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Brutalism Exposed: Photography and the Zoom WaveAuthor(s): Hadas A. SteinerSource: Journal of Architectural Education (1984-), Vol. 59, No. 3 (Feb., 2006), pp. 15-27Published by: on behalf of theTaylor & Francis, Ltd. Association of Collegiate Schools ofArchitecture, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40480642Accessed: 14-03-2016 11:50 UTC
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HADAS A. STEINER
University at Buffalo, SUNY
Brutalism Exposed
Photography and the Zoom Wave
Photography was instrumental in conceiving representation as the effort to grasp the variable
rather than the objective appraisal of reality. This paper explores how avant-garde practitioners in
the mid-1960s harnessed reproductive technology for its momentary meanings. Using the
confluence of the Economist complex, the film Blow-Up, and Archigram 7, the phenomenon is
examined in the context of London-based architectural discourse. While the embrace of unstable
signification would present further challenges, possibility still dominated over loss at this critical
juncture. The allusiveness of representation intimated the potentials of a milieu where nothing
stagnated and images, in and of themselves, constituted architectural practice.
Blow-Up
The opening scene of Blow-Up, Michelangelo
Antonioni's film of 1966 set in London; takes place
in the courtyard of the recently completed
Economist complex (1959-1964) (Figure I).1 With
this commission, Peter and Alison Smithson put the
vision they had expounded over the previous
decade to the test, not on the margins, but right
in the hub of London. The project entailed a cluster
of three stone-clad buildings- an office tower,
a bank, and a residential block- grouped around
a plaza that was raised above street level. "The city
is left outside the site boundary," the Smithsons
explained, with the plaza providing a transitional
zone from the encounters of the street.2 The
varying sizes of the buildings were further scaled
for the intimacy of program by the adaptation of
the bays on the elevations. The roach limestone
chosen for the cladding was a highly textured
durable material, distinctive for being scattered
throughout with hollows left by dislodged
fossils. Unlike the detachment of structure
and glass apparent in the paradigm of the
curtain wall, here the frame, shell, and services
were integrated.
Blow-Up begins with a jeep overflowing with
mimes and clowns circling the empty courtyard of the
complex.3 The costumed party spills out of the
vehicle and then from the bare plaza into the ani-
mated streets of the West End to engulf the con-
vertible of a jaded celebrity photographer as he
returns from documenting a night in a Camberwell
flophouse (Figure 2). From this initial disruption of
the separation of site from city, social and spatial
collocations abound throughout the narrative, always
encapsulated by differentiations, even polarities, in
the urban environment. The time was ripe for the
observation of such contrasts given the range of
construction and reconstruction in many European
cities, from corporate headquarters in the municipal
core to megastructures being built to accommodate
the urban poor on the outskirts. The theme is
encapsulated by the work of the protagonist, who,
addicted to the ephemeral sensations of his imme-
diate environment, prods everything he encounters
with his lens. When bored of his lavish lifestyle and
hedonistic fashion shoots, he turns his hand to cap-
turing the gritty aspects of London life in black and
white documentary-style photographs of the realist
kind. Against the background of housing estates on
the one hand and mews conversions on the other, the
dichotomy of ¡mage versus reality unravels as the film
progresses. When he discovers that he may have
inadvertently recorded a murder in the process of
sneaking photographs of what appeared to be a tryst,
he scours the images for evidence. Ambiguity of the
¡mage leads to obsessive scrutiny of the photo-
graphic grain (Figure 3). Pictures, the photographer
discovers ¡n the end, are as elusive as the transient
events they capture. The existential nature of truth
unravels.
