Architecture firm, England
Archigram is both a group of British architects and their architectural periodical,
which gave the group its name. Between 1960 and 1972, Archigram published nine
issues of the periodical, staged exhibitions and conferences, and devised a number of
influential architectural projects. Founded by Peter Cook (1936-), the group consisted of
Cook, David Greene (1937-), Mike Webb (1937-), Warren Chalk (1927–88), Dennis
Crompton (1935-), and Ron Herron (1930–94). Their avantgarde architecture rejected
heroic modernism in favor of expendable, variable, and often mobile combinations of
component units plugged into superstructures. Although Archigram gained worldwide
recognition, their Utopian project owed much to the intense architectural debate
fermented by the massive rebuilding projects of postwar Britain. The group drew on
eclectic sources, including R.Buckminster Fuller, the Independent Group, Reyner
Banham, comic books, science fiction, consumer imagery, and contemporary technology,
such as the Tels tar satellite, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s mobile
launch towers, and the more modest Airstream trailer.
In late 1960, Cook, Greene, and Webb began meeting in an effort to perpetuate the
vibrant intellectual climate that they had experienced at architecture school. Their
publication both augmented their activities, providing a forum for ideas as well as a
publication venue for student work, and gave the group its name. Archigram not only suggested the
immediacy of a telegram or an aerogram (i.e. “archi[tecture]-gram”) and the urgency of
their ideas but also described the broadsheet format of the fledgling publication. The first
issue, published in 1961, featured both Greene’s poetry and a collage composed of
provocative statements that wound around and through images of architectural projects, a
metaphor for the group’s desire to break down traditional barriers between form and
statement. The document proclaimed their response to postwar British architecture: “we
have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image/which is an insult to functionalism”
Entries A–F 101
in favor of organic forms that “flow,” signaling their enduring interest in the inventive
use of architecture to foster communication.
By 1963 the group had coalesced. That year they produced both Archigram 3 and the Living City exhibition,
staged at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London). Archigram 3 celebrated expendability,
claiming that the change in “user-habits” occasioned by expendable items such as food
packaging should prompt a comparable change in “user-habitats,” an argument for
“throwaway architecture” that would mirror the consumerist lifestyle of the late 20th
century. Inspired by William H. Whyte and Jane Jacobs, Li ving City examined the urban matrix of
which architecture was but one component. The group claimed that “when it is raining in
Oxford Street, the architecture is no more important than the rain, in fact the weather has
probably more to do with the pulsation of the living city at a moment in time” (Living Arts 2 [June
1963]). The installation comprised seven “Gloops,” spaces that defined constituent
elements of the living city, such as Communications, Crowd, and Movement. This “city
stimulator,” a Postmodern pastiche inspired by the Independent Group’s This Is Tomor row exhibition,
installed at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London) in 1956, urged the spectator toward an
awareness of the vitality and the value of city life. Both Archigram 3 and Living City consolidated the group’s
conviction that modernist architecture mistakenly prioritized heroic permanent structures
over the user’s changing needs, thereby failing to respond to contemporary
developments, such as technology, the consumer economy, and modern communications.
With Archigram 4 (1964), the group embarked on a series of celebrated projects that revolved
around the notion of individual capsules that clipped onto or plugged into a structural
framework. These capsules were mobile, expendable, and responsive to human desires,
thereby embodying Archigram’s central concerns. Cook’s Entertainments Tower (1963),
an entertainment center proposed for the Montreal Exposition (1967), consisted of a
concrete tower on which hung facilities (such as an auditorium) that could be removed or
replaced after the exposition. Similarly, his Plug-In City, a series of ideas developed
between 1962 and 1966, proposed expendable capsules plugged into the network
structure by means of integrated cranes. In 1964 Herron proposed Walking City, mobile
megastructures that walked across both sea and land on robotic, spiderlike legs.
Subsequent projects deployed these ideas on a smaller and perhaps more attainable scale.
Webb proposed the Cushicle (1966–67), a personalized enclosure that enabled a human
to carry a complete environment in a backpack that inflated when needed, and the
Suitaloon (1968), a space suit that inflated to serve as a minimal house. These projects
enabled the consumer to construct a personalized environment, free of the strictures of
modernist architecture.
