Archigram design archive of future cities and life bought by Hong Kong museum
- Entire archive of influential British architecture collective has been acquired by M+, despite attempts by the UK to block the overseas sale
- It contains futuristic, yet prophetic, designs from the ’60s and ’70s that envisaged living in adaptable dwellings and walking cities
Have you ever felt like moving home but, while you’d like a change of scene, you’d still quite like to hang around the neighbourhood, avoiding the hassle of a new job, new address and new fight with a new cable TV company?
The phrase “mobile home” once meant something to more than just the owners of RVs or yurts. In the 1960s and ’70s, a six-strong avant-garde London architectural group calling itself Archigram (pronounced “arkygram”) began producing radical urban designs which notably included plans for entire mobile cities. The designs attracted labels such as “neo-futuristic” and “pro-consumerist”, but were seemingly forgotten, or dismissed as impractical and merely theoretical, after the group folded in 1974.
Today, however, Archigram’s startling futurism is being reassessed as prophetic, and may in fact be all around us. What’s more, Hong Kong will – eventually – be in pole position to enjoy the treasure trove of the group’s ingenious, even unsettling, concepts.
Archigram’s speculative explorations promised adaptable dwellings featuring cars as components; the Living Pod “trailer home”, which could function independently or be plugged into a larger structure; and the Popular Pak of prefabricated architectural parts for giving ugly suburbs a facelift. Some designs recall early Pink Floyd album covers; others look like outlandish Heath Robinson contraptions baked with Terry Gilliam’s graphics for Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
M+, the upcoming museum for visual culture in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, has permanently acquired Archigram’s complete archive of original drawings, prints, videos, models, publications, ephemera – even some of the drawing tools used in the 1960s, according to curator-at-large Aric Chen.