Blow-Up is a film about the language of
¡mages. There is a minimum of dialog and, during
the blow-up sequences, none at all. For a story that
includes the possibility of a murder, there is also
little in the way of action, even mystery. We watch
along with the photographer as the instability of his
world ¡s displayed to him. The narrative emphasis is
less on his exploits than on how the environment
affects him or, more accurately, fails to do so. The
film is, in the end, about the contemporary condi-
tion and the ambiguity inherent in the process of
communication. Its two featured modes of photo-
graphy-the stark ¡mages of photojournalism and
the commercial practices on which the fashion
15 STEINER Journal of Architectural Education,
pp. 15-27 ©2006 ACSA
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1. Economist Plaza, 1964. (©Michael Carapetian)
2. Mimes in the Economist Plaza, still from "Blow-Up," 1966. (©Warner Bros.)
industry thrived- were hallmarks of postwar image
culture.4 Black and white representations of spon-
taneity, especially blue-collar artlessness, reflected
a serious endeavor aimed at capturing the essence
of social reality. Color photography, on the other
hand, was circulated through the glossy mass media
and belonged to the cosmopolitan, if transient,
domain of consumerism. The film, however, ques-
tions the authenticity of one mode of representation
over another. Is captured contingency more real
than the composed pliancy of the fashion shoot?
The by-now familiar observation dramatized is that
documentation of any kind, whether of homeless-
ness or of couture, comes about through dominance
and transforms the subject to aesthetic object.5
Distinctions between life and art- city and site-
from the intrusion of the clowns on come undone
along with the protagonist.
Parallels of Life and Art
Both of the photographic practices exemplified in
Blow-Up, replete with their ideological implications,
infiltrated the confines of architectural graphics.
While pop art had taken hold in London in the fifties,
the flooding of consumer imagery into architectural
imagery proper was a phenomenon of the next
decade. For a standard that had been drained for the
most part even of color, such an assimilation of
external modes of representation was notable.
Modernism had continued the academic rejection of
subjective techniques, such as perspective and
atmospheric rendering.6 Modernist graphics assumed
that representation was a transparent tool for com-
municating a philosophy of design; drawings were
treated as objective, measurable portrayals of
objects. Plan, section, and elevation were the desir-
able modes of conveying architectural information, as
well as their amalgam in the axonometric projection
that migrated into architectural practice from scien-
tific disciplines such as cartography and engineering.7
Axonometric projection represented not a way of
seeing, as perspective and photography did, but
a way of drawing.8 Subjective representations would
disturb the balance.
When the Smithsons included photographs
taken by Nigel Henderson of children playing in the
streets of Bethnal Green as part of their presentation
for the ninth Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture
Moderne (CIAM) held at Aix-en-Provence in 1953,
they were thus making a statement in form as well as
content (Figure 4). This run down area of East
London was familiar to Congrès Internationaux
d'Architecture Moderne attendees from a study of
that slum presented to the congress by José Lluïs
Sert.9 The unaltered photographs provided snapshots
of engaged city life within the more technical
language of urban reform. The notion of a genuine
Brutalism Exposed: Photography and the Zoom Wave 16
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3. Blow-up scene, still from "Blow-Up," 1966. (©Warner Bros.)
encounter was grounded further by the fact that the
¡mages were of children at play, itself the subject in
the 1950s of discourse about as-yet uncorrupted
artistic expression. In the context of the conventions
of the presentation "grille/' these nonorchestrated
photographs functioned in the manner of orthogra-
phy, as measurable documents of reality.10 Though
the use of photographs in Congrès Internationaux
A. Detail of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne Grid by Alison and Peter
Smithson showing Nigel Henderson's photography, 1953. (©Smithson Archive)
d'Architecture Moderne display boards was not
unprecedented, the harsh photoreportage, captured
contingency of these slum images certainly was. The
images represented a contrast of the fluid nature of
the urban fabric with the diagrammatic purity of the
grid's divisions. These photographs of recreation in
working-class areas, the Smithsons believed, con-
veyed the same quality of captured contingency,
what they called the "as found," that needed to be
reintroduced to architecture to equate a method of
building with a way of life.11 The ethos of realist
photography migrated right into the heart of official
architectural business.
