Many of the visionary objectives of the 1960’s counter-cultural group Archigram neither began nor ended with the formation and dissolution of its membership and its brief stint of kitchen-counter publications. Presenting a mélange of ideas based in architecture, technology and urbanism through a lens of popular culture, Archigram’s proposals were based in a network of influences which continued to develop, with or without the group’s direct influence, into London’s rise into cultural prominence. This course focuses on
Archigram through contemporary London and London through Archigram’s visions. This will entail the construction of a network of influences, in concept paralleling the invasive and often subversive infrastructures proposed by Archigram itself. Through a series of readings, presentations and discussions, we will weave together a series of these networks—from relationships to urban infrastructures, especially transportation and communication technologies, to precedents in Victorian engineering, to influences of
Gothic literature and 60’s science fiction, to ideas of event and happening, to other radical movements contemporary to Archigram’s rise and demise, especially Superstudio and Archizoom in Italy and the Situationists in Paris.

Coming into the present day, Archigram prophesied, to an uncanny degree, the extensive use of technologies that are environmental, or based in information and communication, and mass fabrication in
new materials of organic or plastic characteristics. Certainly the unconventional, exaggerated technologies so much a vehicle of Archigram’s rhetorical mission have also re-emerged repeatedly in the built work of the British Hi-Tech in the last 40 years. Here a small group of architects have dominated London’s architectural scene, to an extent without parallel in the order of world cities, and have continued an allegiance to
advanced technology which has seduced, provoked and bewildered audiences of every type. As a method of applied study, this course delves deeply into the particular siting of Archigram’s influence with the British Hi-Tech, studying effects wrought as visionary architecture is made tangible, probing into actual technologies of contemporary buildings as well as the thinking behind their various excesses. Though employing case study methodology, the course contextualizes examples with Archigram’s visionary
objectives and the often non-causal manifestation of these in contemporary architecture and urbanism. The coincidence of the technological with the visionary is explored extensively—another dimension re-emerging profoundly in the most recent of architectural speculations.