On the “Archigram-What-Organisation-You-Must-Be-Joking-Mate”
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Management, Strategic Design, Architecture, Organisation, Design

The bare facts are these. Six youngish men come together in various flats in Hampstead, London, in the early 1960s. They produce a magazine-like publication Archigram, that lasted from 1961 to 1970 (roughly), and the firm that had grown out of it, Archigram Architects, lasts until 1975. 900 drawings are produced along the way, yet assessed In terms of built projects they produce only a playground in Milton Keynes and a swimming pool for Rod Stewart. If that. And yet they influence architecture profoundly. Their work is the thing, and should be pored over time and time again (see refs. below), but the question here is whether their organisational structure aided this extraordinary state of affairs.

The ‘rock group’ motif attached to Archigram is a little overplayed — generally the analogy goes they were “the Beatles of architecture”, a lazy comparison based around their perceived insouciance, iconoclasm and psychedelic visuals, exploding out of a then-stuffy trade. “A necessary irritant” as Barry Curtis called them. Firstly, they were of course far better than the wildly overrated Beatles. (Even musically: in the retrospective at the Design Museum a few years ago, the visitor was confronted with The Yes Album playing, from a messy mock-up of their studio, but it really should’ve been Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.)

Secondly, the key point of difference is that they heavily influenced without making buildings. Could a band influence as much without releasing a record? In this, they were part of a tradition of un-built but visionary work that makes architecture and urbanism almost unique in design practice. So what set them apart was the publishing.

That espoused a take on modernism informed by a generally positive reaction to the technology and media that had which emerged, with necessary inventiveness, from WWII, a conflict that was still front of most people’s minds, self-evident in the shattered cities around them. This optimism and invention is then allied to the ‘post-scarcity’ culture that emerges in the late-’50s, as they cut and paste the space race onto colour telly and pop-art and planned obsolescence, spray-painting structural engineering with beat poetry and Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat of technology’, fusing Monty Python montage into avant-garde internationalist happenings in, wait for it, Folkestone. In pursuing the unbuilt, ephemeral, temporary and informational, they are precursors for a version of the 21st century (at least the one unaffected by peak oil).

Their proposals for Instant, Walking or Plug-In Cities, Suitaloons and Living Pods, were radical, fluid, malleable, intimate and transient:

“tune up, clip on, plug in” into “rooms (that) expand infinitely. Our walls dissolve into impermeable mists or into the imagery of stories and fables …”.

Yet their own structure remained relatively solid. If not the band, the architectural practice was essentially their recognisable model, though that is usually just as rife with splits, egos, and partners flouncing out over non-musical differences. There seems to have been little of that in Archigram’s dissolution. Only that a large scheme in Monte Carlo fell through, and their fabric couldn’t stretch over the distance from Folkestone to Los Angeles, which is a long way geographically but even further culturally.