To the eye of the contemporary critic, the
interplay of scales in the Economist complex followed
the logic of realist photography- for better and
worse: "This change of scale between the two
buildings has resulted in a giant trompe-d'œil with
which one is only to experience further perceptual
difficulty as one enters the centre of the plaza,"
wrote Kenneth Frampton in Architectural Design . "In
the centre of the plaza the 'photographic' reduction
in scale of the residential block vis-á-vis the main
tower has the optical effect of 'zooming' this block
away from the observer, with a consequent dramatic
enlargement in the apparent space of the plaza. This
perceptual sleight of hand is brilliant but not in the
last instance felicitous, for the observer does not
remain rooted in the centre and moving on he quickly
discovers the deception."12
When the Smithsons turned to the blow-up,
they drew different conclusions from those implied
by the ordeal of loss endured by Antonioni's
photographer. In the film, the protagonist finds that
the closer he tries to get to the ¡mage, the more it
dissolves, an experience akin to the study of the
Pollock-like paintings dribbled by the painter in an
adjacent studio. In the exhibition, "Parallel of Life
and Art," organized by the Smithsons with
Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi in 1953, instead of
a diminution of reality, the photographic image was
used to draw structural equivalence between the
manmade and the natural: the anatomical
17 STEINER
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dissection of a typewriter or the analogy between the
drips of abstract expressionism and the patterns on
the egg of a sea bird, for example (Figure 5).13 The
influence of László Mohofy-Nag/s heavily
illustrated, seminal postwar text, Vision in Motion
(1947), and its promotion of photographic literacy
reigned throughout. The technologies of homing in
and zooming out- the photographic enlarger, the
aerial photograph, the x-ray, the wide-angle lens, and
the microscope- demonstrated the expanded field
of vision brought about by new tools. What unified
the ¡mages was their ability to demonstrate the
significance of the camera to extend the visual range.
This agenda was furthered by the reproduction of the
source material for the show. Henderson used a plate
camera to replicate the photographic reproductions
with the intention of cultivating the misleading sense
of scale inherent in the photographic medium.14
Formal leveling of scale highlighted the: role of the
camera as a tool for the investigation of reality. All
the reproductions, whether of paintings or cells,
shared a grainy texture.
One hundred twenty-two panels of diverse
dimensions were suspended at various heights and
angles from the ceiling and walls. The ¡mages were
culled from a range of fields, including photojour-
nalism, medicine, and art and the subject matter too
was wide ranging, from the anthropological to the
geological, archeological, and metallurgical. The
point, through a form of three-dimensional collage,
was to expose similarities through juxtaposition of
things that otherwise would not be seen in proximity
and that without the photographic record could not
be compared. Due to the aggregate of imagery and
manipulation of scale, the experience of the exhibi-
tion combined estrangement from the familiar with
the equation of things of disparate natures. With no
captions or commentary to distract the attention, the
visitor could focus on the variations in the perspec-
tivai relationships between the ¡mages. The result was
an amalgam of signs that presented ¡n a condensed
spatiotemporal field ideally would provoke multiple
significations in a viewer.15 Denial of scale increased
knowledge, rather than obfuscated it. The blow-up
was employed in the service of investigating reality,
not as an endeavor in frustration.
Absent from the visual field of "Parallel" were
images drawn from the popular repertoire. Despite
5. Installation view of "Parallel of Life and Art," 1953. (©Henderson Archive)
the fact that a number of their associates, Paolozzi
included, drew inspiration from the more ubiquitous
and visceral realm of glossy photography, indeed the
primary form of ¡mage making engaged in by the
photographer of Blow-Up, the Smithsons rarely did.
While claiming to collect ads, they were not com-
fortable using the language of consumer culture,
even for subversive ends.16 The flooding of these
¡mages ¡nto architectural imagery proper as would
happen ¡n the collages of the Archigram group was
a phenomenon of the next decade and the milieu in
which the Economist Building was destined to
emerge. The slowness of architectural production
often defeats the theoretical process of design. The
Smithsons' architecture of captured contingencies
and ready-made components would have contrasted
with the revivalist styles of the West End under any
circumstances; by the mid-sixties, the solemnity of
their approach was also being overtaken by the
ambient escalation of consumer culture in that
vicinity. The visual dominance of the mass media at
the center swallowed up the grim realities at the
margin.
