Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Buckley, Craig

Titel

Envisioning Assembly: Archigram and the Light/Sound Workshop

Ist Teil von

• Grey room, 2018-12, Vol.73 (73), p.26-53

Ort / Verlag

One Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142-1209, USA: MIT Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

MIT Press Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In late 1966, several hundred subscribers of the London magazine Archigram received a packet of drawings in the mail. Among these was the Maxx Housing drawing, a large view rendered in axonometric projection and printed in stark blue ink. The drawing did not endeavor to communicate the appearance of a finished building or convey the fixed spatial relations of a plan. Rather, it sought to envision the emblematic moment of a process: the delivery of a dwelling unit swung into place by crane to join others already slotted variously into the frame. Infusing the commanding isometric projection often favored in the period's engineering drawings with a set of instructions so beguilingly simple they might have come from a hobby model kit, the pseudotechnical document aimed to reimagine principles of lightweight, industrialized assembly such that they might be reconfigured to serve the flexible, indeterminate, and expendable ethos that circulated as "plug-in" architecture during these years. Signed by Arthur Golding, Craig Hodgetts, and Doug Michels, three students in James Stirling's housing studio at Yale University's School of Architecture, this "American blend" of the plug-in concept was evidently inspired by earlier issues of Archigram, and its makers sent the drawing in a spirit of homage to the group's London address. When Archigram's editors reproduced it in the following issue, they added three mail-in reader-response cards of the kind found in the period's comic books and mass-culture magazines. In so doing, they converted the student drawing into an unwitting advertisement for what they called the "Archigram network," which proposed to offer readers film strips of varying lengths, tapes of lectures, "archifilms," packets of 35 mm slides, and even a projectable version of "any item in Archigram if clearly described."2 The network initiative responded to what the