Archigram

"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.

"[3] Based at the Architectural Association in London, the main members of the group were Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene.

Kill-All-Humans,' a space-comic-robot-zaap, that clicked into place along pneumatic tubes, a plug-in plastic layer cake, that gurgled and spluttered over the old city like creeping, cancerous, testubular, friendly Daleks.

"[8] "The strength of Archigram's appeal," wrote the architecture critic and historian Reyner Banham, "stems from many things, including youthful enthusiasm in a field (city planning) which is increasingly the preserve of middle-aged caution.

"[9] By 1967, in works like Control and Choice Living (1967), the group had turned its attention to the question of exploiting, in architecture and urban planning, those "systems, organizations, and techniques that permit the emancipation and general good life of the individual" within "a high-density location," writes Jencks.

In 1973, wrote Theo Crosby,[11] its members had "found their original impulses towards megastructures blunted by the changing intellectual climate in England, where the brash dreams of modern architects are received with ever-increasing horror.

It provides a new agenda where nomadism is the dominant social force; where time, exchange, and metamorphosis replace stasis; where consumption, lifestyle, and transience become the programme; and where the public realm is an electronic surface enclosing the globe —David Greene[12]The group was supported by mainstream architects, such as David Rock of BDP.

"The building is obviously a realization of the technological and infrastructural rhetoric of Archigram," writes Frampton, "and while the full consequences of this approach are becoming evident through everyday use, it is apparent that certain paradoxical achievements may be claimed on its behalf."

In the second, it is a brilliant tour de force in advanced technique, looking for all the world like an oil refinery whose technology it attempts to emulate.Frampton concedes, however, that the Pompidou seems "to have come into being with the minimum regard for the specificity of its brief—for the art and library holdings it was destined to house.

In Jencks's estimation, "the great contribution of the British avant-garde"—of which Archigram is perhaps the most exuberantly iconoclastic exponent, in architecture—"has been to open up and develop new attitudes towards living in an advanced industrial civilization where only stereotyped rejection had existed before, to dramatizing consumer choice and communicating the pleasure inherent in manipulating sophisticated technology.

He quotes their landmark critique of postmodern architecture, Learning from Las Vegas, published that year: “Archigram’s structural visions are Jules Verne versions of the Industrial Revolution with an appliqué of Pop-aerospace terminology.”[15] And defenders: "Three years later," writes Sadler, the architecture critic Martin Pawley argued that Archigram "stood for 'an existential technology for individuals that the world will, in time, come to regard with the same awe as is presently accorded to the prescience of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, or the Marquis de Sade.

Futile to complain (as many do),‘But they never build anything.’ Verne never built the Nautilus, Wells could hardly drive a car, and the Marquis de Sade?”[16] In 2019, the M+ museum in Hong Kong acquired Archigram's entire archive, despite purported attempts to block the sale to an overseas buyer.