Archigram, Its Origin And Its Influence.

Architecture and Urban Seminar:
Architecture and Urban Culture from 1960’s to Today.
Final Paper
“Archigram, its origin and its influence”
Ofelia Ramos Flores
4th Year Architecture Consortium Student
Universidad Nacional Autiónoma de México
Introduction
This paper pretends to research in order to understand Archigram’s influence in the future of architecture.
It will enlist a seriesof examples of their influence not only in the architectural realm but in other fields such as economy, science and technology.
First of all, I have to refer to the history of archigram and what were the main factors that gave them the start points and eventually sustain their ideas.

The origin
The war
In the first place, to understand the vision of the fab-six, we have to place them beingyoung spectators of the Second World War. It was the first real “gadgetized” war, were the journalism and advertising of the war campaign made popular all the advances and extensions of human communications, speed and destructions hosted by the technology, the engineering and the science.
They lived in a time where the technologic and scientific contributions meant the victory, the avant garde,the future, and Britain was the place where evident the most.
They acquired a strong love for the machines and technology and faith in their ability to improve the human conditions. In addition, they were raised in the consumerism movement that was born in the second half of the 50’s and the bombarding of propaganda and advertising. When everything became a product to sell and buy.
The UtopiasFurthermore, they lived in a time where utopias were being made, executed, fought for and sacralized. The Soviet Union was getting its peak, raising conscience that there were different ways of doing things, even if they were extremely radical. The USSR also became extremely important in Archigram’s work, as it being a catalyst for both, its own and the American, science and technology appliedto war or space conquest.
On the other hand, once they became architects, they found themselves constrained in a modernist world. The rigidness of the grid, the curtain walls, the homogenization of the urban landscape and the pursuit of build to last.
Fortunately, they came across the idea of the megastructure, e.g. Gunter Domenig (dwelling unit for Graz), Nicolas Schoffer (Cybernetic city),and Yona Friedman (Paris Spatial).
The super structure becomes invisible on top of the city so that human can finally breeze like birds.
The main contradiction about the mega structure is that its DNA is itself destructive; if the mega structure proliferates, the “you don’t see earth anymore”, then it is not a structure but it becomes a surface. And it disappears as a structure.
They also foundmain sources of inspiration in the works of Richard Buckminster Fuller who was wondering whether “humanity had a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how?”
Another form of inspiration for them was the drawings of Antonio Sant’Elia who became involved with the futurist movement, and shared a vision for a “mechanized” city of the future. This was perhaps the mostessential characteristic of the Archigram world, the constant pursuit of a utopia, made to accommodate the comforts of the humans.
These ideas united to a plan obsolescence culture set as one of the strongest features, created what we can now describe as Archigram:
“an attempt to recover the thrill of modernism’s pioneering phase, in protest against its later marshaling into a discipline.Occupying the ground already cleared by the London vanguards of the 1950s, the new brutalists and Independent Group, Archigram attempted to bring architecture up to speed with leading artistic, technological, and cultural tendencies— “pop” influences in particular”.
Simon Sadler, Architecture without architects; Page 7-8.
With this said, we can now move on to explain their influence in the future...