Death by Architecture

May 8 1975. 5pm

The biggest audience for a lecture at the AA for a long time. There must be 300 people trying to get in, filling the hall, blocking the stairs, spilling out onto the pavement. The event is the tenth anniversary performance of the Archigram Opera. Nearly all the Archigram principals are there, together with an epic load of audio-visual aids. The opera, a production that had once seemed extravagant when it used two slide projects, now boasts a tower of stacked tables and a battery of six or eight, plus tape players, mixers and king-size speaker cabinets, all focused on a long, draped, curving, pinned-back roll of uncut newsprint serving as a giant screen.

In front of the screen stands the late Warren Chalk (ex-Manchester School of Art and LCC architects’ department), he has 40 cigarettes and a box of matches in his hand. Behind the projectors stands Dennis Crompton (also ex-Manchester and LCC) ready for a hard slog. Deep in one wing of the hall, wearing a polka dot shirt, is Peter Cook (Bournemouth and Taylor Woodrow). Somewhere else in the background is the late Ron Herron (Northern Polytechnic and the LCC), and somewhere else altogether are David Greene (Nottingham and Cubitt), and Michael Webb (Northern Polytechnic and the Rhode Island School of Design). It is 14 years since the group first came together on the stapled page of the student leaflet “Archigram: paper one”. By now they are old hands at operas. Shortly after five o’clock an expectant hush descends and Warren Chalk steps forward.

“I suppose I am the oldest member of the group,” he begins truthfully, “and I’m going to introduced all this stuff because otherwise it will take hours and…”

He gets no further because Pink Floyd breaks in, louder and with better sound quality than Archigram has ever dared use before. Then the lights dim and the paper screen erupts into images of team Archigram at work and play. Then appears the junior team – Colin Fournier, Ken Allinson, Tony Rickaby, Bernard Tschumi and others. Then their chosen precursors and heroes: Bucky Fuller, Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Charles and Ray Eames and others. All the Archigram principals have had themselves photographed in the style of album covers: one is out in the Mojave desert in Western boots; another on the Las Vegas strip; a third astride a motorbike; a fourth in close-up sports aviator shades.

The rock music gives way to Also sprach Zarathustra and a salvo of Modern Movement standards is fired at the screen. There are buildings by Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Mendelsohn, Scharoun, the Taut brothers, projects by Russian Constructivists, shots from the International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture, held in Folkestone in 1966, shots taken at the ICA. Then a slide saying “BUT WE TURNED ELSEWHERE”.

At this steel bands break in followed by even louder heavy metal. There are more and more slides of zeppelins, submarines, spacecraft, molecular structures, transistors, computers and fashion girls, all mixed in with snatches of NASA dialogue. Then the covers of successive issues of Archigram magazine flash up, with the projects that were illustrated there first. The famous Walking City, the famous Plug-in City, the Weekend Telegraph “1990 Room set” and more, like the Cushicle, the Suitaloon, Rokplugs and Logplugs and Nick Grimshaw’s university diploma project (carefully labelled “Newcomer”). Then another subtitle slide hits the screen: “MACHINE MONSTER WORRY? THEN PACKAGE IT!” What does that mean? It is too late to find out, as motorised tents, pods and capsules, and subliminal messages “ARCHIGRAM!” flash and bang remorselessly. One useful epigram advises: “IN OXFORD STREET THE ARCHITECTURE IS NO MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE RAIN.”

I t is impossible to take notes after 10 or 20 minutes. The noise, the people, the agony, the ecstasy, the overwhelming impression. The heat. It is a solid hour before the slides and music let up and an intermission is called. The silence is deafening. Immediately curtains are torn open by half-suffocated fans who lean out of windows, gasping for air. But few dare leave their seats entirely, even for long enough to get a drink from the bar. There must still be a hundred standees hanging about. Peter Cook, a bunch of Magic Markers in his hand, is circulating through the audience like an old pro, fielding questions about this and that and the fate of the Archigram project office – an enterprise whose future is considered to be as much in doubt as the rest of Western capitalism.

“We thought about closing it down but we decided, what the hell, we’ve been going this long, we might as well keep going,” he replies disarmingly.

Part Two
In addition to music and slides, part two of the opera offers a star speaker, Peter Cook himself, the only real performer in the group. He comes on to the strains of Delius. “Yes, Delius,” he intones after a few bars. “It never has a theme that develops anywhere: it just goes on and on. Perhaps sickening. Who knows?”

This whimsical change of mood indicates that the interval has been well paced, for it is time for the second strain of Archigram to come to the fore. There will be no more blowtorch engineering or modern masters. Archigram has been outside the air-raid shelter of art history for long enough. Now it is time for eternal values and conceptual architecture. For just as old Archigram was to Zoom, so will new Archigram be to the gallery circuit.

