Peter Cook charts a fervid vision of a contemporaneous future in ‘Archigram Ten’

"So Archigram never went away...?", quips Peter Cook in the editorial—resurfacing 50 years after their last Archigram 9 ½—like the eccentrically prophetic figure he proved to be with his work within the radical group Archigram. It was perhaps the same question everyone thought of upon the announcement for Archigram Ten a few months ago, met with equal hints of fervour and nostalgia, if not, cautious optimism. Are the original satirists of architecture still in the image business? What is the image business, to begin with, and what are its connotations in the to-day? The questions persisted.

Perhaps in the age of the proliferation of artificial intelligence and generative design, where the morphology of the image is more profitable than ever, what the image warns itself becomes self-evident. To the chief question then, the trailing text seems to vehemently answer, "AS AN ATTITUDE IT HAS NEVER GONE AWAY IT IS EVEN MORE NECESSARY THAN EVER ARCHITECTURE MUST MOVE FORWARD ARCHITECTURE MUST INVENT." Here, text is image, and image is text; a glimpse of what is to follow.

The utopian lattices of Buckminster Fuller, the science fiction visions of writers like Jules Verne, advancing space technology at the time and the possibilities it offered for the worlds of architecture and design, pop culture and comic books were only some of the inspirations for the radical group. As Reyner Banham wrote about the reason for their popularity (then, and even today, in a crowd of hopeful architecture students), “The strength of Archigram's appeal stems from many things, including youthful enthusiasm in a field (city planning) which is increasingly the preserve of middle-aged caution. But chiefly, it offers an image-starved world a new vision of the city of the future, a city of components on racks, components in stacks, components plugged into networks and grids, a city of components being swung into place by cranes." It was their insistence on the power of the image and an insistence on situations rather than function that set them apart.

Our contemporary sense of being and living has seen a number of the ‘predictions’ by the group of British architects established by Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene in 1961 coming true, though perhaps not as exuberantly as they imagined. An obsession with biomorphism in design, music festivals like Burning Man, smart homes and high-tech architecture (think the inception of the Lloyds building) are only some of the zany ideas that the group was extolling in the 1960s when technology did not allow for these to exist. Instead, architectural technology at the time failed to embrace the emancipation of technology promised, while a generation of new social configurations was being nurtured by the rise in communication systems. The architecture of the ‘60s reproduced the notion of building being a static art, which Cook and gang were reacting against by proposing a liberatory model - one where architecture was not dictated by a plan or a single author but was ephemeral, mobile even, was determined by the user, and able to adapt to different situations by being part of a larger systems-oriented approach that did not disregard the context surrounding it.

Their battle cry, issued in the first issue of their magazine, reads, “A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seem to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to bypass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism.”

The tone that sets off the new book, in ALL CAPS, is in some ways jubilant but also premonitory, in the usual style of Archigram’s catechisms. It harkens that we need the philosophies that drove the group more than ever, even 50 years on. However, the group, hailed by most architecture critics as the bad boys, the ironic rebels, the rockstars of British architecture, were “short on theory, long on draftsmanship and craftsmanship. They’re in the image business,” Banham observed, which perhaps led to their dissolution in 1975. The members would go on to establish their own practices (like in the case of Cook) or go on to teach, mostly both. Crompton, who unfortunately passed away earlier this year, would eventually establish the Archigram Archives, which he continued to curate for the rest of his life. The group's legacy can not only be discerned in the turn towards imagistic architecture today, but also in inspiring the likes of Renzo Piano and Norman Foster.

Reflecting on the current state of architecture and providing a vision for its future, contributors to the latest volume include architects whose philosophies echo the techno-fetishistic, maximalist and scatty visions of the group, including Argentinian architect Tomás Saraceno, London-based designers Naja & deOstos, Dutch designer Winka Dubbeldam, French architect Odile Decq, Chinese architecture studio People’s Architecture Office, American architect Thom Mayne and London-based EcoLogic Studio, among others.

These projects, visions and predictions are interspersed with notes from the surviving members of the group, including Crompton, who writes in a reflective essay, titled Back to the Future, about the failed potential of technology for Archigram's vision. "One of the most important elements of Archigram’s work was the concept of responsive environments. In the 1960s, we were limited by the lack of technological tools to develop architecture that could interact dynamically with its occupants. Now, we have the tools, but the enthusiasm and drive to use them are missing. It’s a curious change from a time when the possibilities excited many despite the technological limitations," he notes.

Apart from Crompton’s somewhat dour tone, the collage by Greene is also contemplative in how it uses images for the message it presents, calling back to Archigram 9, the issue where the British architects looked at the convergence of technology and nature. In fact, this tendency towards biophilia and a symbiotic relationship with the natural environment that bypasses the deleterious effects of the Anthropocene are abundant in this volume. For instance, EcoLogic Studio’s vision of Tallinn uses the city’s urban wastewater infrastructure to construct new habitats that co-exist with the natural landscape. Japanese studio Tezuka Architects’ plan for an ongoing school project in the UAE is also particularly reminiscent of the kind of systems thinking proliferated by Archigram, where natural systems like plant tissue are used as a way to think about creating an alternative genealogy for architecture. Similarly, Dubbeldam envisions a symbiotic architecture where buildings “generate mutually beneficent, self-sustaining and self-healing habitats and environments that create positive feedback on the environment”.

