an invention of visiting British architects and critics—like Reyner Banham and Archigram—which required a selective, mythic, and even nostalgic understanding of the city.

This monograph aims to execute a historical analysis of sixties, which has as the main exponent the post-war architectural movement named Archigram, and their collections, documents, reports, comparisons, ideas, projects, studies and successors of these; relating it with the electronic visionary games through the comparative method, thus showing the importance of predictions for the construction of ideas of not only these, but of all the produced visionary material, which involves books, movies, television series, and new technologies, for example. Still, it’s related and compared with architectonic and technological elements of the present and the foreseen, such as drones, home automation, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and others, establishing therefore a bond between both and awakening a watchful eye about the concept of “derive”, designed by the Situationist International, besides identifying the effect of them in the urban mesh, the society, and the humanity through the functionalist method and introduce the reader to new concepts, such as the active world and the static world.

This paper deals with the importance of existing cities and architecture at some of the greatest projects by Archigram, and it is based on the direct analysis of their projects and texts, as much as on the meticulous study of the main publications on their work. Historically related to utopian and revolutionary positions, this British group of architects also set up new links between the inherited city and the avant-garde architecture, which had been artificially divided by Modern orthodoxy. This aspect of their work has not been studied in depth, although it is an original feature.
Archigram’s members, as well as subsequent authors such as Simon Sadler and Hadas A. Steiner, have efficiently pointed out the main concerns of the group. Two of them influenced the evolution of their proposals, from the first utopian and autonomous cities to the last more contextual projects. The first one is the search for a metropolitan essence; the second one is the revision of functionalism.
Eventually, these two issues were tackled simultaneously at the Instant City, 1968. This project materialized the spirit of the metropolis and, thanks to the ‘plug-in’ functional notion, complemented the existing city in a symbiotic manner. The Instant City was not thought as a substitution, but as an ‘updating’. In this proposal, the inherited city is just an infrastructure to be gently colonized by all kind of architectural components and devices.
Some other projects reproduced the same concept at different levels. The Tuned Suburb, 19 68, and the Addhox, 1970, were focused on residential areas. They proposed an informal way of transforming the repetitive housing of suburbs by adding all kind of new spatial units and, thus, they addressed an English traditional principle: design by addition. It's a..., 1970-71, and Tuning London, 1972, showed how the Instant City procedures could result in informal, dynamic and adaptable urbanscapes.
In order to implement this update of the city, Archigram used different components: telecommunication infrastructures, urban audiovisual devices, temporary structures, functional and infrastructural elements connected to existing buildings, etc.
In summary, this paper reveals how Archigram offered a new way of approaching the existing city. Despite of their apparent breakdown with the past architecture, they applied all their experimental concepts to the update of the inherited city, and proposed a large range of solutions for continuity and discontinuity between the new and the old. In this way, they made the difference among their contemporaries and set an interesting precedent.

The architecture concept of plug-in is based on the duality of the infrastructure system and units or elements connected to it. In the context of megastructures, the concept was most vividly characterised by works of Archigram and Japanese Metabolists in the 1960s and early 1970s. Blurring the boundary between the building and the city, the plug-in concept outgrew architectural boundaries and was slowly transformed into an urbanistic concept.
The paper presents the cultural context relevant to contemporaneity, which in uenced speci c development of the technology-driven concept of plug-in in the British Archigram Group and Japanese Metabolists. Based on the aesthetics of change and incompleteness, which was characterised by similar architectural manifestations despite entirely different cultural backgrounds, the plug-in concept foreshadowed social transformation based on freedom, individualisation and mobility in an utopian manner and held a promise of urban development with adaptability to unpredictable needs and desires of residents, who would become its co-creators with an active approach.
Although the revolutionary sixties are quite some time behind, the plug-in concept in its commodi ed form has become and remained operational and relevant at least on the metaphorical level; in the contemporary space it is evident primarily in urbanism and not as much in its original architectural form.

