Transcript from a presentation by Alex McDowell for British Design panel at SEGD International 2012
Symposium at the V&A London, on April 28th.
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| With thanks to Simon Herron and the Ron Herron Archive |
WALKING CITY
(ARCHIGRAM. Project Authors: Warren Chalk, Frank Brian Harvey, Ron Herron)
When I was at Central School in
London in the late seventies, studying painting and first lapping up Archigram
- I was obsessing on Pop Art, and I took Ron Herron and his gang at their
fanzine-style face value, as anarchistic pop cultural theorists. But one thought, of course,
that the work could never be built and these Archigram guys
were fun but not too serious.
Walking City was designed in 1964.
Looking back at the work now, having
made some sort of transition from dilettante art punk to immersive design
practitioner with my obsession now in narrative space, I can see how smart and
prescient Archigram were.
They were grabbing contemporary
culture, science fiction, comic books, science and engineering* - looking at
Superman, NASA and Lego - and extrapolating forward these realized ideas, with
fine humor and British cynicism, in order to break down boundaries, explore the
spaces in-between, and turn them into political theater. They were telling the
kind of space-driven immersive stories that now drive my day-to-day practice.
If we look seriously at the idea of
science fiction it's a fantastic tool to challenge the known, the staid, the
familiar and to turn it on its head - it takes the inner logic of human culture
and applies it to constructing unfamiliar narrative worlds, and by doing so these
worlds come alive, are built, and become self-fulfilling spaces within which we can
now create our own future stories.
And of course Archigram knew, as we
now know, that mobile societies based in technology and virtual worlds were not science fiction but future reality, to be everywhere. Because in their open vision they could imagine that we would one day be surrounded by technology that
now gives designers flexible and transformative tools for the inception,
prototyping and manufacture of the imagination. Ah, what they would have done with these tools
we now have in our hands.
What's also interesting to me about Walking City is that the style of the buildings that
Ron Herron and Archigram imagined is not that important. What he is proposing here is
architecture as a container for narrative, and his design is the idea - of the
designer/ maker of the building and its population as nomadic**. Archigram is
using a science fiction lens to challenge sedentary, nationality-obsessed
culture to look globally and keep moving. This is architecture for creating a
new shared and distributed culture that abandons borders.
In 2008 Peter Frankfurt, Greg Lynn and I were commissioned by MoMA
to develop a model of a future web-based social space for a now renown exhibition called 'Design
and the Elastic Mind'. We imagined a
virtual world called New City, that mirrored all of the major cities in the
world, projected onto a group of floating manifold forms that rotated in
relation to one another - not only are there no borders, but the motion of the
cities would constant rub divergent cultures and social groups together
creating new socio political sparks that would create a transaction between the
virtual cities and their real counterparts.
This project can of course be traced
directly back to Ron Herron and Archigram, whose work continues to indict us
when we rest on our laurels, or our backsides.
*/ "... basically, he is
writing an essay about the relationship between architecture, science-fiction,
science-fact and comics; about how at the time when he was writing this, which
was 1964, there was tremendous overlap between what was appearing in comics and
what people like Frei Otto and Bucky Fuller and we were writing about years
earlier. H.G.Wells had written about Leonardo da Vinci ...; there was a
tremendous overlap. So there weren’t hard edges between science-fiction and science-fact --
and sometimes the science-fact was ahead of science fiction and other times
behind it. And sometimes architecture was ahead of what’s in the comics, and sometimes it hadn’t spotted the possibilities."
- Dennis Compton/ interview on
Peter Cook and the Amazing Archigram magazine (issue 4).
**/ “…Walking
City imagines a future in which borders and boundaries are abandoned in favor
of a nomadic lifestyle among groups of people worldwide.
Walking City anticipated the
fast-paced urban lifestyle of a technologically advanced society in which one
need not be tied down to a permanent location. The structures are conceived to
plug into utilities and information networks at different locations to support
the needs and desires of people who work and play, travel and stay put,
simultaneously.
By means of this nomadic
existence, different cultures and information is shared, creating a global
information market that anticipates later projects...”
- Peter Blake, Architectural
Forum 1968