Archigram 4 not only initiated a series of celebrated projects but also brought the group
worldwide attention. Pages were widely reproduced in magazines, providing the model
for other anti-architecture groups, such as the Italian Archizoom group, and group
members were invited to lecture worldwide. In 1966 they organized the International
Dialogues on Experimental Architecture (IDEA), an exhibition and conference in
Folkestone, Kent, England, which attracted notable speakers. In 1967 the Weekend Telegraph
commissioned Archigram to design a house for the year 1990 and received a structure
that could be adjusted to accommodate various daily activities, which was exhibited at
Harrods in London. Archigram was invited to exhibit at both the 1968 Milan Triennale
and Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. In 1970 the group was invited by the Ministre d’Etat of
Monaco to participate in a limited competition for a seaside entertainment center in
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 102
Monte Carlo. True to the group’s anti-heroic stance, their winning project was an
underground structure that preserved the view of the sea. Because of the difficult
economic climate of the 1970s, the Monte Carlo project was never built.
Archigram’s significant collective activities ended in 1972, although its members
remained active as designers, teachers, and archivists of their own history. Archigram
remained influential: a sequence of exhibitions and publications has celebrated their
work, and their anti-architecture stance figures in any history of 20th-century
architecture. Their legacy proves difficult to quantify not only because the members
contributed to a diffuse international discourse about architecture but also because their
projects seem to presage innumerable contemporary trends, including both high-tech and
sustainable approaches to design. More concrete influence can be seen in the work of
Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, and Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s Pompidou
Centre (1976) in Paris. Archigram’s medium has proven as powerful as its message. Its
members’ combination of intricate draftsmanship and collaged elements—including
comic books, advertising imagery, and Day-Glo colors—produced a vivid visual record
that typifies the decade of pop art, Marshall McLuhan, the Beatles’ Yellow Subma rine, and Rowan and
Martin’s Laugh-In. Similarly, both their anti-authoritarian stance and their focus on the individual
reflect the social concerns of the 1960s. Nostalgia for the decade, as well as the
continuing aptness of Archigram’s inventive architecture, continues to spur interest in the
group, as evidenced by the 1998–99 retrospective exhibition.
APARTMENT BUILDING
Population growth and the increasing density of cities created a housing crisis in the 20th
century. The apartment building emerged as a solution for housing large numbers of
people in small areas. Although a preexisting type, during the 20th century the
development of the apartment building dramatically reshaped the built environment of
cities and their surrounding suburbs. Apartment buildings developed in locations
convenient to transportation networks and services that encouraged dense residential land
use. The increase in apartment living subsequently inspired continued international
dissemination of the modern apartment building type.
An apartment building contains multiple dwelling units of one or more rooms. Other
basic aspects of the 20th-century apartment building’s program are a bathroom and
kitchen for each unit and the provision of heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and other
systems. As with other commercial building types, efficient use of space is integral to
good apartment building design. Public areas of the apartment building are normally
minimal, with a small lobby and laundry room or, in more luxurious examples, a roof
deck, recreation room, or swimming pool. All apartment buildings share the basic
function of providing shelter for numerous household groups, but the features and
appointments of a building can vary greatly, depending on the socioeconomic level of the
intended residents. Apartment buildings need to balance efficiency with comfort; this
requirement is challenging, especially when building for low-income tenants.
In the early 20th century, most architecturally notable apartment buildings were
intended for upper-class tenants. Living in a full-service apartment building could
provide a luxurious home at much smaller cost than maintaining a single-family house.
Rising land values in many cities made sole ownership prohibitively expensive even for
the relatively well off. Use of Classical Revival and Italian Renaissance Revival
decorative modes was prevalent, as evidenced by the lavish examples built in cities such
as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Vienna. The dominance of
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 98
historical styles in apartment building design indicated the fashionable design mode for
most commercial and domestic structures during the early part of the century.