Criticality was an anguished debate in contemporary architecture. A classic 1974 essay on the problem, Manfredo Tafuri’s “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir,” argued that neo-avant-garde architects manipulated the empty signifiers of their art and left the world at large unchallenged. Nevertheless, my chapter argues, neo-avant-garde modernists like Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, Archigram, and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture sincerely posited design as a mode of research into architecture’s relationships to an emergent modernity. Tafuri correctly warned that this postwar celebration of Futurism, Constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, Pop art, and technology strayed, in distinction to the interwar modernism from which it grew, toward the mimesis and celebration of capitalism and its associated social relationships. But faced with the accelerating deterritorializing effects of cultural, economic, extraurban, transnational, and technological development, this "projective modernism" was nonetheless civic, reinventing the 19th-century public-sphere typologies of concert halls, libraries, museums, and transport interchanges threatened with extinction. This pragmatic, optimistic, and liberal architecture left the boudoir, then, only to be detained in the Salon.

Este articulo tiene como propósito el describir cómo, de acuerdo al contexto histórico vivido a
finales de los años 40’s del siglo XX, el concepto de ciudad cambió con respecto al que se
desarrolló en los años 20’s por el movimiento Modernista o Funcionalista. En este periodo
histórico la idea de ciudad se transformó a partir de la integración de los nuevos avances
tecnológicos desarrollados en ese entonces y esbozar así lo que se pretendían fueran las
ciudades del futuro.
Este cambio de perspectiva sirvió como transición entre lo que se clasifica como la
Modernidad y la Posmodernidad y se vio principalmente aplicada en las teorías y conceptos
de dos grupos geográficamente opuestos, por un lado el Archigram en Londres y por el otro
los Metabolistas en Japón.
Se tratará de explicar cuáles fueron los antecedentes para ambos movimientos y las
características que cada uno de estos propone y que se desarrollan en un conjunto de
proyectos cuyo campo de actuación fue la ciudad, y veremos como a través de estos nuevos
planteamientos urbanos se generó una nuevo pensamiento arquitectónico.

Palabras clave: Ciudad, urbanismo, Archigram, Metabolistas, modernidad, posmodernidad,
tecnología, utopía, megaestructura, forma en grupo.

Academic disdain notwithstanding, the exploration of the relationships between comics and architecture has been a not quite visible yet recurring phenomenon throughout the history of the medium. Beyond its low key appearance, it has fascinated architects with its unique capacity to gather together communication, space and movement. A look at the architectural publications of the last thirty years points in that direction, showing a discrete but steady flow of articles, as well as an increasing number of exhibitions covering the different overlaps between architecture and graphic narrative. Along with the drift towards virtual scenarios and animation, today’s architecture, still primarily represented as lines and colors on printed paper, shows a renewed interest in, and a particular affinity toward, the techniques, strategies and aesthetics of graphic narrative.

MAS Context #13: 'Narrative': http://www.mascontext.com/20-narrative-winter-2013/

This introduction to the early 1960s formation of Britain's celebrated avant-garde architecture group, Archigram, was written for The Twentieth Century Society's 2002 book "The Sixties," edited by Elain Harwood and Alan Powers. It argues that the group was a reaction to British "brutalist" architecture, with which Archigram members were both enamored and discontented, pushing brutalism to new extremes at the London County Council's South Bank Arts Centre and in florid, visionary competition entries.

