As our part 25th anniversary ceremonyWe are re -publishing the stories of formative magazine before our website is launched. The story appeared in the first Dwel’s July/August 2006 issue.
“In science fiction We dig information about the prediction about geodesic net, pneumatic tubes and plastic domes and bubbles …. Our document is space comic; Its reality is in the gestures, design and natural style of new hardware for our decade.
These words are part of editorial Arcigram 3 And 4 ,
Influenced by Roeling movements in art, media, politics and technology, they had the name and group identity that takes into account the rock band instead of architecture firms: metabolics, superstudio, ant farm and arcizom. Instead of designing buildings, they made fantasy utopia more often, Whole city What was never made on paper, but who encouraged an entire generation and encouraged the wholesale revaluation of the built atmosphere.
From different methods and through different media – from Gonzo graphics to film art – many of them discovered the impact of new materials, production processes and auto and aeronautical industries and mobile lifestyle promised by aeronautical industries and information technology. “They were all dealt with in various ways of communication,” says David Erdman, a cofounder of design collaborators Saro. “And they were developing new languages ​​of architecture which dealt with the new things involved in it.”
Analyze and criticize Corporate modernism And more rationalist urban planning of that period, these architects captured the irony and intellect to make their point. “It was a success moment when the explosion of new materials and radical lifestyle was running a vision of architecture that was unclearly nomadic and not oriented towards the acquisition of property,” Craig Hodgets, Architects, Professors of Architecture, and Ant Farm Group say long -term friends. “The ideal was not the luxury bath we see today, but the bathroom of the airplane.”
These colleges introduced “whispers and content and insiatons and irony back in architecture,” Stephen Novel, “Stephen Novel, Director of Williamson Gallery at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. “At that time it was almost sacred that they would do so. But this creative rebellion is one of the most important things you can teach in a design school.” Many travel movements have been performed in these counter movements in recent years, in which many travel performances and academics perform weighty scholarships at their work.
The most influential and productive was collective, Archigram, the largest of the hypocritical groups. Its member (Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crumpton, David Green, Ron Heron, and Mike Web) created a stunning 900 paintings of pen-end-ink and collided paintings between 1961 and 1974. Six met at the end of 5OS, holding day jobs in a large construction firm in London. On their nights, however, capsules home, plug-in city, and The Walking City, were spent with fictional, mobile, a fever with a temporary environment with electronic age names such as a megastructure, which could drop on the ground like a huge robotic animal.
He published his projects with essays and poems and work of other designers, whom he considered a cocorator against the establishment, he collided together in nine issues of an underground magazine. ArcigramThe first was published in May 1961.
Today, the cook clearly explains the goal of the group: “We wanted to keep the jap back into architecture.” Archigram, he says, was inspired by a passion for technology and art, while some other groups were inspired by politics. “Three out of six of us went to the art school before the architecture school,” Cook. “We were mixed with all art students. Our women were art students. I cannot speak for Italians, they always have political layering that doesn’t interested me.”
Politics was central for groups such as Ant Farms and Superstudio, however, when students around the world were in rebellion. Architecture Grade Chip Lord, Dug Mitchells, and Curtis Shreyar established Ant Farm at a time and place for rebellion in 1968. “Year L. Graduates had time for the Antiver Movement, so we adopted a form as a completely fanaticism,” Lord. “Initially we were a kind of commune, and people came and left, such as a lot of bands, The Greatful Dead or Jefferson airplanes.”
Meanwhile, Florence, Italy, Superstudio, an Italian gang of five- Adolfo Natalini, Cristiano Toraldo Drya, Alesandro and Roberto Magris, and Gian Pierro Fracinelli- dismissed the optimistic approach to technology’s ability to improve the world. Instead, he attacked architecture and politics with ironic comments in the form of photos Montaz, sketches and storyboards to increase the world’s social and environmental problems. What he created is called “negative utopias”, a house for a “antidice” culture in which all will be given a sparse but functional location, free from magnificent objects.
Despite the frantic force and immense enthusiasm, with which these groups gave their messages of architectural rebellion, ’60s and 70s radical architects gradually pulled out with a decade of oil crisis, repetition, and a decade of kitschi postmordern architecture.
Some fans of these counterials architects wonder where bigotry is today. It may have reduced because these groups came to visit or because it is no longer clear who is the opponent. “Popular political topics today are less clear and very broad and more fine,” says Edman of Saro. The Ant form connects the Lord of the form, “the new generation has several more options to define an architectural practice,” referring to multi -kolkas non -Hirassic firms today. He says that designed possibilities for the building have exploded: “Today there is more access to various styles, and more technical freedom.”
On the other hand, some say that the architects who question the basic principles of the design and society have not disappeared at all, they have only transformed. Radicalism involvement, not in the paper utopia but in real buildings, by a new generation calm revolutionaries. “Today’s Counteracture Architects,” Novel of Williamson Gallery of Art Center says, “They are really searching Green architecture And fundamentalist new ways we give ourselves shelter in new situations. They are challenging relationships with the entire machinery about how architecture becomes. “You won’t see fantastic pictures of fantasy techno-wisdom cities, such as Archigram, or poetic images criticize civilization like a superstudo, or a piece of demonet performance like Ant Farm.” This is not a different sensation.