Conceptual architecture, the architecture that would-be real world designers do when they admit to themselves that their drawings will never get them into business; that intercourse with space comics and techno magazines will produce no live offspring, and that the distance from Jules Verne’s fictional Captain Nemo to the real-life commander of the USS Natilus (the world’s first nuclear submarine) is so immense that it is not even worth attempting to bridge it.

“This is a bland piece of land,” Cook explains of a slide of a field he is sketching over with one of his pens as the strains of Delius begin to fade. “But sneakily something happens [next slide] and it is interrupted by a crevice [next slide]. Sudden elegance in the crevice, then the land continues [next slide]. Such paradoxes are the milk from which one draws… the beginnings of an orchard. Then the orchard becomes [next slide], dare one suggest it? A kind of megastructure manqué [next slide], in this case… mechanical trees. A structure. One couldn’t resist quirking the plan even before one began [next slide] cancerously adding the lumpen stuff to it. The tactile quality of satin… The cream as it folds. This is beyond architecture, honestly it is…”

And so it continues. By 8pm the opera has been running for three hours and there are still 40 or 50 people who have been standing since the beginning. Cook has been speaking for two hours and showing no signs of tiredness. The paper screen is in shreds, multicolour sketched to pieces. “Archigram,” Cook concludes, to the accompaniment of a jolly piece of Haydn, “went through two stages of development. First there were the mechanisms, and second this architecture of the thing to be so far beyond one’s experience of other objects as to be something else again.”

How right he was in 1975. For Archigram has been a phenomenon twice. The “mechanisms” were the triumph of the early phase. David Greene’s Cushicle (a combination house and vehicle), and his Suitaloon (a combination suit and dwelling) were magnificent concepts, occupying that middle ground between product and building that remains unoccupied to this day, except by those unsung long-distance truck drivers who sleep above their cabs. In the 1995 catalogue for this show there was a black and white photograph of what looked like a mock-up of the Cushicle in a studio somewhere in Rhode Island. It was an incredible image. It looked like nothing so much as one of those last-ditch Nazi rocket planes designed to run on bicarbonate of soda. But there it stayed, a mock-up. Nobody ever made the Cushicle work. It would have required a hundred thousand design hours, like a new Japanese car. Couldn’t do that in architecture then, can’t do it in architecture now.

Archigram’s second phenomenon was as architectural art. Their drawings and renderings sold. They were bought into the Gelman collection. They are exhibited in galleries. It is crazy to say that Archigram never did anything. They did so much it takes hours just to look at it all. They drew the wholesale application of aerospace, automobile and consumer technology to architecture, but they didn’t gobble up architecture: architecture gobbled them up instead.

Martin Pawley
Blueprint January 1998, pp. 22-24




Arena performance transcript

TIME VOICE

00.00 MARK

01.19 PHASE ONE

02.19 With "The Beat Goes On" we can look retrospectively at the four phases of Archigram work and Archigram statements. In the first phase which corresponds with the issues of the magazine, number 1 and number 2 between 1961 and 1962, there was a general feeling of frustration on the English scene, particularly for young architects. This expressed itself in Archigram 1 as a series of very
2.59 wild statements that very few people wished to listen to.


03.25 The history of architectural discussion has very much been the question of heroes and villains. The idea of heroical statements, rhetorical statements and the whole tradition of making gestures in order to overthrow the thing that has gone before, probably stood for Archigram 1 as much as anything else. The whole business of having our own icons which contradicted quite directly the icons of the previous generation and yet at the same time gave a very direct impetus by imagery, by statement, by ideals for the new thing that we all felt must come although none of us could really put a word to it, or put an image to it at that time. So Archigram 1 very much consisted of illustrations that took new forms, new shapes, concerned with connectivity, with flow and form. In fact the whole Archigram 1 period was very much concerned with a new kind of formalism. Some people have traced this in its origins to things like Gaudi, to exploiting techniques such as ferro cemento to simply fighting your way out of a very sterile thing – if you look at the majority of office blocks and similar things that were going up in London at the time. And so Archigram 2, although it began to spread out from this, was still a question of making formal solutions
05.08 to new problems.


05.40 Nothing much like this had ever been seen before because at around the end of 1962, not only the group of David Greene, Mike Webb and Peter Cook who started Archigram, but the other group, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton and Warren Chalk, working at that time at the London County Council, were also beginning to make buildings nothing like which had ever been quite seen before – and I think this whole early period was, although originally a sort of formal search for way-out, was also concerned with the imagery of heroism, the imagery that could perhaps help this rhetoric along. In fact, I think that the first period of Archigram was tremendously
06.31 helped along by the new imagery.