‘Rem Koolhaas, Leon Krier and Bernard Tschumi were students of mine at the Architectural Association in 1970-71’, the Italian radical architect Natalini once proudly said. This chapter explores the new theoretical framework that emerged and began to inform British architectural production at the start of the 1970s, after Natalini served as a guest lecturer at London’s Architectural Association and instilled scepticism into his students. A student of Benevolo, Quaroni, Ricci and Savioli, Natalini brought the politicized architecture of the Facoltà di architettura di Firenze to the Architectural Association and decisively contributed to the emergence of alternative pedagogies there. If Manfredo Tafuri dismissed Superstudio’s visionary architecture as a futile attempt at disrupting the capitalist system of production, Natalini and his colleagues were, in fact, aiming to challenge the system of knowledge production, or conventional and reactionary architectural education, and did so fruitfully. The state of architectural education was an intensely debated subject in Italy at the time, and a certain Althusserianism can be discerned in the way in which contemporary Italian criticism stressed the ideological significance of transforming behavior through radical design pedagogies. That Natalini’s ‘anti-design’ left a strong impression on his younger colleagues at the Architectural Association becomes evident when considering the analogy between the ambiguity of Superstudio’s ‘negative utopia’ and the ambivalently dialectical gesture represented by OMA’s early thought experiment Exodus, which tried to locate beauty in the horror of the Berlin Wall. In what follows, I will contend that this dialectical utopianism began as a critique of Archigram’s naïveté, as well as reveal connections between OMA’s early pursuits and the preoccupations of the Global Tools group, founded in Milan in 1973 as a successor to Superstudio.

"The Yellow Submarine (1968). La Arquitectura Utópica y Arte de los Sesenta en una Película Animada”. Avanca Cinema. International Conference. 2014 (Costa Valente, António; Capucho, Rita, coords.) Avanca, Portugal, 2014, pp. 506-518. ISBN: 978-989-96858-4-0

Le visioni utopiche degli Archigram radicalizzano un’idea di città fondata sul controllo ambientale, sulla flessibilità meccanizzata degli spazi, sulla rapida movimentazione di merci, persone, dati e quindi dipendente da un ingente consumo di energia. Vengono portati ad estreme conseguenze alcuni nodi critici riguardanti le relazioni tra architettura e sostenibilità energetica.

Since its timid first appearance in 1961, and fundamentally after their ultimate consolidation in the mid of the same decade, Archigram, both magazine and group, became a sine-qua-non of the utopian scene and of the history of architectural teams in general. The turning point in their encoding as an indispensable element in the history of XXth Century  architecture would be, however, the publication, in 1964, of Amazing Archigram!, the fourth issue of the magazine devoted to science fiction. With its mechanical and space age imagery, and its American comic book aesthetics, the “Zoom Issue” would have a prominent role in conforming the public image and the very public perception of Archigram’s ethos. On the one hand, the issue would catapult their brand to the international scene. On the other, its visual punch, and the transgressive consistency of its message, installed in the collective eye of architecture the idea of Archigram not just as a magazine, but as an architectural office with a common agenda. However, “Amazing Archigram” also established the vision of the team as a  group of “provocateurs”, and the regard of their architecture as something belonging in the world of science fiction, which was far from being the intent of their authors, whose proposals, visionary or else, certainly helped shape that “realitas ludens” that impregnated the very architectural reality of the 1960s.

Desde su tímida aparición en 1961, y fundamentalmente a partir de su consolidación definitiva a mediados de la misma década, Archigram, revista y grupo, ha pasado a ser un sine-qua-non del panorama utópico y de las historias de las agrupaciones arquitectónicas. El punto de inflexión en su consolidación como un elemento indispensable de la historia de la arquitectura del siglo XX, sería, en cualquier caso, la aparición en 1964 de Amazing Archigram!, el cuarto número de la revista, dedicado a la ciencia ficción. Con su imaginería mecánica y espacial, y su estética de comic book americano, el “Zoom Issue” tendría un papel crucial en la conformación de la imagen y el propio ethos de Archigram. Por una parte, el número catapultaría su marca hacia un panorama internacional. Por otra, su potencia visual, formal y transgresora, unida a una aparente coherencia en el mensaje, instaló en el ojo colectivo de la arquitectura la idea de Archigram no sólo como una revista, sino como un estudio de arquitectura con una agenda común. Sin embargo, “Amazing Archigram” también instauró la visión del grupo como un conjunto de “provocateurs”, y de su arquitectura como perteneciente al terreno de la ciencia ficción, algo muy alejado de la intención de sus autores, cuyas propuestas, visionarias o no, se orientaban hacia el muy real objetivo de dar forma arquitectónica a esa “realitas ludens” que impregnaba la propia realidad de los 60.

