Excerpt: Annette Fierro on Archigram and the British High Tech

In her latest book, Architectures of the Technopolis: Archigram and the British High Tech, Associate Professor of Architecture Annette Fierro revisits the work of two groups of architects to come of age in London in the 1960s and 70s that included Peter Cook, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Terry Farrell (MArch’64). While one group consisted of academics and artists known for their humor and eccentricity and the other were a group of deadly serious architects gaining international renown, Fierro argues they shared uncannily similar impulses. In an excerpt from the book’s preface, she lays out the claim of lineage to follow.

Fierro will talk about the research behind Architectures of the Technopolis in a Wednesday, March 20 lecture presented by the Department of Architecture.

Since the 1970s, a particular architecture emerged in London which was startlingly aggressive in pursuing technological advancement and its expression. These architects, known grudgingly as the British High Tech, went on to become some of the most prolific practitioners in the world. Their emergence in the socially and architecturally conservative London has, to my mind, always tweaked disbelief – just how and why did this come about? The presence of these architects in London has until just recently exhibited a degree of exclusivity unimaginable in any other major city. In particular areas, there are enclaves where High Tech groups of buildings stand in close proximity to each other and form palpable districts, veritable mechanical jungles.

The heavy proliferation of High Tech architecture in these districts, so very different from the tradition of what one might regard as British architecture, is more than a curious emergence, especially from a seemingly monolithic group of architects, disposed to a highly unusual, highly specific set of interests which reified building technology as the central driving factor of their architecture. This book will attempt to address this peculiar and yet ubiquitous phenomenon, going back to examine diverse precedents, diverse histories, a wide variety of ideas and concepts, events and associations from which this movement emerged. In all of these apparitions – these technological dreams – no influence is more pertinent than the avant-garde group of the 1960s, Archigram, whose work this book is equally devoted to investigating, in all its trajectories and speculative forays.

This affiliation, of what became the international British High Tech with the avant-garde of the 1960s, has been so obvious for so long that it seems that it is either forgotten or inspires denial. There is the self-evident commonality of language: overblown machines considered both as iconographic image and as technological pursuit, kits-of-parts of pieces and components, a disintegration of building as object in favor of the constituent elements – considered joint by joint, surface by surface, module by module. Underlying both movements is a mutual, undying optimism in technological process and technological expression. Transferred from group to group and era to era, these traits and philosophies are so indelible that they form their own cohesive identity, joining the recent architecture of Great Britain to its history in the 1960s. This claim of lineage is both easy and difficult to make, as members of both groups are still living, and when asked, often vehemently deny the connection.

Certainly, both groups were/are dramatically different. Archigram originated as a group of young iconoclasts who set out to challenge post-functionalist righteousness, gaining notoriety through a series of self-published pamphlets that could have been neither more modest nor more ambitious. In complete contrast, the architects known popularly as the High Tech emerged onto the popular stage through emphatic acts of the building – buildings of increasing scale, technological prowess and prominence in international recognition. Nor could the cultural contexts for the work of the two groups have been more different. For Archigram, the disaffection of the post-war 1950s fueled an exuberance that often courted the absurd, a provocation for the sake of provocation, easily dismissed until their farcical proposals were understood as profoundly prophetic. Could the effect of expanded definitions of technology for Archigram end in the dissipation of objects themselves? Archigram contended exactly this in the trajectory of their work and thought, their megastructures dissolved into ubiquitous bots, virtual effects or, at its extreme, simply ambiance. In contrast, the High Tech’s work prompted exactly the opposite conclusion. Coming into age from the late 1970s through the 1990s, they led the technological advancement in the building sciences, bolstered by the economic explosion of the 1990s in the UK. Heightened attention to systems of building construction led them to a dizzyingly prolific production of buildings throughout the world, and a reification of building as concrete, technological objects.

The themes I have selected encompass considerable stretches of history, as well as a variety of extra-disciplinary interests. These range from various attempts to transform the social dimension of the city through visionary means, to relationships between architecture and fiction, including science fiction, to different degrees of commitment to the ‘technological project’ through history. For example, Chapter 1 explores the history of utopian vision, its strong links to London, where a strong utopian residue exists, and its regular appearance in British architectural culture in many guises and fluctuations. The term is not finite, not is it ever self-contained: the contamination of the term utopia as it moves from literature into visionary proposals, and then into contemporary architecture, is at the heart of this complex story. Did Archigram intend for their projects to be realized, or to exist as dreams which would prompt questions? Cook’s answer was always the former, but the provocation of Archigram’s drawings lies at the center of their function’. Did these dreams have a different function, which intersected with the concept of utopia as a perfect world, as found in literature and social projections? I hope to show that Archigram’s concept of choice as a major theme in their work, for example, was a response to the utopian proposals of universalist modernist housing. This approach contradicts the more typical understanding of their work as having little or no socially minded intention (Sadler). That a particular form of utopia emerges tainted with an affinity to technology is a fundamental part of the story’s unique and almost perverse feature, but this too emerges from a historical context. London, in its openness and willingness to entertain and finance technological feats in building and infrastructure, was almost uniquely (but surprisingly) suited for what became an ever-present exploration of technological inspirations in architecture. These trajectories are based in the case of a prolific movement, forming a dense narrative of itself, and especially in the presence of an exploding global urban context around it.

Weaving together these connections and lineages, many pervasive influences and historical trajectories emerge to the surface. This is an account which is discontinuous, pictorial, even emotive. Technology is not dismissed as an issue of technical innovation, but takes on an extreme role of expression, to the extent that it is a subconscious presence, with even an oneiric dimension. London is the premise of ‘Plug-In City’ realized, a density of machinic language which expresses and motivates the vitality of a global city. When one squints, looking down from a great height, at the City of London below, with its sparkling machines humming and throbbing, it looks like an aerial perspectival drawing of Plug-In City, albeit one that was never drafted by Archigram. In the end, the city of London itself becomes the ultimate protagonist in this great story. These buildings and visions intertwine with larger cultural histories and impulses, each inextricable from each other and the larger whole, a mass of constructs overlaid.