Zoom Wave
In 1966, Reyner Banham, who at the onset had been
a chief promoter of the Smithsons' built and written
work, reassessed that support. Banham had pub-
lished a definitive article in 1955 that explained the
"as found" philosophy under the title of "The New
Brutalism" (Figure 6). For Banham, Parallel of Life
and Art was the "locus classicus" of the New
Brutalism as it firmly established the priority of ¡mage
over beauty.17 The exhibition demonstrated all the
tenets of the doctrine in its structural incorporation
of scale, composition, and texture. More than the
built architecture of the landmark Hunstanton School
(1950-1954), "when Parallel of Life and Art had
enabled Brutalists to define their relationship to the
visual world in terms of something other than
geometry, then formality was discarded."18
Photographic documentation enabled the theory.
Brutalism Exposed: Photography and the Zoom Wave 18
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6. Illustrations for Reyner Banham's article on the "New Brutalism," Architectural Review, December 1955.
Over the course of the decade that followed his
article, however, Banham came to suspect the
acceptance of the abstraction inherent in photo-
graphic reproduction, as well as the graininess and
chiaroscuro of the overenlargement.19 The critique
was clearly articulated in the successive text, also
called The New Brutalism, followed by the subtitle,
"Ethic or Aesthetic?"20 If the reduction down to basic
elements, as the photographer discovered in Blow-
Up, merely revealed patterns, the New Brutalism was
left depleted of all its social aspirations. "For all its
brave talk of 'an ethic, not an aesthetic/ Brutalism
never quite broke out of the aesthetic frame of ref-
erence," Banham concluded.21
For Banham, avant-gardism had always implied
engagement with technology and he turned, at this
critical juncture, away from the raw materials and
untreated surfaces of industrial production to the
emerging domain of consumer-ready digital services
and the cooption of its visual sensibilities for archi-
tecture. In March 1966, Banham published another
key article, "Zoom Wave Hits Architecture," in New
Society.22 In it, he listed four little magazines at the
core of this trend. Polygon out of the Regent's Street
Polytechnic was the oldest of the bunch. The newest
was Clip-Kit, headed by Peter Murray at the Archi-
tectural Association. The third was Murray's previous
effort, Megascope, started at Bristol University
(Figure 7).23 The "reigning champion of protest
mags" was, of course, Archigram (Figure 8).24 Not
only was Banham's article illustrated with ¡mages
from that magazine but also the other publications
looked to Archigram for inspiration, as well as
reproducing its projects and interests: Fuller and
geodesies, plug-ins and megastructures, and plastics
and inflatables.
These magazines emerging from the architec-
ture schools possessed a dispositional resemblance to
the manifestos of the avant-gardes of the teens and
twenties that Banham had struggled to rehabilitate
7. Cover of Megascope, November 1965.
19 STEINER
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9. Plan and section for Living City, 1963. (©Archigram Archives)
advertising, science, science-fiction or pop-art
material, were presented in a deliberately disjointed
or random fashion/'32
Living City deployed the jumble of photographic
¡mages as signs from across the visual field, "from
trivia to valued drawings, and monster versions to
minuscule versions of everyday things," albeit of
different objects and for a different message
(Figure II).33 Significantly, the allegiance to the
camera lens, the prioritization of the visual, and the
holism of the ¡mage were absent. The camera was, in
fact, represented as part of a broader collage
dedicated to the subject of communications that
encompassed the written word, the film reel, the eye,
the phonograph record, the highway interchange, the
clock, and the corporate logos (Figure 12). The
organizers hoped to express as urban content "the
triviality of lighting a cigarette, or the hard fact of
moving 2 million commuters a day."34 Here the
21 STEINER
equation of scale is in the treatment of these two
events, both dependent on time, location, and
circumstance, as "equal- as facts of the shared
experience of the city."35 The ¡mages employed for
this end were described as being of the moment, with
the unavoidable admixture of past forms.36 Each
section of the exhibition- Man, Survival, Crowd,
Movement, Communication, Place and
Situation- utilized imagery for its own purposes.