06.49 The things that we liked and the things that we definitely didn't like could all be traced in this type of love/hate, new/old, good/bad way and even at the next phase this heroes and villains thing began to
07.09 beak down.


07.11 PHASE TWO


07.30 A practical expression of phase two was taking a very good look outside the straight jacket of architecture, particularly things mechanical, things that had been invented, the new technologies formed a catalyst for the second phase work. In this breaking out from underneath the big wadge of architectural tradition, in breaking out and finding a new imagery to go with the second phase, Archigram 3 and Archigram 4 which were produced in 1962-1963 period, were very much concerned with the problem of finding a completely new kind of architecture that was as sensible, basically,
08.26 as the new technologies.


08.38 This Jefferson Aeroplane tack is called "Three Fifths of a Mile in Ten Seconds". I think it summarises a beginning of a new attitude to the problem of architecture and what it's meant to be doing, the idea of specification rather than formalisation was very much behind the beginning of what are known as Archigram Group Projects. Also, the same instinct goes behind the scene of Archigram 3. This theme was the expendable building, the throwaway building, and we said that we are coming much more used to the idea of changing a piece of clothing year by year rather than expecting to hang on to it for several years, similarly the idea of keeping a piece of furniture long enough to be able to hand it on to your children is increasingly ridiculous. In this situation, we should not be surprised if such articles wear out within their welcomed life span, rather than their traditional life span. But there seems to be a mental blockage when we talk about buildings. Perhaps it will not be until such things as housing, amenity place and work place also become recognised as consumer products that can be bought off the peg with all that implies, industrialised and throw-away. The idea of the non-permanent building at the moment has bad overtones but ultimately they must come otherwise buildings are just masquerading as
10.31 monuments.


13.23 In Archigram 4 the inspiration came from another quarter. There seemed to be a connecting link between the German expressionists and the Italian futurists of 40 years back and he tradition of the space comic. in fact a lot of the really exciting objectives that these early people have had were only carried through in such things as space comics. The other interesting thing is the accelerating connection between science fiction and science fact and so once again we could point to real examples off rhetorical examples that seems to suggest that the architecture that we are all familiar with
14.11 was missing the point.


15.39 A respectful salute in the general direction of Roy Liechtenstein and we're off – Zoom Archigram goes into orbit with the Space Comic/ Science Fiction Bit.


15.48 Interesting is the fact that these goodies produced outside the conventional closed architect/aesthete situation show a marked intuitive grasp of principles underlying current in-thinking. Which is great....


16.00 The search for radical valid images of cities goes on – leads in many directions. The Space Comic universe great in its complexity is just one such direction, which can inspire and encourage the emergence of more courageous concepts.


16.26 Only those imbued with respect and enthusiasm for today's wish-dreams can adequately interpret them into the built environment. Recurrent theme in Space Comic universe is mobile computer 'Brain' and flexing tentacles.


17.06 These Space Comic cities reflect without conscious intention certain overtones of meaning – illuminate an area of opinion that seeks the breakdown of conventional attitudes, the disruption of the 'straight-up-and-down' formal vacuum – necessary to create a more dynamic environment.


17.43 Close examination of Space Comic material reveals a two-way exchange between Space Comic imagery and the more advanced 'real' concepts and prophesies – Geodesic nets, pneumatic tubes, plastic domes and bubbles – the world of the thinks-balloon and the inventor's pad overlap


18.01 A bold intuitive gesture that eludes rationalisation, the strip cartoon kick provides a visual jump-off point – a mental zoom boost – enables us to push aside architectural waste-matter so that reality
18.14 may emerge.



19.13 PHASE THREE


19.56 The next Archigram, Number Five, dealt with the whole idea of metropolis. Whether there were ways of bringing the whole city together as a single building, whether there were ways of structuring it by megastructures, infrastructures, or patterns of connection. The next Archigram after this, Number Six, also took a look back at a previous period which is normally disregarded, that of the 1940's, and then looked in the other direction, particularly towards pneumatic structures in an area where a completely new technology seemed to make an expendable, immediate building
20.48 form which was at the same time cheap.


20.59 This Vanilla Fudge record is called "People Get Ready" and I think we were getting ready ourselves for another phase. We had done the Plug-In City, the Computer City, the Walking City projects, the various kinds of industrially designed capsule homes seemed to suggest that the idea of the throw-away building could be compatible with some kind of large organisation or marketable
21.40 product.

21.44 Later on, the idea of the complete set the home or the house or the city was to disintegrate. But for the moment we seem to be bringing together a whole lot of thinking about the new technologies and
22.11 some, to us anyway, some straightforward design solutions.