Proyecto Progreso Arquitectura #11: 'Arquitecturas en Común / Architectures in Common': https://ojs.publius.us.es/ojs/index.php/ppa/issue/view/70/showToc

The aim of the research is to discuss, within the framework of the Architectural Utopias of the 60s, the concept of Space colonization, declining it in the ephemeral use of megastructures. The main role given by the study to the English group Archigram wants to highlight how their experimental proposals are not so far from our reality and how their conceptual framework perfectly matches with the requirements.

The rising of the idea of space colonization got a reserved spot in the scientific research since 1969, when the first human footprints were left on the lunar soil, and analyzing the current project proposals we can define some common points that we can highlight and confront with Archigram.

The English group is given a role of absolute European centrality in the field of Utopian Megastructuralism, as their main concept ideas, were to break from the past in order to “invent and develop an ex-novo modern city, as huge tumultuous, agile and dynamic construction site in each of his part” and not less important, a vision of the city made of components, interchangeable and updatable where the dimension of time plays an important role given the indetermination and fluency in scientific and social evolution. The name itself is a representation of immediacy, as the group wanted an architecture that was important, urgent and rapid at the same time, like a telegram, from which the payoff “Archi(tecture...tele)gram”.

One of Archigram’s accomplishments had been to reorient architecture toward changing social and ideological patterns. The innovation of Archigram stands also in reconsidering the urban fabric and the city from the inhabitants point of view and their conditions: the surrounding environment usually characterized by buildings in their physical mass (hardware) should be imagined as something flexible and upgradable, non-static (software) according to the users’ needs. And so is the un-explored field of living on new planets.

The final question should be, Can Archigram proposals be the solutions for the colonization of new planets?


Keywords: megastructures, space, ephemeral, colonization, temporary
Topic: 1. THE MISSION: new needs for new settlements for new planets, 2. THE VISION: Characteristics and utopias of Archigram, 3. ARCHIGRAM 2.0: over the horizon

This paper, for the 2013 Yale School of Architecture symposium "Exhibiting Architecture: a paradox?," focuses on Theo Crosby, who was a figure central to the post-war architectural avant-garde, yet whose own personal program and preferences seem mercurial, and obscured by his preference to edit and curate the work of others. The paper makes the case that Crosby’s curatorship of a series of key exhibitions from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s was, rather, an act of stealth architecture, and that Crosby was an architect-curator who elevated curatorship to the level of modernist heroism in an era which, he seems to have intuited, was edging beyond modernist heroism into what we would now recognize as postmodern quietism. Sensing the imminent loss of a unifying project in the arts, and at the same time the opportunity which that presented for a stimulating pluralism, his exhibitions tried to imagine future communities without identity—communities of creators and audiences that did not depend on core affinity. Community would be instead played out through unavoidable conflicts of interest, termed "pessimist utopias" by Crosby.