An implicit premise was that architects rely on
prevailing vocabularies and that these expressions,
like those of fashion, have geographic specificity and
vary over time. While a designer might be keenly in
touch with the cultural moment, conventional
architecture inevitably outlasts methodology due to
its duration. There were already things in the urban
environment that had evolved to the point that they
were discarded upon outliving their use. Like the
proliferation of disposables, the life of the city was
becoming increasingly more detached from the
aggregate of municipal building types. The objects
that made up the content of the urban "Survival Kit,"
for example, provided a possible sample of material
urban life, ranging from necessities for generic bodily
maintenance to personal preferences for leisure
activities. Some forms of shelter already had ele-
ments of the expendable built into their production.
Urban vitality, however, was generated not by the
demarcations of the built environment, or even
objects at all, but rather by the discourse that took
place when people gathered.37 Those things and
conditions that enabled inhabitants to lead a vital
form of life relied on the opportunities that arose for
communication. The exhibition addressed this hier-
archy in spatial terms. Man, Crowd, and Survival, the
categories that addressed the inhabitants, formed
a cluster to the left of the entrance point. These
categories were contingencies dependent on the
variables of Movement, Place, and Situation that
unfolded in a crescent to the right. Communication,
the stimulant that enabled all the social conditions
for activity, had pride of place on entrance right.
From Big Ben to transportation systems, the images
in the exhibition were presented as the signs and
symbols of transmission.
"We are in pursuit," wrote Warren Chalk, the
senior member of the group in the catalog, "of an
idea, a new vernacular, something to stand alongside
the space capsules, computers and throw-away
packages of an atomic/electronic age."38 The "new
vernacular" on display in the exhibition was not one
of authentic naivete but rather the urbane accretions
of plenty. Take, for example, the photomontage of
the modishly dressed woman glancing over her
shoulder, mouth obscured by a furry stole as she
touches her seamed calf, that accompanied Chalk's
statement declaring the quest for an updated
vocabulary in the exhibition catalog (Figure 13). It is
an overtly voyeuristic ¡mage of a contemporary
woman caught from behind in a vulnerable posi-
tion.39 In a convergence of the glamor shot with stark
realism, the damp street on which she stoops is lined
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12. "Communications" collage, for the Living City exhibition, 1963. (©Archigram Archives)
that went much deeper than the introduction of
unorthodox forms.
Beyond Architecture, 1966
By the time Banham defined the Zoom Wave, the
Archigram project was already into its fifth year
and on its seventh newsletter, Beyond Architecture .41
From the expendables that still were, after all,
predominantly the product of an industrial culture,
they had graduated to the heightened transience of
networks. The cover sheet of Archigram 7 featured an
intricate weave of circuitry. The issue, assembled at
the end of 1 966, consisted of fifteen loose pages of
varying sizes printed in inks of red, green, blue,
brown, or black that came sheathed together in
a plastic bag. It was, certainly in terms of format, the
least coherent of the Archigrams. Still, Peter Cook's
editorial reflections commented on the manner in
which the ideas of previous issues, such as networks,
had begun to converge:
In Archigram 7 we are looking at several
interpretations of basic ideas thrown up in
23 STEINER
previous numbers: growth, change,
metamorphosis, indeterminacy, anti-zoning,
expendability, freezones, etc .... What started
out as separate threads seem now to be
meshing together, and like any catalysts they
are undergoing their own metamorphosis:
suddenly a much bigger conversation looms
(one which could not be imagined when we
started Archigram, which is more than the sum
of its parts): does architecture have anything to
do with life anymore? Are there any abstract
values worth waiting around for whilst we fall
further and further behind reality?
