Quotes by Archigram

Archigram office in 1972

“ The happenings within spaces in the city, the transient throw-away objects, the passing presence of cars and people are as important, possibly more important in determining our whole future attitude to the visualization and realization of city”

- Warren Chalk (Archigram member)

“We are in pursuits of an idea, a new vernacular, something to stand alongside the space capsules, computers and throw-away packages of an atomic/ electronic age”

- Warren Chalk (Archigram member)

“…somebody once said to me, ‘Don’t you want to see it built, don’t you want to be an architect?’ To my mind, the assumptions behind these questions betray a misunderstanding as to what the work of Archigram represents. A misreading of it as a set of proposals, a set of windows through which to see a ‘new world’, is only a rather pathetic regurgitation of the dogma which asserts that architectural drawings are representations of something that wishes to become."

-David Greene (Archigram member)

“ The rounded corners, the hip, gay, synthetic colors pop-culture props all combine to suggest an architecture of plastic, steel and aluminium, the juke boz and neon- lit street, the way a city environment should be”       

- Archigram

The diagonal, “ is not only a product of current engineering experimental preference, but implies a purpose of the structure that is new to buildings: To provide an umbrella whithin which growth and change can take place”

-Archigram

“The fundamental characteristics of futuristic architecture will be expendability and transience. Our house will last less time than we do, every generation must make its own city”

- Archigram

“ Almost without realizing it, we have absorbed into our lives the first generation of expendables… food bags  paper tissues, polythene wrappers, ballpens, e.p’s … We throw them away almost as soon as we acquire them. … Every level of society and with every level of commodity, the unchanging scene is being replaced by the increase in change of our user-habitats— and thereby, eventually, our user-habitats"

- Archigram