Indisolublemente ligado a su percepción como producto destinado a un público infantil, el cómic ha evolucionado a lo largo del siglo XX desprovisto de la legitimidad intelectual rápidamente adquirida por otros medios como el cine o la fotografía, y la atención que se le ha dedicado desde la arquitectura lo ha relegado habitualmente a la categoría de mera curiosidad. Pese a ello, los cómics han suscitado y continúan suscitando el interés de la disciplina, siendo objeto, desde su introducción en el espectro cultural y académico en los primeros 60, de un flujo constante de artículos, exposiciones y estudios que lo redescubren periódicamente para su consumo por parte del público arquitectónico general. Sin embargo, este interés no es un fenómeno reciente. Las relaciones entre narrativa gráfica y arquitectura se remontan en realidad al comienzo de la modernidad, que intuyó en ella un potencial redescubierto por nuevas generaciones de arquitectos interesados en explotar sus posibilidades como herramienta de comunicación, pero también de diseño.
Le Corbusier read comic books. Notes on the interactions between architecture and graphic narrative
Tied to their early encoding as a children's' medium, comics -comic strips, funnies, comic books or, more recently, graphic novels- have made their way throughout the XX Century devoid of the intellectual legitimacy which other visual media, such as cinema, or photography, rapidly gained within the cultural scene. Consequently, comics have seldom been approached as an academic object of interest in architectural scholarship. And even when they did get featured, occasionally showing up in articles and exhibitions -especially after the 1960s, when authors such as Umberto Eco prompted their entrance into Academia-, their presence was always that of a mere curiosity. Comics are looked upon with a combination of fascination and despise, bound to be periodically rediscovered by those interested in exploring the visual production located in the periphery of the discipline and regarded as a decidedly minor, unserious by-product of popular culture and consumerism by the architectural establishment.
However, this has not always been the case. In the earlier decades of the XX century, Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso were usual readers of The Katzenjammer Kids (Rudolph Dirks, 1897), and George Grosz mentioned them as a great influence on his own work. Picasso, Joan Miró and Willem de Kooning were great fans of George Herrimann's Krazy Kat (1913-44), as well as Walt Disney or Frank Capra, and both Picasso and Dalí, René Magritte and André Breton used the language of graphic narrative at some point. But this interest in comics was also present in the early stages of modern architecture, through such a seminal figure as Le Corbusier. As Stanislaus Von Moos has noted, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret grew up fascinated by Rodolphe Töpffer, a teacher, painter, cartoonist, and caricaturist best known as the Swiss father of bande dessinée. Jeanneret had discovered Töpffer through a children's book, Voyages en Zigzag, where Von Moos locates the origins of Le Corbusier's later passion for travel. This fascination for Töpffer did not fade with time, and in the following decades Le Corbusier became more interested in the histoires en estampes that the Swiss pedagogue had started producing in the 1830s, writing the first article on comics to be found in an architecture magazine, "Toepffer, précurseur du cinema", in L'Esprit Nouveau (1921), and even expressing his interest in writing a doctoral dissertation about him. Töpffer's shadow can be found in the Swiss architect's sustained evolution towards a sort of ligne claire rendering style, and even more so, in Le Corbusier's use of the techniques of graphic narrative in his earlier years, both on different occasions in L'Ésprit Nouveau, or in his atypical, storyboarded Lettre a Madame Meyer of 1925.
Le Corbusier's early interest in the ability of graphic narrative to represent and imagine architectural space and in comics, notably absent from architectural publications until the recovery of the medium spawned by the publication of Archigram 4 (May 1964), contrasted with the fascination that architecture provoked in comic authors since the very inception of the medium. The works of Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland, 1905) or Frank King (Gasoline Alley, 1918) illustrated, with the medium barely a couple decades old, the potentialities of the graphic sequence's spatialization of time for the rendering and reinvention of architectural space. One century later, already in the age of digital reproduction it is architecture which looks back at comics, either trying to use their -still- transgressive aura (Koolhaas) or communicative qualities (BIG), because of their ability to capture architectural essence (Neutelings), or in the work of new generations of architects such as Wes Jones Jimenez Lai, who look at comics as a tool for architectural research.

‘Locally Available World unseen Networks’, better known by its acronym ‘LAWUN’, is a project that Archigram member David Greene has been working on for the last thirty years. It is work that seeks to project architecture away from matter, away from building towards pure network, pure event-information-space. Recent manifestations of the work have been based upon live performances and mobile phones. Older manifestations typically featured ‘Electric Aborigines’- technologically extended nomads who would travel with their prosthetic environments. Fixed, permanent architecture would be reduced to ‘a servicing frame in a field waiting to be used or built upon. Very concentrated. The nearest thing to a village or town or building that should be allowed.’ The real architecture here happens at the interface of the body and the ether of communication networks encompassing the planet.