In conclusion came the warning, "there may be
no buildings at all in Archigram 8."
That architecture might not involve building was
among the convictions that the Archigram project
shared with Cedric Price, a figure who was a role
model for the group and a frequent contributor to the
publication. In a three-page essay included in the
seventh Archigram, Price explained that an interro-
gation from outside the discipline also required
a mode of representation that came from without.
13. Warren Chalk, "The Passing Presence," for the
Living City exhibition, 1963. (©Archigram Archives)
"Mathematical modernism," Price assessed, only
continued the tradition of "puerile pattern making"
from within. Interpolations of the grille, for example,
would fall into this category. He further criticized
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14. Warren Chalk, "Ghosts," Archigram 7, 1966. (©Archigram Archives)
diagrammatic propositions, singling out by way of
example the techniques proposed by Christopher
Alexander. He asserted that the manner in which an
idea was expressed set the tone for built work, as
analytical techniques were often mistaken for work-
ing drawings. Even the computer, Price observed at
this early juncture, was being used by most to reit-
erate what had been done before it was available
instead of opening up new possibilities. "This is yet
another plea," he wrote by way of explanation, "for
the architect to increase others' range of choice, but
in the context of the future planning it requires
conscious design application in calculated uncer-
tainty." To design for calculated uncertainty required
a language that did not fall back on past conceptions
or mistake the diagram for the finished product.42
The question that remained was how architectural
language could develop the capacity to represent
objects and, more complicatedly, conditions that
were always in transition.
Ghosts
Archigram 7 is redolent of loss. From the lack of
binding to the elimination of buildings, it mostly tells
a story about what architecture can no longer be.
Tucked in among the loose pages of expected
Archigram visuals, including several variations on the
plug-in concept and a dymaxion-style cut out puzzle,
was a letter written by Warren Chalk to David Greene
that addressed the losses of visual language directly.
Under the heading, "'Ghosts' (by Albert Ayler)," this
contribution dealt directly with the pressures of
influence that were brought to bear on the creation
of the new language, both from within the discipline
and from the cultural realm without.43 Chalk wrote
Greene:
Architecture is probably a hoax, a fantasy world
brought about through a desire to locate,
absorb and integrate into an overall obsession
a self-interpretation of the every-day world
around us. An impossible attempt to rationalise
the irrational. It is difficult to be exact about
influences, but those influences that enter our
unconscious consciousness are what I call
ghosts.
Our lives exist within a complex web of these
influences which we either accept or reject;
those we find acceptable are turned to
advantage; they become our preoccupations,
prejudices or preconceptions.
To demonstrate how architecture served as
a method to assimilate the everyday world, Chalk
prepared an array of ¡mages as a supplement to the
letter (Figure 14). On both sides of a sheet of inked
paper (15.5 x 12.5 inch), white ¡mages emerged
from a black background. The "A" side was dedicated
to the "unconscious consciousness" of preconcep-
tion. Surrounding a picture of Ayler with his saxo-
phone hovering over the word "GHOSTS" with an
adjustable compass strategically placed off to the
right were the apparitions of modernism's variations
on a framework.44 Included in the array were side
elevations of tubular steel chairs by Marcel Breuer,
the design for a Spherical Theater (1924) by Andreas
Weininger, the plan of the 5O-by-5O House (1950-
1 951 ) by Mies van der Rohe, and a plan of Ronchamp
(1955). These choices were not necessarily paradig-
matic items, but personal, more fanciful- an
impossible theater for spectacle, an unbuilt prototype
for mass housing by Mies, Le Corbusie^s more
whimsical later work. Strewn among those were
¡mages from without, including a silhouette of
a crane, outlines of tailor's mannequins, and a film-
strip by Richard Smith and Robert Freeman featuring
Brutalism Exposed: Photography and the Zoom Wave 24
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15. Warren Chalk, "Phantoms," Archigram 7, 1966. (©Archigram Archives)
a man in profile.45 Drawings of one of modernism's
most enduring ghosts, the four-door sedan, were
also incorporated.
