Word: archigram
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...There are some puzzling omissions in this exhibition. Where is Buckminster Fuller? Or the modular housing of Moshe Safdie? But there are plenty of high points, including the Monty Pythonesque drawings by Archigram, a group of British design theorists from the '60s and '70s whose fantasies on paper, such as The Walking City, have long since worked their way into the collective psyche of architecture students. An actual building with a plain debt to The Walking City was even completed last year in Toronto: Will Alsop's Ontario College of Art and Design is a massive tabletop of classrooms...
...Archigram drawings and watercolors were musings about what the postindustrial city had become, a compact node of entertainments and spectacles in a society of people in motion. That's the spirit of Peter Cook's Instant City in a Field Long Elevation from 1969, a deadpan fantasia of a city with all its diversions that could be lowered from the air by balloon. The philosopher Francis Bacon once wrote that "the monuments of wit survive the monuments of power." If that's true, then these whimsical flights of fancy will still be around long after some of the uglier skylines...
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