Takis Zenetos was enthusiastic about the idea of working from home, and believed that both architecture and urban planning should be reshaped in order to respond to this. He supported the design of special public spaces in residential units, aiming to accommodate the inhabitants during working hours. This article argues that Zenetos’s design for “Electronic Urbanism” was more prophetic, and more pragmatic, than his peers such as Archigram and Constant Nieuwenhuys. Despite the fact that they shared an optimism towards technological developments and megastructure, a main difference between Zenetos’s view and the perspectives of his peers is his rejection of a generalised enthusiasm concerning increasing mobility of people. In opposition with Archigram, Zenetos insisted in minimizing citizens’ mobility and supported the replacement of daily transport with the use advanced information technologies, using terms such as “tele-activity”. Zenetos was convinced that “Electronic Urbanism” would help citizens save the time that they normally used to commute to work, and would allow them to spend this time on more creative activities, at or near their homes. The main interest of “Electronic Urbanism” lies in the fact that it not only constitutes an artistic contribution to experimental architecture, but is also characterized by a new social vision, promising to resynchronize practices of daily life. An aspect that is also examined is the relationship of Zenetos’s ideas and those of the so-called Metabolists in the 1960s in Japan, including Kenzo Tange’s conception of megastructures. Zenetos’s thought is very topical considering the ongoing debates about the advanced information society, especially regarding the social concerns of surveillance, governance, and sovereignty within the context of Big Data. His conception of “tele-activities” provides a fertile terrain for reflecting on potential implications and insights concerning home-office conditions not only within the context of the current pandemic situation but beyond it as well

Yona Friedman: Las ciudades en las alturas y las utopías urbanas de la segunda mitad del siglo XX Juan Luis Burke 4 de marzo de 2020 El 21 de febrero de 2020, la cuenta de Instagram de Yona Friedman publicaba una foto del arquitecto, a la vez que comunicaba: "Luego de 96 años en esta tierra, Yona se ha mudado allá arriba para construir una Ciudad Espacial e instalar algunas Cadenas Espaciales en el cielo." 1 De esta manera, la Dotation Yona Friedman anunciaba el deceso de una de las figuras arquitectónicas más intrigantes del siglo XX .

Исследование посвящено вопросам становления и развития новых педагогических программ в 1970–1980-е гг. в одной из ведущих архитектурных школ второй половины XX в. — лон- донской Архитектурной ассоциации. Зодчие, получившие в это время образование в Ассоциации, являются крупнейшими теоретиками и практиками современной архитектуры. Здесь учились Рем Колхас, Ричард Роджерс, Заха Хадид, Дэвид Чипперфилд, Стивен Холл. В разработке учебных курсов в разное время принимали участие Питер Смитсон, Седрик Прайс, Даниель Либескинд, Леон Крир, Бернар Чуми, Николас Гримшоу.
В статье анализируется деятельность в Архитектурной ассоциации Питера Кука — одного из лиде- ров движения «Аркигрэм». Рассматриваются аспекты, которым уделяли внимание Кук и его коллеги в работе над градостроительными проектами, в том числе бумажные утопии, тема номадического города, перепрограммироваие городской среды, актуализация средневековых моделей городского развития. В основе исследования — материалы архивов лондонской Архитектурной ассоциации.
The research deals with the question of new pedagogical programs elaborated at one of the leading European architectural schools — London Architectural Association — during the period of the 1970s-1980s.
574 К. А. Малич

  Architects who graduated from the Association have become true heroes of contemporary architecture. The list of names connected with the Association is unbelievably representative: Ron Arad, Ben van Berkel, David Chipperfield, Nigel Coates, Peter Cook, Mark Fisher, Zaha Hadid, David Green, Nicholas Grimshaw, Steven Holl, Rem Koolhaas, Leon Krier, Daniel Libeskind, Richard Rogers, Patrik Schumacher, Bernard Tschumi, Elia Zenghelis. The paper is focusing on works and pedagogical methods of Peter Cook, one of Archigram leaders and Architectural Association tutors. Among the questions considered in the paper are futuristic utopian proj- ects, nomadic cities, reprogramming of the city environment, and actualizing of medieval urbanistic models. The paper is based on the materials of the London Architectural Association archive