Chalk continued:
Ghosts help reinforce and establish attitudes,
build a very personal language, a complex
labyrinth of ¡deals, constraints, theories, half-
remembered rules, symbols, words that
ultimately digested affect our concepts. It is
unpopular, but essential, that existing attitudes
come in for constant and rigorous renewal or
reappraisal. We are confronted with a dynamic
shifting pattern of events at both popular and
intellectual levels, both stimulating and
confusing. In this ever-changing climate, old
ghosts may be cast out and replaced by new;
25 STEINER
it is right that influences should last only as
long as they are useful to us, and our
architecture should reflect this. At a general
level it is becoming increasingly apparent that
due to historical circumstances the more
tangible ghosts of the past- those grim,
humourless, static, literary or visual
¡mages- will succumb to the onslaught of the
invisible media; the psychedelic vision; the
insight accompanying a joke; the phantoms of
the future.
Thus, the static things that linger and preoc-
cupy must be allowed to interact with the newer
dynamic conditions all around, even be supplanted
by them. The capacity for architecture to adapt to
the ever-changing climate directly correlated with
the capacity for its language to incorporate the
range of ever-changing influences from outside.
The "B" side, "Phantoms," to which the "Ghosts"
will succumb, included no works of architecture as
such (Figure 15). These included diagrams of geo-
desic triangulations, op art abstractions, a model
against a leopard print, diagrams of fleeting
impulses of various kinds, and a schema of a rocket
with hovering spiky, comic-style speech bubbles.
Whether an aerial, a telephone cord, a satellite dish,
or a strip of punched code, all forms of electronics-
age cultural production were architecturally
suggestive.
Other projects in the Archigram further
addressed the "onslaught of the invisible media":
the Free Time Node by Herron and Barry Snowden,
for example, was a serviced spine of programmatic
"cages" for leisure, education, shopping, and other
urban activities that allowed for freedom of
mobility within the urban framework. Mike Webb's
Rent-a-Wall provided some insight to accompany
a joke.46
Phantoms (of the Future)
If the language of captured contingency had once
appeared bold in the context of institutional
modernism, the juxtaposition of the design philos-
ophy of one decade with the built practice of
another exposed the contingencies of duration for
the process of ¡mage making. The Economist
Building stood in the heart of the city like one of
modernism's ghosts among the phantoms of the
future. Architecture as a vehicle of communications
had by then dramatically increased the reliance of
the discipline on the visual domain outside of
modern graphic strategies. Images of consumer
culture were drawn upon to generate the
atmosphere of transience and circulation, or even
equate lifestyle and architecture. Architecture as
a web of imagery implied that building was not
of the essence after all. Representation was
architecture in itself.
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22. Reprinted in Design by Choice (London: Academy Editions 1981),
pp. 64-65.
23. Murray later became the art editor for Architectural Design.
24. Despite its authors' claim of institutional neutrality (e.g., Archigram 5
declared: "This magazine is completely independent of any organization,
school of architecture, etc. It is registered as a business name"), the Ar-
chigrom was part of this phenomenon of the architectural schools and was
initially distributed by students at the AA and the Regent's Street
Polytechnic.
25. Editorial, Archigram 2, unpaginated.
26. Peter Cook, "Introduction," Living Arts 2 (1963): 69.
27. Maxwell's review noted that the group originally considered using
smells as well. When asked what sort of smells they might have contem-
plated and about the composition of the soundtrack, Dennis Crompton
responded, "I don't recall anything very positive, but city smells come to
mind. You must have noticed the different characteristic smells of Paris,
Milan, London and New York just for a start. Bob also refers to 'discon-
tinuous sound track'- cannot be much help with this either except to
suggest that you should first check on the availability of tape recorders in
1 963 as I'm not sure that we had them at that time. The earliest 1 /4" tape
that I have on my shelves is the Beatles 'Revolver dated 1966. We did
have records and Coltrane/Coleman would have been high on the hit list.
