Jan Freeman writes The Word column for Ideas.
Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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Christopher Shea writes the Critical Faculties column for Ideas.
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« Hodgman on Duty | Main | Sports Illustrated loves Boston... » Tuesday, June 19, 2007Archigram gets some loveSomething else I wrote about for Ideas back in 2005: Archigram. Simon Sadler's "Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture," had just been published by MIT Press, and I asked the author about the legacy of the "cadre of British architects who in the 1960s struggled to end the tyranny of modern architecture's concrete-steel-and-glass boxes--and to redesign the very purpose of architecture, whose fixation on erecting structures they felt was out of step with the mobility and fluidity of postwar life." As I put it. "Archigram believed that architects couldn't go on planning big models with carefully designed outcomes that make people behave in certain ways -- they thought spaces should be shapeless, that the market would determine their design," Sadler told me. This may have sounded progressive in the '60s -- but one unforeseen result, Sadler noted, was the infinitely re-organizable (but ultimately banal) layout of big-box stores like Wal-Mart. Ugh. Anyway, Archigram founding member Peter Cook was knighted earlier this month, for his "services to architecture." Forget Wal-Mart. Check out Cook's Kunsthaus, in Graz, Austria:  Now, that is progressive. Via BLDGBLOG. Posted by Joshua Glenn at 07:52 AM
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