Instant City by Archigram

Watching some of the presentations made at the Villes 2.0 workshops on the 4 big challenges for a Ville 2.0, I was intrigued by Thierry Marcou‘s mention of Archigram. According to Wikipedia, Archigram is:

Archigram was an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s – based at the Architectural Association, London – that was futurist, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist, drawing inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was solely expressed through hypothetical projects.

One of the members, David Greene wrote in the first issue of Archigram magazine:

A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge – they didn’t worry.”

One of the Archigram project, Instant City, is a mobile technological event that drifts into underdeveloped, drab towns via air (balloons) with provisional structures (performance spaces) in tow. The effect is a deliberate overstimulation to produce mass culture, with an embrace of advertising aesthetics. The whole endeavor is intended to eventually move on leaving behind advanced technology hook-ups.

The french newspaper Le Monde has a very nice audio and visual description of Instant City.

One of the collage revealing Instant City and its scenarios © Ron Herron, Archigram Courtesy Ron Herron Archive

Relation to my thesis: Of course, Instant City is a stunning example of a vision of architecture made of atoms… and bits, it is not hard to imagine the balloons acting has the current Internet clouds of connectivity.

Catching up with the pile of media I was not able to swallow the past couple of months. The Fing work on the city (Ville 2.0) and Hubert Guillaud’s recent articles on traces and “hyperlocalité” are excellent source of inspiration:
- Comment protéger notre vie privée dans un monde où la traçabilité explose ?
- Personnalisation sans identification
- Hyperlocal : nos réseaux dans la rue, nos rues dans l’écran
- Révéler l’hyperlocal
- Vers la ville personnelle