But it could just have easily been the ICA barman's radio " (e-mail,
December^ 1998).
28. In the working documents for an early version of the exhibition
proposal, Peter Smithson stated, "The first great creative period of
modern architecture finished in 1929 and work subsequent to this can be
regarded as exploratory work for the second great creative period
beginning now .... The second great period should be proclaimed by an
exhibition in which the juxtaposition of phenomenon from our various
fields would make obvious the existence of a new attitude" (Walsh,
Nigel Henderson: Parallel of Life and Art, p. 90). "Living City"
also claimed to speak for its generation (Editorial, Living Arts
2 [1963]: 1).
29. Many critics disliked this feature.
30. Cook, p. 66.
31 . A section of "Living Arts," a new journal founded by Theo Crosby for
the ICA, provided the textual accompaniment for the exhibition.
32. Robert Maxwell, "The Living City Exhibition at the ICA," Living Arts 3
(1964): 98.
33. Cook, p. 71 .
34. Ibid., p. 70.
35. Ibid., p. 70.
36. Ibid., p. 71.
37. Peter Cook, "Come-Co: The Key to the Vitality of the City," Living
Arts 2 (1963): 80.
38. Warren Chalk, "Cloop 7: Situation," Living Arts 2 (1963): 112.
39. Simon Sadler remarks on the issue of masculine identity with
relation to this image in "Living City Survival Kit: A Portrait of the
Architect as a Young Man," Art History, 26/4 (September 2003):
556-575.
40. The colors, however, were not reproduced in the Archigram publi-
cation where the feel of a zine was self-consciously maintained until its
demise.
41 . An exhibition, "Beyond Architecture: A Projection of 640 Images,"
opened on February 22, 1967 at the Oxford Museum of Modern Art.
42. This came to be the judgment directed at the Pompidou Center,
despite the commonplace that one of the few British architectural exports
of the twentieth century, the style known as "High Tech," followed in the
footsteps of Archigram. Indeed, a group bus trip was undertaken to see
the completed Pompidou Center (1977), some highlights of which were
caught on film. The arrival in Paris, inevitably, was accompanied by
disappointment. Though they recognized their cartoons in the work, the
literal application of diagrammatic color to the overblown external ducts
converted what in the drawings was a metaphor of circulation and
exchange into a monumentalization of services. On-camera musings
reveal bewilderment at the fundamental lack of dynamism on display.
While the frame enabled internal flexibility of program, the core issue
of transience, from the structural incorporation of time to the exchanges
of technology and consumption, was untouched. The consensus was
that the Pompidou Center was, though filtered through the
representational lens of Archigram, a static building. Thus, the Archigram
project was converted into a traditional one. Dennis Postle recorded the
bus trip from London to France and the observations of Price and the
others as part of Four Films, Tatooist International Productions, Arts
Council, 1980.
43. Ayler first recorded "Ghosts" on Spiritual Unity (1964).
44. Chalk was an avid enthusiast of jazz and sought to extend the analogy
of "jamming" to design.
45. The image came from the first issue of Living Art magazine,
captioned "A film made by Richard Smith and Robert Freeman in 8mm
colour (running time 10 minutes)."
46. "You'll appreciate Rent-a-Wall's good looks and versatility. . . . says
president Fred X. Shooman."
47. "International Ideas," Archigram 7, unpaginated.
48. Conversation with Greene (June 1, 1998).
49. Joseph Kosuth, "Art After Philosophy," in C. Harrison and P. Wood,
eds., Art In Theory 1900-1990, An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1992), p. 864. Or as number ten of Sol LeWitt's "Sentences on
Conceptual Art" claimed, "Ideas alone can be works of art; they are in
a chain of development that may eventually find some form. All ideas
need not be made physical" (ibid., pp. 837-839).
50. "When it is raining in Oxford Street the architecture is no more im-
portant than the rain; in fact the weather has probably more to do with the
pulsation of the living city at that given moment" ("Introduction," pp.
70-71).
27 STEINER
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