The Nature of Things

    Many new technologies were invented around the 1960's. These inventions fundamentally restructured everyday life and informed Archigram's vision of future society. As far as inventions go, the 1960s was the most revolutionary decade in human history.

1954

• Oral contraceptives- the pill- invented
• The first nonstick teflon pan produced.
• The solar cell invented by Gerald Pearson, Calvin Fuller and Daryl Chapin,
• Ray Kroc started McDonalds.

• 1955

• Tetracycline Invented
• Optic fibreinvented.

1956

• The first computer hard disk used.
• The hovercraft invented by Christopher Cockerell.
• Bette Nesmith Graham invented "Mistake Out," later renamed liquid paper

1957- First Artificial Satellite in Orbit

• Fortran (computer language) invented.

1958

• Computer Modem invented
• Laser invented by Gordon Gould
• Hula Hoop invented. Becomes a 'fad'.
• Integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce.

1959- First Unmanned Moon Landing

• The internal pacemaker invented by Wilson Greatbatch.
• Barbie Doll invented.
• Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce both invent the microchip

1960- First Successful Weather Satellite Launch

• The halogen lamp invented.
• Etch-a-sketch invented

1961- First Manned Space Flight

• Valium invented.
• The nondairy creamer invented.
• First industrial robotic arm, the Unimate

1962

• The audio casette invented.
• The fiber-tip pen invented by Yukio Horie.
• Spacewar, the first computer video game invented.
• Dow Corp invents silicone breast implants.

1963

• The video disk invented.
• Zip codes invented
• Lava lamps invented

1964

• Acrylic paint invented.
• Permanent-press fabric invented.
• BASIC (an early computer language) is invented by John George Kemeny and Tom Kurtz.

1965

• Astroturf invented.
• Soft Contact lenses invented.
• NutraSweet invented.
• The compact disk invented by James Russell.
• Kevlar invented by Stephanie Louise Kwolek.

1966

• Electronic Fuel injection for cars invented.

1967

• The first handheld calculator invented.

1968

• The computer mouse invented by Douglas Engelbart.
• The first computer with integrated circuits made.
• RAM (random access memory) invented by Rober Dennard
• Waterbed invented

1969- First Moon Landing

• The arpnet (first internet) invented.
• The artificial hearing aid invented.
• The ATM invented.
• The taser invented
• The barcode scanner is invented.
• First supersonic flight

Space Age: Man on the Move

    In the UK of the 1950-1960's, technology and population were booming. Unemployment was low- around 3%. Between 1947 and 1957, employment of married women jumped from 18% to 50% and continued to rise. Disposable income increased due to lower taxes. Emigration and use of commuter systems was high. Migration represented the presence of work and promise of progress. A fundamental aspect of modern lifestyle in 1960's Britain, mobility  inevitably forms the basis for Archigram's design work.

  
   According to the UN archives, the 1950-1960 period, the United Kingdom experienced a net emigration of 540 thousand people, the ninth most in the world. Mobility was a major aspect of British life. Even Michael Webb moved to America. 

    This diagram is a record of train system use within the UK.

   Between 1950 and 1960's, the UK had a net emmigration of half a million, much of which was for work in America, meaning fewer commuters. Concerning more recent statistics, the number of people present to accumulate miles is constantly increasing through natural growth. Usage is measured as a total and considering the fluctuating population, usage of trains by the individual in the 1960s was very high. Considering unemployment was at low, we can assume a significant proportion of this usage was for commuters.

Archigram: The New Generation

 

       
   An architectural group of students and office assistants formed, Archigram, a magazine based in London in 1960s. Bored of what was being built at the time, Peter Cook and David Greene meet up with Michael Webb, who was working on his fourth year project, Furniture Manufacturers Association Headquarters to escape the boredom of London by writing letters to the press, creating projects to submit for competitions, and to criticize current projects. As more people joined each of these meetings, they started to discuss the possibility of publications since British magazines during the time did not publish any student work. The name Archigram came from the idea of communication. Therefore, similar to the word telegram, the magazine was named archi(tecture)-gram. The group all came from different schools giving the magazine an interesting lead. The first publication of the magazine in 1961 included a poem by David Greene explaining the physical and conceptual barriers of form and expression in the built environment. By the second magazine in 1962, Dennis Crompton, Warren Chalk and Ron Herron, who were already working at the London County Council's architects department, were invited to join the magazine. As Peter Cook wrote in the comic strip below, he, Webb, and Greene were “in awe of Ron, Warren, and Dennis” since they already had the experience of building. In 1963, the group of six worked together on an exhibition, “Living City”.