1960lı ve 70li yıllarda önemli eserler vermiş olan Archigram mimar topluluğunun eserleri bir süredir Garanti Galeri'de sergileniyor. Topluluğun döneminin elitist mimari anlayışını sorgulayan ve mimari tasarımı pop-artla harmanlayan çalışmaları, ütopya ve dolayısıyla distopya kavramları üzerine çeşitli çıkarımlar yapmamıza imkan tanıyor. Archigram'ın "ütopya"sı en genel anlamıyla teknoloji ve tüketim kültürü kavramlarıyla şekilleniyor. Bu ütopyada en genel anlamıyla mobilite, daha dar kullanımıyla göçebelik özgürlük kavramıyla neredeyse özdeşleştiriliyor ve İtalyan fütüristlerini hatırlatacak bir şekilde devinim kutsanıyor.

Richard Rogers cimenta sus planteamientos en un conocimiento profundo de la arquitectura: desde las lecciones de Paul Rudolph, las visitas a la obra de Kahn, el conocimiento de la arquitectura medieval inglesa y, como no, Archigram. El artículo expone cómo esas referencias son rastreables en el Millennium Dome, y para ello se revisan ciertos proyectos previos del arquitecto. El artículo formó parte de "Construyendo Londres, Dibujando Europa" dirigido por el catedrático Manuel Trillo de Leyva, in memoriam

In 1970 the journal Design Quarterly published a special issue titled “Conceptual Architecture.” While the term conceptual architecture has been invoked periodically in architectural discourse since this initial pronouncement, it has often been denigrated by skeptical historians and architects. In The Dematerialization of Architecture: Toward a Taxonomy of Conceptual Practice , Ross Elfline considers conceptualism as a set of broad aesthetic and antiaesthetic strategies designed to question the foundational premises of a discipline. With the Design Quarterly issue as a focus, Elfline divides conceptual architecture strategies into four main categories: the birth of the activated user, radical negation, disciplinary retrenchment, and ephemeral performance. He further establishes links between these strategies and their cognates in the field of conceptual art. The study provides a taxonomy of self-critical aesthetic strategies in conceptual architecture in the 1960s and 1970s.

Richard Rogers cimenta sus planteamientos en un conocimiento profundo de la arquitectura: desde las lecciones de Paul Rudolph, las visitas a la obra de Kahn, el conocimiento de la arquitectura medieval inglesa y, como no, Archigram. El artículo expone cómo esas referencias son rastreables en el Millennium Dome, y para ello se revisan ciertos proyectos previos del arquitecto. El artículo formó parte de "Construyendo Londres, Dibujando Europa" dirigido por el catedrático Manuel Trillo de Leyva, in memoriam

Architecture research incessably returns to the past in order to analyze the historical conjonctures leading civic society, professionals, and regional decision makers to act jointly in the built environment. Professional, intellectual and artistic milieus are thus approached as "scenes" in constant evolution. This is also the case for the italian post-war architecture under Saverio Muratori's influence, the French post-war reconstruction case, the Alhambra Manifest and the London scene of the 1960's. The present volume of the Cahier de la Recherche Architecturale focuses on those cases.

The purpose of this article is the graphic and virtual reconstruction of the project for the utopian city “The Walking City”, carried out by Ron Herron in 1964 and published in the architectural magazine Archigram.
The main objective of the work is to generate a simulation of the project that allowed users not only to visit the city in a virtual way, but to interact with it, inhabit it and get to feel it.
The article includes the graphic documentation made prior to the generation of the model in virtual reality. This has been configured as a fundamental element for the analysis of the project, complementing the existing original documents about it.
The workflow carried out from the preparation of the initial documents to the work on video game engines for use in virtual reality systems is exposed.