For low- and middle-income tenants, apartment building design was characterized by
tension between aesthetics and economic viability. Tenement house design frequently
sacrificed aesthetic and sanitary concerns to create a profitable investment. By the 1920s,
apartment buildings were integral to the international debate over housing and social
reform. European avantgarde architects used the apartment building type to explore the
potential of modernism and prefabricated structural systems for providing affordable
worker housing. Government sponsorship of housing projects provided important
opportunities for architectural experimentation not available in the commercial real estate
market of the United States despite housing reform efforts. The housing policy of the
Weimar Republic generated pioneering modern apartment buildings for German cities,
such as Breslau, Hamburg, Celle, Berlin, and Frankfurt. Another example is J.J.P.Oud’s
Kiefhoek housing (1925), an International Style garden apartment complex built in
Rotterdam. Both the garden apartment and the high-rise form of the apartment building
were explored by architects throughout the mid-20th century. A key high-rise example in
London is Highpoint I (1933–35), designed by Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton.
These two primary apartment building forms—the mainly urban high-rise and the
suburban garden apartment—became internationally prevalent by the 1930s. High-rise
apartment buildings, alone and later in planned groups, capitalized on an economy of
scale. They distributed the rising cost of elevators, ventilation, and other systems-related
apparatus by using modern building materials to create taller structures with more living
units. Garden apartments were suitable for lower-density development on the urban
periphery, where land was less expensive. Groups of two- or three-story buildings
arranged on landscaped sites contained units that shared an entrance stairwell. The garden
apartment form did not require formal public areas or expensive elevators but was not as
efficient in land use or building materials as a more compact high-rise apartment
building. In the post-World War II period, the housing crisis became more acute owing to
years of postponed building and wartime destruction. European governments again
sponsored the construction of major apartment housing projects. In the United States, the
new Federal Housing Administration and later the Department of Housing and Urban
Development began to fulfill a role similar to that of their European counterparts,
although more limited in scope. International Style modernism, particularly the slab-form
high-rise developed by Le Corbusier, dominated these construction efforts.
The key postwar example is Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (1947–53) at
Marseilles, France. Unite d’Habitation is a 12-story horizontal slab raised on heavy
tapered pilotis . A roof deck and an interior commercial “street” seek to create a unified
community, but this quality of self-containment also separates the building from its
neighborhood context. Other large apartment buildings based on this model experience
mixed results when applied in other contexts.
Noteworthy examples of apartment
buildings done in a postwar modernist vocabulary include ATBAT housing (1951–56,
Shadrach Woods and J.Bodiansky) in Morocco and Peabody Terraces (1964, José Luis
Sert) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
During the postwar period, large-scale developments, including multiple high-rise
apartment buildings, site planning, and amenities such as shopping and recreational
facilities, became more prevalent. In the United States, federal urban-renewal funding
cleared sizable portions of blighted urban neighborhoods to be replaced by large public
housing projects. These projects reflected the modernist vision of social reform through
environmental determinism. Commercial interests built more luxurious and wellmaintained
versions of these high-rises for middle-class and wealthier tenants. These
projects could be successful when integrated into existing community services, but they
failed miserably when they isolated poor residents from economically stable parts of the
urban landscape.
Apartment buildings have been a source of controversy over zoning and land use in
the United States. As a multi-dwelling structure, the apartment building threatens the
American ideal of the single-family house. However, economic reality, even in the
United States and the prosperous nations of Europe, is that apartments fulfill an important
need. The apartment building has transformed the urban and suburban landscape of the
20th-century city and by extension the lived experience of many residents.
century. The apartment building emerged as a solution for housing large numbers of
people in small areas. Although a preexisting type, during the 20th century the
development of the apartment building dramatically reshaped the built environment of
cities and their surrounding suburbs. Apartment buildings developed in locations
convenient to transportation networks and services that encouraged dense residential land
use. The increase in apartment living subsequently inspired continued international
dissemination of the modern apartment building type.
An apartment building contains multiple dwelling units of one or more rooms. Other
basic aspects of the 20th-century apartment building’s program are a bathroom and
kitchen for each unit and the provision of heating, ventilation, air conditioning, and other
systems. As with other commercial building types, efficient use of space is integral to
good apartment building design. Public areas of the apartment building are normally
minimal, with a small lobby and laundry room or, in more luxurious examples, a roof
deck, recreation room, or swimming pool. All apartment buildings share the basic
function of providing shelter for numerous household groups, but the features and
appointments of a building can vary greatly, depending on the socioeconomic level of the
intended residents. Apartment buildings need to balance efficiency with comfort; this
requirement is challenging, especially when building for low-income tenants.