26.21 The whole range of technologies began to come together. In projects like the Plug-In City, the Gasket House and Mike Webb's various projects, were assemblies where the car and the home weren't two completely different kinds of things but in fact a continuous state with moveable, flexible and interrelated parts. Later on, in phase four, this was to lead into quite a different kind of objective – in fact no objective. The whole idea of the house, the car as opposed to the house, the route system and the suit of clothing were to gradually merge together, and to disintegrate as separated
27.07 things.



27.21 Architecture is probably a hoax, a fantasy world brought about through a desire to locate, absorb and integrate into an overall obsession a self-interpretation of the everyday world around us. An impossible attempt to rationalise the irrational. It is difficult to be exact about influences, but those influences that enter our unconscious consciousness are what I call ‘ghosts’.
Our lives exist within a complex web of these influences; which we either accept or reject; those we find acceptable are turned to advantage; they become our preoccupations, prejudices or preconceptions. Systematic analysis is such a preconception.
Ghosts help to reinforce and establish attitudes, to build a very personal language, a complex labyrinth of ideals, constraints, theories, half-remembered rules, symbols and words that, ultimately digested, affect our concepts. It is unpopular, but essential, that existing attitudes come in for constant and rigorous renewal or reappraisal. We are confronted with a dynamic shifting pattern of events at both popular and intellectual levels, both simulating and confusing. In this ever-changing climate, old ghosts may be cast out and replaced by new: it is right that influences should last only as long as they are useful to us, and our architecture should reflect this. At a general level it is becoming increasingly apparent that due to historical circumstances the more tangible ghosts of the past – those grim, humourless, static, literary or visual images – will succumb to the onslaught of the invisible media, the psychedelic
28.14 vision; the insight accompanying a joke; the phantoms of the future.



29.35 PHASE FOUR


29.50 If one had to find a general word which describes the projects illustrated in Archigram 7 and Archigram 8 one might describe them as hybrids, not only in their form or organisation, what they looked like, what they appeared to be, but in the fact that they are deliberately overlays of a whole lot of different systems and mechanisms but in order to survive and in order to capitalise the kinds of facilities that we need we don't want a single kind of machine or environment or dwelling or whatever. in this way in the seven years the discussion has shifted, first from a search for form to the throwaway building, from this to the notion of the all happening city. And from this inevitably to the question of whether there will be a building as such at all. In Archigram 7 the notion of assemblies or programmes of designed objects was beginning to loosen up so that it is no surprise to us that Archigram 8 is entirely concerned with the problem of direct personal provision – of comfort, facility, satisfaction, enquiry. Above all the effect of all kind of phenomena upon each other. In the last few months we have, for the moment, used a check list, the ideas of metamorphosis, the nomad, the polemic set-up by hardware and software and the idea of exchange and response between one facility and the person who uses it or any number of facilities with each other. And not to be forgotten, the need for comfort, the need for support. And in the recent work on the Milan Triennale, once again discussing the idea of the commodity,
32.17 the popular pak.

37.00 My name is Norman Jones. I am thirty eight. Until recently I was employed as a clerk in a shipping department of a firm manufacturing rubber goods. I must confess I hated the work. I only took the job because my father said it would be a nice and steady source of income and there was a pension at the end of it and it would be a way of supporting Dorris and the kids.
37.26 I would rush home in the evenings, give Dorris a peck on tthe cheek and dash upstairs to our attic where I had a double-O-scale part of the Union Pacific Railroad as it wended its way through the Rockies – six Alcoa hoods, four J1 Pacifics, twelve Auto racks and two TRF piggie-back flat cars.
37.48 But then "Dreams Come True" came into my humdrum little life. I could begin to live and for the first time to live, to live. How wonderful is lumo-daeanescent living. I'm getting interested in all sorts of things I never dreamt existed before.
38.12 Here I lie in my Orandic Speoda with a chorus of heavily sounds above me. High above me, up in the ionosphere. High, high above. Floating, floating in one of the three giant service domes, each six miles across with floating doh and tentacle servicing across the
38.46 green landscape.

39.47 Norman Jones chose for himself and his family a new life from among our range off life options. He is now a new man and has understood the preciousness of life.
40.09 I hope we have helped him to understand what sort of person he really was and how many of our worries in the straight world are caused by systems and institutions that have a crushing disregard for human beings.
Existing is the machinery ready to make a wonderful new life for everybody.
We understand no edges between systems.
Dream and it shall come true.
This is Buzz Altenbrunner.
40.30 Goodnight.

42.14 The boundaries are down. There's a marvellous sense of relief and
42.21 we are once again out on an exploration.

44.25 END

Archigram