Among the various “isms” that develop during the sixties there is a current, a group, known as the “Archigram” that developed around the AA of London.
Some of the exponents were Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene. Their foundation manifesto was composed in 1961 and had the title “Archigram I”, it explained their attraction towards components such as “clip” technology, mass consumption, space capsules and the environment “use and casts”.
To these interests was also connected a considerable interest in robotics, highlighted in the project by Ron Herron of the Walking City, 1964; there were spider-shaped cities that moved above the water. Another project that summarized the group’s ideas, such as an anti-heroic attitude that rejected the noble principles and opposed to the Team X generation in the theory of architecture, was the “Plug-in City”. This did not house buildings in the traditional sense of the word, but frames in which elements could be inserted standardized. The functions were no longer satisfied by the forms, but by electronic and mechanical services.
Other influences can be found in the Pop paintings of the early sixties, in the previous 20th Century Group and in the work of the engineer Fuller for his anti-monumentalism. The theories, forms and images produced by Archigram had considerable futuristic quality and the group was interested in the statements of Sant’Elia on the city of the future as a dynamic machine.
It can be said that in the sixties their “anti-architectural” images were absorbed by the architects, and works such as the Center Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers would have been inconceivable without the legacy left by the Archigram group.
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