Walking City

Transcript from a presentation by Alex McDowell for British Design panel at SEGD International 2012 Symposium at the V&A London, on April 28th.

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