Even Mayne voices his thoughts about gardens, drawing on the rhetoric of Archigram 9 to suggest a new path for architecture. “The manipulation and understanding of biological systems and the underlying principles of behaviour and evolution play a significant role in design-thinking…As we locate multiple grounds and blur the boundaries between where one begins and the other ends, architecture approaches a mixture of the natural and the constructed,” Mayne prophesied. Each presentiment, in this case, demonstrates a concern for how architecture can redress what it has annihilated in symbiosis with what remains of the natural. More so, if the visions are to be believed, the reverence for natural ways of doing, of course at the same time reliant on the tenets of science and technology, is a way of rethinking the agency and identity of the designer.

Some contributors argue for the proliferation and acquiescence to technology as a means to free the designer (over the design). This assumption, another pet theme for the group that was formed during the heyday of techno-optimism, is discussed with the same exuberance as 50 years ago. For instance, Decq proclaims the potential of artificial intelligence optimistically, writing, “Creation, like scientific research, means accepting that our certainties are called into question.” In his text, Perry Kulper notes that “the contemporary architect needs to be many architects”, using different mediums of spatial visualisations to do away with the singular perspective (very parametricism coded). The last text of the volume by London-based architect Gilles Retsin argues for automation and technology start-up Automated Architecture (AUAR) as a viable future model for a new architectural paradigm.

The most droll propositions, however, are the projects that rehash the band’s original radical diagrams, covers of classic hits, if you will. These suggest that a return to the kind of systems thinking where designers look at instances of building, at contexts and behaviours rather than at schemes for architecture, is required. By re-presenting radical ideas of the '60s in the context of today, they reignite arguments for breaking away from the idea of a static realism. 

People’s Architecture Office’s Megacity Plug-Ins is an obvious call back to the Plug-In City. The studio has worked on the idea of plug-ins in architecture for almost 10 years, and here, it extrapolates the principles to a larger urban design scale, advocating for walkability and accessibility. Pedro Pitarch’s An Atlas of Metropolitan Islands for Berlin, in some ways, brings to mind Cook’s proposal for Instant City. As Pitarch writes, “The city of the captive event is devoted to the constant construction of enclosed contexts.” Meanwhile, David Garcia’s proposal for visually communicating radiation readings in Chernobyl to facilitate tourism in the area channels the ironic nature of Archigram’s work. Klein Dytham’s Super Model, however, is the most droll, offering a revised version of a deep cut, an unpublished design for a walking kiosk that only true fans might remember.

While the present cover calls back to the cover for Archigram 6 in its choice of font and colour scheme, the drawings—brimming, weird and fantastical—are what are meant to grab the reader's attention, not so much the words that veer towards techno-jargon in some instances. If contemporary architecture is, as Craig Hodgetts writes in his essay in the volume, “a passive response to the coincidence of materials marketing, thermal and engineering necessity”, the musical equivalent of “what’s heard in the confines of lifts, not the rowdy sounds of the arena”, then the diagrams in Archigram Ten aim to be exactly the opposite—unruly.

Perhaps it is no coincidence, in the year that Carlo Ratti's curatorial theme for the Venice Architecture Biennale looks to push architecture towards the idea of a semblance of technocratism and the scientific discipline of architecture, Archigram reissues their own stance on the issue: chaotic, multidisciplinary, but never as rigid or impervious as some of the ideas that Ratti puts forth. In this context, it is still worth noting that in addressing the current anxieties of the profession, most contributions do seem to lean towards practicability rather than fantasy. It’s also fascinating to see how the issues of today find echoes in the solutions of the 60s. Did Archigram really go away then?

From an overview, the projects in the volume all tie to the idea of a liberatory architecture; whether that liberation lies in how architecture proliferates without the presence of the architect, or the idea that in connecting architecture to nature, the Anthropocene emancipates itself, or the proliferation of intelligence through the use of technology. In the end, it seems that these hinge on the image alone. After all, as Trevor Boddy observes in the essay, Instagram is Archigram: the medium is the message. The image reigns supreme in this eccentric concoction of the magazine’s 10th edition. In some ways, it feels like a nostalgic callback. Do images hold the same power in an age that has learned how to harness them to no end? Perhaps the appeal of Archigram lies in the impossibility of the image, of a utopian space where what is imagined offers critique to the end of what must be imagined.

As Cook reiterates, “DRAWINGS ARE EXCITING DRAWINGS CAN BE WAYWARD DRAWINGS CAN BE VERY, VERY PRECISE DRAWINGS CAN BE PRESCIENT. Doodles are a direct, spontaneous link to much of the material that follows. Yet doodles can often be the unencumbered creative act. Maybe Archigram is one collective doodle then...?”