Archigram

Archigram was an avant-garde British architectural group (1961-1974) whose unbuilt projects and media-savvy provocations "spawned the most influential architectural movement of the 1960s," according to Princeton Architectural Press study Archigram (1999). Using paper architecture (or visionary architecture), they imagined physically adaptive cities heavily embraced by modernism. The group (while not working together directly in many occasions) addressed the changing world in a post-industrial society. With the rapid evolution of technology, building techniques, and cultural shifts (increased class-consciousness), Archigram curated a philosophy that first served as a wild imagination of how the profession of architecture can respond to changing needs. According to Santiago Lillo and Pedro Molina-Siles in "The Imagined City. Futurism, Utopia and Archigram": ...[A] reflection was established on the relationship between architecture and technology, the dissociation of the ecological problem, ... Through the assimilation of the consumerist model and through a chaotic visualization of the future, they proposed architectural and urbanistic models that would allow the incorporation of more useful technology, using synthetic, disposable and industrial materials and creating mobile, assemblable and even obsolescent structures." By 1970, their depictions shifted to dystopian implementations of technology, as another reflection to a disdain of futurism by the public. The works of Archigram had a tendency to fall into the neofuturistic, influenced by Antonio Sant'Elia's works, Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman's thinking. "Their attitude was closely tied to the technocratic ideology of the American designer Buckminster Fuller," Kenneth Frampton confirms, in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, "and to that of his British apologists John McHale and Reyner Banham. ... Archigram's subsequent commitment to a 'high-tech,' lightweight, infrastructural approach (the kind of indeterminacy implicit in the work of Fuller and even more evident in Yona Friedman's L'Architecture mobile of 1958) brought them, rather paradoxically, to indulge in ironic forms of science fiction, rather than to project solutions that were either truly indeterminate or capable of being realized and appropriated by society." Archigram was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2002.

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