Archinect - News

Colin Fournier, popular Archigram co-founder and UCL professor, passes away at 79

2024-09-17T12:35:00-04:00

Colin Fournier, the British architect and planner who helped form Archigram with Sir Peter Cook and others in the early 1960s, has passed away at age 79. He was best known for the firm’s 2003 Kunsthaus Graz and work with Bernard Tschumi on the design of Parc de la Villette in Paris.

A commemoration from the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture notes: “In addition to his architectural practice, Colin was a dedicated and well-loved educator. He joined The Bartlett in 1998 and inspired generations of students for almost two decades with his distinctive approach to design. As Professor of Urban Design, he was instrumental in the formation and directorship of the Urban Design MArch and led the successful Unit 18 on the Architecture MArch programme for several years with a number of teaching partners. Colin inspired countless students and colleagues throughout his life, and his absence will be felt profoundly by all who were fortunate enough to know him."

In a statement to the Architects’ ...

Avant-garde architectural group Archigram sells archive to Hong Kong museum for £1.8 million

2019-01-25T16:07:00-05:00

Archigram, the architectural studio known for its avant-garde theoretical projects, has sold their archive for £1.8 million to the soon-to-open M+ museum in Hong Kong. Set to open later this year, the museum designed by Herzog & de Meuron will focus on 20th and 21st century design and architecture, moving image, and visual art from Hong Kong, Asia, and beyond.

Despite attempts to obstruct the sale, Britain's new cultural secretary Jeremy Wright has allowed the deal to move forward. This follows a decade long search on behalf of Archigram to find a buyer for their colossal archive of drawings and models.

How far off were the radical architects of the 1960s?

2018-12-31T12:53:00-05:00

The 1960s, a time when possibilities and technologies in many areas — artistic, political, scientific — seemed broader than ever, remain a seductive decade. Fifty years on from the first moon landing we need to remember that the most striking image from space (and the one that had the most real impact) were not those of the dusty, dead surface of the moon but those of our own planet, glimpsed as something delicate, whole and beautiful.

The future used to look brighter.

This may be the feeling gained when looking back at some of the most radical visions from familiar names in architecture. Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom and Cedric Price each took their shot at a future based on post-war rhetoric, and we continue to marvel at the gap between their expectations and our reality.

Walking City, by Archigram

But this gap may be wider and more troublesome than anyone could have imaged at the time of these images of the imagined future were produced, according to Financial Times writer Edwin Heathcote. Looking back at the future of the 1960's from the 2010's might, in fact, be our way of coping with our precarious future, Heathcote argues. "All this is an escapist fantasy," he writes, "a way of sublimating our awareness of catastrophic climate change and our guilt at participating in the economies that fuel it."

No Stop City, by Archizoom

Heathcote ends his compelling article with a warning against the provocation of ...

It's Archigram's Future: We are just living in it

2017-11-17T12:39:00-05:00

Archigram can be seen as part of several trends that influence metropolitan life to this day. One was the Pop Art movement, where color, dynamism, fashion, and disposability were presented in graphics as understated as a passing billboard.

While history may be said to define us, it could also be that history paves the roads in which we will ultimately walk. Archigram, known for being an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s and for its neo-futuristic, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist theoretical projects, may, in fact, have been more prophetic than theoretical. While their work has been the precedent for endless variations of conceptual and realized projects, it may also ultimately end up being the destination as well.

In new exhibition, Sir Peter Cook reflects on architecture's possibilities

2015-09-08T12:42:00-04:00

Cook’s artwork of over four decades is being exhibited for the first time in India. [...] “I want to make it uncomfortable — for the philistine, for the boring architect, for the person who wants his building to be predictable,” says Cook [...] “Architecture is what you do with the potential of life.”

Editor's Picks #350

2014-01-14T13:15:00-05:00

The latest edition of ShowCase highlights CRAB Studio’s Abedian School of Architecture in Queensland, Australia.

Plus, the fourth installment in Screen/Print (Archinect’s experimentation in translation across media) features "fruity labors" from the quarterly journal MAS Context's 20th issue, Narrative.

News
Architect Magazine reported the American Folk Art Museum will be razed for a Diller Scofidio + Renfro's designed MoMA expansion.

Amelia Taylor-Hochberg Editorial Manager for Archinect, went to the trouble of gathering "a slew of responses to the proposal, both indignant and accepting, from Archinect contributors and beyond".

HotelSphinx thought the excuses/reasons given for demolition were ironic "DS+R is a firm that made a building out of fog for the Expo in Yverdon-les-Bains in 2002. Yes, fog. But aligning floor plates is too difficult? They have got to be joking me".

Meanwhile, Mason White of Lateral Office was perplexed.

"Architects revolt about 2 high-society architecture firms in...

Arup Proposes Radical Building of the Near Future

2013-02-12T11:36:00-05:00

The global engineering firm envisions a "smart" building that will plug into "smart" urban infrastructure and cater to an increasingly dense and technology-savvy urban population.

Download Arup's January 2013 issue of Foresight [PDF]

75 Peters

2011-10-31T16:18:12-04:00

75 PETERS celebrates iconic British Architect (and co-founder of Archigram) SIR PETER COOK's 75th birthday. 75 established and emerging international artists have produced a portrait of Sir Peter to auction for charity Architecture for Humanity.