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Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture

Article in Technology and Culture · February 2006

DOI: 10.1353/tech.2006.0196

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 B O O K R E V I E W S

subservient role. Thus design must be grounded into our situated presence
in the world and not in the technicalities of structural, mechanical, or
informational building systems.
Vesely offers ideologically loaded, hostile reevaluations of European
technical history presented through a novel prism of representation. The
splitting off of humanistic culture is much less controversial now than
when Lord Snow first described it in 1956, but description is not Vesely’s
purpose. This is an ambitious manifesto whose impact on design depends
on whether architects read him—not an easy task—or at least grasp, after
someone else’s mediated reflection, the import of his highly theoretical rec-
ommendations. For architects the gap between Aristotle’s Poetics and prac-
tice demands many conceptual and practical bridges, still missing here. But
few will sustain an unalloyed enthusiasm for blindly technical determinism
in design after digesting this difficult work.
SERGIO SANABRIA
Dr. Sanabria is a member of the faculty in the Department of Architecture and Interior Design
at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Archigram: Architecture without Architecture.

By Simon Sadler. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. Pp. 242. $35.

The 1960s went away and now they’re coming back. “Archigram is a mar-
velously fitting choice for a Royal Gold Medal” (p. 1) read the citation in
2002 when the Royal Institute of British Architects gave its major prize to a
group that had once defied all its conventions. Archigram was a band of
radical British architects—Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton,
David Greene, Ron Herron, Michael Webb—but it was even more the name
of the newsletter/magazine the group produced between 1961 and 1970.
Simon Sadler’s subtitle, Architecture without Architecture, is a double enten-
dre. On the one hand, to a first approximation, the group never built any-
thing. Early on, some of its members were involved in the design of the
South Bank Arts Centre in London (1960–64); in the early 1970s the group
was commissioned to design an Entertainments Centre in Monte Carlo (a
project which collapsed, with little explanation given in this book). Be-
tween those dates, Archigram—the magazine—was the vehicle for an archi-
tecture of the imagination, rendered in striking graphics—and this gets us
to the second sense of “architecture without architecture.”
Archigram members aligned themselves against the canon of conven-
tional architecture, especially the idea that the architect’s job is to design a
fixed form for buildings and cities. Instead, their object was adaptive archi-
tecture—architecture that could somehow change shape to accommodate
the emergent needs and desires of its users. Ron Herron’s 1964 designs for
the Walking City are emblematic: pictures of a city as a single, vaguely

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organic, engineered unit on legs. If the city loses the rationale for its loca-
tion, well, it can just stroll off somewhere else. A crazy idea, but I wouldn’t
complain if Urbana-Champaign edged toward Chicago.
Other Archigram visions were more realistic, though wild enough.
Peter Cook’s Plug-In City imagined a world of interchangeable dwellings,
easily moved from one location to another, plugging into readily available
JULY
services—an image of the city as fluid and capable of, again, quasi-biolog-
2006 ical growth, always responsive to its evolving environment. Later in the
VOL. 47
1960s, Archigram’s imaginary tended toward “the shed,” as Sadler calls it—
the building as a big box, endlessly reconfigurable inside, providing all sorts
of services, including information, to its inhabitants. As it happens, the
greatest shed of all was not an Archigram affair; it was Joan Littlewood’s
Fun Palace, for which Cedric Price was the architect (on which see Stanley
Matthews’s admirable 2002 Columbia University dissertation). An enor-
mous amount of planning was done on the Fun Palace in the early 1960s,
but a site was never found, and when it was reincarnated as the Centre
Pompidou in Paris, its architect conceded that his version was “not very
dynamic” (p. 167).
Sadler’s book is a tightly focused history of Archigram from the early
1960s until the eventual demise of Archigram Architects as a formal con-
cern in the mid-1970s, with Archigram magazine as its key object, especially
the images to be found there—and, for me, the 128 illustrations it contains
are its single most desirable feature, aesthetically as well as historically.
(Search the web for “archigram” to see what I mean.) But this is not to
diminish the value of Sadler’s text. The book is, I would say, a well-contex-
tualized history of images. Sadler does a good job at getting at the substance
of the enormous diversity of projects that Archigram imagined and laid out
(though many of the technological details remained vague in their original
conception, alas), but he also situates the group and its imaginary along
several axes: the modernist architectural establishment and 1960s Brutal-
ism from which Archigram distinguished itself; postwar planning; swinging
London and the new pop art; the Situationist International (Sadler’s other
book is The Situationist City [1998]); an odd enthusiasm for America;
cybernetics (vaguely grasped); a feminist critique of those 1960s girls in lit-
tle skirts who tended to show up in Archigram’s montages.
Sadler explores interestingly the deliberate and consequential engage-
ment of Archigram with disgruntled students, and the emergence of the
Architectural Association school as a key vector of propagation of adaptive
architecture up to the present. He also explores the moment in the late
1960s when it all went wrong, as the antiwar movement shaded into anti-
technology and Archigram found themselves branded as technocrats—a
sad conjunction when much that was most valuable about the 1960s mis-
takenly got the boot for the rightest of reasons.

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My one frustration with this book is that Sadler contextualizes Archi-

gram so well that he never takes a position himself. Archigram said they
wanted to make a revolution in the built environment; others saw them as
sexist technocrats. But what is Sadler’s evaluation? I don’t know. I think we
should take Archigram and their adaptive architecture very seriously. Now
we could build what they imagined.
ANDREW PICKERING
Dr. Pickering is professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He
is writing a book on the history of cybernetics in Britain.

Chicago Architecture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives.

Edited by Charles Waldheim and Katerina Rüedi Ray. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xxiii+488. $40.

Twenty-eight essays and more than 300 illustrations in Chicago Architec-

ture: Histories, Revisions, Alternatives provide the reader with a wide array
of representations of the city and its built environment. Seven of the essays
were published elsewhere between 1984 and 2003, but, with two exceptions,
have been revised for inclusion here. While many essays do not relate sig-
nificantly to the history of technology, most convey an understanding of
the interconnections among technology, design, politics, finance, and social
concerns. In Richard Solomon’s words in the foreword, Chicago’s dyna-
mism is evident in its architecture, “an architecture that cannot be sepa-
rated from the social and cultural context—from the power matrix—in
which it is embedded” (p. viii).
This dynamism is the book’s chief strength and also its main weakness:
the shifting and divergent views range from personal reminiscences to
thorough scholarship, from visual urban portraits to a one-man play. The
lengths of the essays vary, as do the authors’ writing styles and abilities, re-
sulting in an uneven treatment of diverse topics. This ungainliness, partly
due to the effort by the editors to break “the spell of the past,” has a certain
appeal. Five essays directly address issues of racism, sexism, and homopho-
bia in the history of Chicago’s built environment, part of a deliberate effort
“to counter Chicago’s current conservative architectural culture” (p. xiii).
Refreshing angles and new material promise to invigorate subsequent
scholarship on Chicago.
The editors assert that “no single city has played such a pivotal role in
the history of modern architecture as Chicago,” noting that SHOT’s own
Carl Condit (1914–1997) was a key shaper of that history. Condit himself
moved away from his 1952 and 1964 interpretations of Chicago’s architec-
tural history, revising his own work in the 1970s. But this volume vigor-
ously engages mid-century scholarship by Condit, as well as Lewis Mum-

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