Enviro-Pill | Project author: Ron Herron, 1969
Speculative proposal for a pill for inducing architecture or virtual and imaginary environments in the mind.
Plug-In Mews | Project author: Peter Cook, 1965
Speculative and realistic design for the transition from an existing urban plan towards a Plug-In City.
Promotional Event Kit | Project authors: Ron Herron & Barry Snowden, 1970
Speculative design for a reconfigurable kit-of-parts exhibition and media display environment.
Manzak | Project authors: Warren Chalk and Ron Herron, 1969
Speculative design for remote controlled audio-visual entertainments robot.
Bournemouth Steps | 1970
Project authors: Ken Allinson, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, Colin Fournier, Margaret Helfand, Ron Herron, Diana Jowsey and Bobby Wilson.
Speculative partner to Monte Carlo scheme using ‘expressionist games, purged’ from the ‘real’ design in proposal for entertainments/park facilities in Bournemouth, Dorset.
Family Dwelling (Cage Structure System) | Project author: Peter Cook, 1966
Speculative design for ‘Family Cage’; family-sized dwelling units (can be combined with one- or two-person units of Hornsey Housing Study) as part of plug-in housing development.
Underwater City Project | Project author Warren Chalk, 1964
Speculative proposal for an underwater city based on NASA space technology.
(Images used with express permission from EXP University of Westminister. © Archigram.)
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The other evening I stumbled upon the Archigram Archival Project and spent several hours tripping through this remarkable resource. The project makes the work of the seminal architectural group Archigram available for public viewing and academic study. The project is run by a team from EXP, an architectural research group at the University of Westminster. (Collaborative help was kindly provided by the surviving members of Archigram or their heirs who retain copyright of all images.) Offering hundreds of illustrations, I have barely scratched the surface of the archives and shall be returning many times to these vivid imaginings.
Archigram was an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s—based at the Architectural Association, London—that was futurist, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist, drawing inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was solely expressed through hypothetical projects. Committed to a ‘high tech’, light weight, infra-structural approach that was focused towards survival technology, the group experimented with modular technology, mobility through the environment, space capsules and mass-consumer imagery. Their works offered a seductive vision of a glamorous future machine age; however, social and environmental issues were left unaddressed.
Archigram agitated to prevent modernism from becoming a sterile and safe orthodoxy by its adherents. Unlike ephemeralisation from Buckminster Fuller which assumes more must be done with less material (because material is finite), Archigram relies on a future of interminable resources.
The works of Archigram had a Futurist slant being influenced by Antonio Sant’Elia’s works. Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman were also important sources of inspiration.
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Sandi Vincent grew up in the bay area of California surrounded by mid-century modern architecture and other influences responsible for her affinity for the period and its pop style, including her early exposure to The Monkees, The Avengers and Gerald McBoing-Boing. Sandi now resides in Portland and is a board member of a local nonprofit preservation group, the Mid-Century Modern League. In her day job at a community foundation, she sports the web/social media/print materials coordinator title.
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So fresh and contemporary. Beautiful post!
it’s amazing!! love this post..