 

   At the Institute of Contemporary Art and from then the name Archigram stuck to the group. Starting with Mike Webb’s creation of interesting space cities, many of the group’s projects drew ideas of technology from the ‘Space Race’. They challenged what the habitation of the future would be like with the digital information and increase in consumerism in their famous projects such as the Walking City, Plug-in City and Instant City. The Amazing Archigram 4 was the pinnacle of the group’s and each of the member’s individual schemes. By the 1970s, the group was seemed to have started a firm, Archigram Architects, and had received a major contract to design a casino in Monaco in 1969. However, when the project failed in 1973 causing the Archigram office to close in 1974, this marked the end of the Archigram.

 

The Amazing Archigram 4!

The cover of Archigram 4

    Zoom Issue was the first international edition of Archigram. The fourth issue discussed science fiction, science fact, and space comics. The projects of Archigram 4 borrowed from the imagery of all three themes- all equally wild and imaginative- and especially from the space program.This is the first Archigram issue to feature the word 'capsule' which would later fill the magazines. Furthermore, 1964 was the year the Cushicle was conceived, though it was not published in Archigram magazines until 1968. This issue discussed bubbles, space capsules and Plug-Ins, key to the Cushicle's design.

    Archigram 4 has bold graphic images and is the most memorable Archigram magazine. The title "Zoom" refers to the speed of assembly inherent to small, prefabricated forms and spacecraft. Archigram 4 was 20 pages long and staple bound, the magazine's dimensions were similar to a comic. The middle of the magazine features paper pop-ups of a city. All the pop-ups in the thousand or so copies originally produced were hand cut by the members of Archigram. Peter Cook designed the layout of the magazine save the first six pages and cover. Reyner Banham distributed about seventy copies to his influential colleagues in America and greatly increased                                                 Archigram's international reputation.

    An essay by Warren Chalk announces the science fiction theme. Various panels from space comics illustrate the essay and emulate a comic book. The essay reads as follows:

[text]

ZOOM.

A respectfull salute in the general direction of Roy Lichtenstein and we’re off-- ZOOM ARCHIGRAM goes into orbit with the SPACE COMIC/SCIENCE FICTION BIT. 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-- 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, can inspire and encourage the emergence of more courageous concepts.

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.

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 thinks--ballon and the inventors pad overlap.

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

The Gap between fantasy and fact narrows—COUSTEAU REALLY ZOOMS see “Underwater Cities” in next Archigram—METROPOLIS ISSUE

In this second half of the twentieth century, the old idols are crumbline, the old precepts strangely irrelevant, the old dogma no longer valid. We are in pursuit of an idea, a new vernacular, something to stand alongside in the space capsules, computers and throw-away packages of an atomic/electronic age.

Warren Chalk

‘The Living City’

London, 1963

    SPACE COMICS,as Chalk says, represent the overlap of popular discourse, science fiction, science fact, architecture and technology. Bubbles, wheels, tubes and capsules were among the new forms promoted. The most significant project from Archigram 4 is the first iteration of Chalk, Cook and Crompton's Plug-In City. The design was inspired by space age technology such as the space capsules. The form of the structure is scarcely more than the appliances. Overall, Archigram 4 boldly advocates the relevance of the day’s most modern vernacular, which was usually disregarded. These ideas, bubbles, spaceships, technologic environments, capsules and expendability inspired many of Archigram's projects including the Suitaloon and Cushicle. Like the spacecraft, the Cushicle is composed of only a minimal chassis and vital technologies for living. Through and through, the Suitaloon and Cushicle were influenced by the sci-fi preoccupation with bubbles and technology.