In the early 20th century, most architecturally notable apartment buildings were
intended for upper-class tenants. Living in a full-service apartment building could
provide a luxurious home at much smaller cost than maintaining a single-family house.
Rising land values in many cities made sole ownership prohibitively expensive even for
the relatively well off. Use of Classical Revival and Italian Renaissance Revival
decorative modes was prevalent, as evidenced by the lavish examples built in cities such
as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Paris, and Vienna. The dominance of
Encyclopedia of 20th-century architecture 98
historical styles in apartment building design indicated the fashionable design mode for
most commercial and domestic structures during the early part of the century.
For low- and middle-income tenants, apartment building design was characterized by
tension between aesthetics and economic viability. Tenement house design frequently
sacrificed aesthetic and sanitary concerns to create a profitable investment. By the 1920s,
apartment buildings were integral to the international debate over housing and social
reform. European avantgarde architects used the apartment building type to explore the
potential of modernism and prefabricated structural systems for providing affordable
worker housing. Government sponsorship of housing projects provided important
opportunities for architectural experimentation not available in the commercial real estate
market of the United States despite housing reform efforts. The housing policy of the
Weimar Republic generated pioneering modern apartment buildings for German cities,
such as Breslau, Hamburg, Celle, Berlin, and Frankfurt. Another example is J.J.P.Oud’s
Kiefhoek housing (1925), an International Style garden apartment complex built in
Rotterdam. Both the garden apartment and the high-rise form of the apartment building
were explored by architects throughout the mid-20th century. A key high-rise example in
London is Highpoint I (1933–35), designed by Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton.
These two primary apartment building forms—the mainly urban high-rise and the
suburban garden apartment—became internationally prevalent by the 1930s. High-rise
apartment buildings, alone and later in planned groups, capitalized on an economy of
scale. They distributed the rising cost of elevators, ventilation, and other systems-related
apparatus by using modern building materials to create taller structures with more living
units. Garden apartments were suitable for lower-density development on the urban
periphery, where land was less expensive. Groups of two- or three-story buildings
arranged on landscaped sites contained units that shared an entrance stairwell. The garden
apartment form did not require formal public areas or expensive elevators but was not as
efficient in land use or building materials as a more compact high-rise apartment
building. In the post-World War II period, the housing crisis became more acute owing to
years of postponed building and wartime destruction. European governments again
sponsored the construction of major apartment housing projects. In the United States, the
new Federal Housing Administration and later the Department of Housing and Urban
Development began to fulfill a role similar to that of their European counterparts,
although more limited in scope. International Style modernism, particularly the slab-form
high-rise developed by Le Corbusier, dominated these construction efforts.
The key postwar example is Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation (1947–53) at
Marseilles, France. Unite d’Habitation is a 12-story horizontal slab raised on heavy
tapered pilotis . A roof deck and an interior commercial “street” seek to create a unified
community, but this quality of self-containment also separates the building from its
neighborhood context. Other large apartment buildings based on this model experience
mixed results when applied in other contexts.
Noteworthy examples of apartment
buildings done in a postwar modernist vocabulary include ATBAT housing (1951–56,
Shadrach Woods and J.Bodiansky) in Morocco and Peabody Terraces (1964, José Luis
Sert) in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
During the postwar period, large-scale developments, including multiple high-rise
apartment buildings, site planning, and amenities such as shopping and recreational
facilities, became more prevalent. In the United States, federal urban-renewal funding
cleared sizable portions of blighted urban neighborhoods to be replaced by large public
housing projects. These projects reflected the modernist vision of social reform through
environmental determinism. Commercial interests built more luxurious and wellmaintained
versions of these high-rises for middle-class and wealthier tenants. These
projects could be successful when integrated into existing community services, but they
failed miserably when they isolated poor residents from economically stable parts of the
urban landscape.
Apartment buildings have been a source of controversy over zoning and land use in
the United States. As a multi-dwelling structure, the apartment building threatens the
American ideal of the single-family house. However, economic reality, even in the
United States and the prosperous nations of Europe, is that apartments fulfill an important
need. The apartment building has transformed the urban and suburban landscape of the
20th-century city and by extension the lived experience of many residents.
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