Archigram – Digital reconstruction - Walking City – Virtual Reality – Immersive experiences

ITA_ I disegni di Alessandro Melis sono lo spunto per una descrizione interpretativa, orientata a mettere in luce l’espressione di un nuovo rapporto fra uomo e non umani come tema dell’architettura contemporanea. L’immaginario che agisce nei disegni esaminati predispone, come sempre in architettura, lo scenario di fondo cui prepararsi per i reali interventi disciplinari.
La ripresa degli organi zoomorfi o delle macchine tecno-sensoriali di Coop Himmel(b)lau, a loro volta eco delle prime introduzioni di Archigram, del bowellism di Frederick Kiesler, dei sistemi viventi di Hans Hollein, prolunga nel contemporaneo l’eco di una ricerca di apertura del campo disciplinare. La novità, nella frontiera verso la quale si spostano questi disegni, non è certo quella della poetica bio-tecnologica, o della realizzazione delle ipotesi decostruttiviste, ma la modalità realistica, composta e in equilibrio, con cui questi nuovi corpi e le architetture immaginate coabitano con spazi e fabbriche della storia. Queste macchine viventi della trasformazione bussano alla nostra porta per chiedere all’architettura di costruire ormai realmente la coesistenza. Progettare le forme e i linguaggi per farlo è una delle sue sfide principali.

ENG_Alessandro Melis' drawings are the starting point for an interpretative description, aimed at highlighting the expression of a new relationship between man and non-human as a theme of contemporary architecture. The imaginary that acts in the drawings taken into account prepares, as always in architecture, the background scenario to reckoning with real disciplinary transformations.
The evocation of the zoomorphic organs or the techno-sensorial machines of Coop Himmel (b) lau, that refers in turn to the first introductions of Archigram, of the bowellism of Frederick Kiesler, of the living systems of Hans Hollein, prolongs in our times the echo of a search for expanding the architectural field. The novelty concerning the frontier towards which these designs move, is certainly not that of bio-technological poetics, or the realization of deconstructivist hypotheses, but the realistic, composed and balanced mode with which these new bodies and the imagined architectures cohabit with spaces and historical buildings. These living machines of transformation knock on our door to ask architecture to really build coexistence. Designing the shapes and languages to do it is one of its main challenges.

Meses atrás, estava lendo os números dos anos sessenta da revista Arqui- tectura. É preciso, a meu ver, certa dose de paciência para suportar aquela fase histórica da revista e, em geral, parte daquela fase da história da ar- quitectura, uma “prófase” da contemporaneidade. Contudo, apesar de não terem sido os anos mais interessantes da arquitectura portuguesa, já se respiravam ares novos, saboreava-se o começo de uma grande “aventura” teórica e sensível: a da arquitectura lusa contemporânea. Apareciam os primeiríssimos “Sizas”, os já belos “Távoras”... Eu, leitor, sabia que, com paciência, iria chegar aos anos setenta, anos de mudanças e democráticas “mitoses” radicais, da Revolução dos Cravos... É a sensação que temos quando, em plena adolescência, estudamos os ci- clos de reprodução assexuada, sabendo que, mais adiante, há-de chegar a parte interessante, a da reprodução sexuada. No entanto, para poder des- frutar dela, é preciso aturar a multiplicação das bactérias, dos vírus... Lia com calma aquela fase editorial, cheia de contradições, ainda em pleno Regime, embora já fosse perceptível nos seus conteúdos uma certa “auto- nomia”, conquistada com as lutas dos anos cinquenta por alguns arquitec- tos corajosos.

This essay introduces Italian readers to Archigram's Plug-in City for the catalog accompanying the exhibition La Citta Nuova Oltre Sant'Elia (Beyond Sant’Elia. A Hundred Years of Urban Visions), Villa Olmo, Como, March-July 2013, curated by Marco de Michelis.