Archigram’s System’s Philosophy & Sustainability: The Missing Link

Archigram seemed to be on the right track, philosophising the importance of ‘seeing everything in relationship’, simultaneity, whole system approaches to design. I believe their writing (at least in the Archigram 7 publication) was evidently still overcome by its context in time despite their best efforts to ‘see into the future’. It was written at a time when consumerism was seen as sophisticated advancement of human development, where environmental sustainability and human impacts on the degradation of natural systems was not as widely understood as we know today. Clearly, the talk on architecture being sympathetic to emergent situations is highly relevant when considering sustainable design approaches; it is the method in which they propose to achieve this that reveals a different understanding of embodied energy, resource limitation etc. For example, ‘the expendable house’, ‘kit-of-parts’ etc, essentially still characterises a ‘throw away’ society. I believe that many of their concepts engaging with the idea of high density living are extremely useful and simply need to be rethought alongside closed loop design solutions.

Sadler, S., 2005. Beyond Architecture. In. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. pp90-138.