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But what has been their contribution to posterity? This powerful
and revealing exhibition summarises, for the years 1961 to 1974,
the strength, veracity, and inspiration the group provided to the
European and global architectural community. The essence of this
exhibition was first shown (launched seems to be a more appropriate
word) in the Vienna Kunsthalle, in 1994. It has had a number of
limited showings in other cities since then. And after the current
show at the Design Museum in London, it moves across to Japan.
It has been said that the Archigram exhibition is the best exhibition
ever held at the Design Museum. Crossing Tower Bridge, looking back
at the city skyline, as one steps down one level to Shad Thames
to reach the venue, wicked thoughts stray across one's mind. Looking
across to the North Bank, the phallic Swiss Re Tower, by Norman
Foster, jingle jangles, hiding its unrecognised roots for today's
consumerised public. Few would draw the valid connection with Archigram's
inspirational city view:
Returning from America, some young English architects knew
that they could, and should make an architecture that was
of the future - now … Archigram emerged as the mouthpiece
of this philosophy, Richard Rogers and Norman Foster emerged
as its fashioners and engineers, Peter Rice and Anthony
Hunt emerged as its boffins. There was no need for a detached
avant-garde: time for that could not be wasted if the future
was really to happen - now.
(Peter Cook, The Architectural Review, July 1983)
Just over the shoulder of Swiss Re stands the still shining Lloyds
building by Richard Rogers, the other leading architect of the interim
period who, it has to be admitted, also drew inspiration from Archigram.
Posterity stands quaking, and ready to forget such original sourcing
today. One is tempted to indulge in the historian Andrew Roberts'
party game of 'what if … '. What if Archigram had got off the
ground really fast with, say, The British Library project, or latterly
Tate Modern? But there were impassable constrictions in British
Architecture, which readily delayed progress until the 21st century.
So, 'they not got much built,' and we can only look now at what
they engendered among others. Whatever the setbacks, their position
in history stands irrevocably firm, unassailable now - unlike the
way in which numerous of the so-called Po-Mo pattern builders are
already disappearing into oblivion, for all the building they did.
Finally in this resumé, we must offer a word about their
intellectual sponsor, the late, great Peter Reyner Banham. Banham
was the mentor of so much that has lasted - such as Archigram -
as well as of much that we do not regret in passing - Brutalism
for example, an especially English fetish. To fully understand Banham's
prophetic contribution, and its sustenance, one need only find a
copy of his brilliant The Visions of Ron Herron (Academy
Group, 1994), which traces the meteoric progress and superb graphic
skill of but one of the contenders.
The exhibition at the Design Museum also contains a nostalgic but
nudge-nudge facsimile of Archigram's actual original work space,
('office' would be too much of a euphemism), there amidst the Rapidograph
pens, discarded Letraset samples, and Barbour Index rejects. Many
studio reconstructions by curators convey to the public a lack of
authenticity, but this collision of primary colours has the ring
of truth. Peter Cook and Dennis Crompton made sure of that, assisting
curator James Peto in achieving maximum authenticity.
The exhibits, since the Kunsthalle, Vienna extravaganza of 1994,
have reduced in number. Some of the models have gone but the show,
as compressed into the first floor galleries of the Design Museum,
retains all the powerful impact of the seminal content that has
in this form travelled the world. The exhibition rivals that in
Paris, which followed Vienna, although the location there within
the Pompidou Centre, served as a reminder of the powerful influence
Archigram have had on their contemporaries.
The visitors seem to divide into two main groups. First, the curious
from the generation that came after - those who were quite deliberately
disengaged from all this charisma by their seriously job-oriented
practice-builders of the 1970s, and in this group must be included
the post-Venturi rationalists. Curious, in this Proustian time-slip,
because they stand wondering where it all passed them by. Then,
there is the new generation of students, from up and down the country,
who examine ruthlessly the superb technique of Herron, Cook, Crompton
et al and find it to be a prediction of so much that has
happened since. Prominent here are Peter Cook's and Colin Fournier's
students from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College
London as well as bemused Architectural Association students (who
realise now that it did not all happen at the AA, but only briefly
in passing there). In addition to these blocs, there are the history/theory
aficionados, who now realise that Archigram has been a major milestone
in the development of architectural awareness throughout the 20th
century. Many of these are European or Japanese, engaged in a searching
enquiry as to where and how British architecture lost the plot.
Dominating one end wall of the galleries is the vast reproduction
of Ron Herron's 'Walking City' (1964). Finally, providing a superb,
green climacteric at the final wall before one leaves the exhibition
is Peter Cook's dramatic pointer of the way into an environment
of total, built-but-growing landscape, 'Sponge City' (1974). This
constitutes a mural of several panels, over two metres high at the
two peaks, and some five metres long. This last exhibit shows, as
never before, that Cook anticipated always in his work the way in
which the future must happen now, 'Now' (then) was 1974, and Cook
was typically forecasting the many possible ways in which cities
would be absorbed within the growing landscape. This is precisely
what we find beginning to happen in the 21st century.
The five original Archigram (Chalk, Herron, Cook, Crompton and
Webb) members were uniquely visionary, in a manner not seen since
the Russian Constructivist, or the related Italian Futurist Movement.
But their documentation was dramatically superior to both, as Banham
knew. There was here no political agenda, but a distinctive brand
of youthful realism fuelled by an unbreakable group dynamic. Yes,
as Arata Isozaki said, shockwaves they make. And so will continue
to do.
But, there is a deficit. Architects still fail to acknowledge this
work to the extent that they ought. Theorists are still defensively
dismissive. The Big Book on Archigram, steered along as an
initial project by Dr Sutherland Lyall (endless meetings with Butterworth-Heinemann
in the late 1980s) could still happen. And meanwhile, the Archigram
Archive has been miraculously preserved, extended, and curated by
Dennis Crompton with Lyall in waiting. It is fortunate to be still
in this country; it could be at risk, but at least a majority of
the members are still around, complete with Gold Medal.
Michael Spens, Editor
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