Archigram 6.11: the capsules and zoom persist

         

Comic Built

    Amazing Archigram 4: Zoom Issue inspired the Cushicle with many new perspectives on design. To Archigram 4, technology was form, a building was no more than a bag of frozen peas and comics were predictions. Space comic technology could be built.
As stated in this editorial by Peter Cook, Archigram used contemporary imagery to represent their decade's ingenuity.

“It would have been too easy to look over one’s shoulder and fill Archigram with three dozen of the respected goodies of the last fifty years (interesting that so many would be pre-1930), and the comment ‘What have we lost? What are we missing?’ Yet set against such a feeling of loss is the continuance of something that has not yet disappeared into historical perspective -a tradition that is still developing, and is still original to many of the basic gestures of modern architecture. It shares much of its expression with thise dim, neurotic, enthusiastic days of the Ring, Der Sturm, and the Futurist Manifesto- the architectural weirdies of the time feeding the infant Modern Movement. Our document is the Space-Comic; its reality is in the gesture, design and natural styling of hardware new to our decade – the capsule, the rocket, the bathyscope, the Zidpark, the handy-pak.

Is it possible for the space-comic’s future to relate once again with buildings-as-built? Can the near-reality of the rocket-object and hovercraft-object, which are virtually ceasing to be cartoons, carry the dynamic (but also non-cartoon) building with them into life as it is? Or shall we be riding in these craft amongst an environment made of CLASP? The ridiculousness of such situation can be compared with the world of Schinkel seen by the Futurist.”

- Peter Cook, Editorial from Amazing Archigram 4

Archigram 7: Beyond Architecture

      Although neither the Cushicle nor Suitaloon were featured in the 7^th installment of  Archigram. Archigram 7: Beyond Architecture played a vital role in the development of the Suitaloon and Cushicle. Between the release of the 6^th and 7^th issues of Archigram there was a shift in society. People began exploring information systems, communication systems and the advancement of technologies. The members of Archigram witnessed this shift and quickly realized that the comic strip language and the study of urban infrastructural systems that dominated previous issues could not go on. Computer-based technology had been referenced in some earlier Archigram projects but with the release of Archigram 7: Beyond Architecture, computing was put in the forefront. 

       “Its cover illustrated not with a building but with a computer loom, in December 1966 Archigram no. 7 claimed to be the first issue that went “Beyond Architecture”. And, Peter Cook warned in his editorial, “There may be no buildings at all in Archigram 8.” 

-Hadas A. Steiner

    Archigram 7 was distributed as a series of loose sheets and inserts all folded together in a plastic bag. The bizarre packaging of Archigram 7 removed the idea of a predetermined narrative and instead presented the reader with a low-tech information system. The print of the computer circuit on the front of the magazine represents a movement in technology that was going on at the time of Archigram 7’s release. Technology was becoming miniaturized.

“At the beginning of the Sixties, electronics was about hot valves and stuff like that. It was end of the Faraday era, if you like, where the ways of processing electrons were through valves and various devices that were based on late Nineteenth century discoveries but in the Forties and the Fifties, and then primarily through the space programme miniaturisation, transistors have been discovered, lasers have been discovered…"

                                                                         - Dennis Crompton                                                                                     

       The major projects that can be found in Archigram 7 are The Plug in city, The living Pod, the Free Time Node and Drive-in Housing. Peter Cook also included a do-it-yourself miniature paper model of the plug in city in Archigram 7. The purpose of this model was to illustrate the point that the Plug in City was not unified design, but rather a series of loosely related structures that came together to form an urban site.

      Archigram 7: Beyond Architecture introduces the idea of an architectural language formed around technology and communication. Archigram 8: Popular Pak elaborates on the ideas presented in the projects of Archrigram 7.

Triumph of the Space Age!

A newspaper headline from 1958.
Many unmanned moon rockets 
exploded in the first tries.

Headlines: October 5, 1957 and December 6, 1957. Los Angeles Times.

   

   Here are some designs, difficulties and triumphs of the 1950's space race. The 1961 Mercury is part of the body of spacecraft designs that inspired Archigram's various capsule type structures.

A diagram of a spacecraft. published in 1961. The Mercury project was released in 1958 and underwent sever subsequent iterations. The project had two successful manned launches and several unmanned orbits.

A newspaper headline from April 11, 1961