AGENCIES OF DRAWINGS: UTOPIA AND TECHNOLOGIES OF GREEN ARCHITECTURES
This lecture introduces Annette Fierro’s recent book, “Architectures of the Technopolis: Archigram and the British High Tech,” (LundHumphries 2024). As she says in the book, between the two groups the “affiliation has been so obvious for so long that it seems that it is either forgotten or inspires denial. There is the self-evident commonality of language: overblown machines considered both as iconographic image and as technological pursuit. Archigram originated as a group of young iconoclasts who set out to challenge post-functionalist righteousness, gaining notoriety through a series of self-published pamphlets that could have been neither more modest nor more ambitious. In complete contrast, the architects known popularly as the High Tech emerged onto the popular stage through emphatic acts of the building – buildings of increasing scale, technological prowess and prominence in international recognition.” Her new research departs from the first chapter, “Utopias Past to Politics Present: The Elusive Garden.” The emblem of the talk begins with a image by Peter Cook, “City Hidden” of 2013, one of a series of many drawings and paintings that he embarked upon after Archigram that explore his vision of the contemporary city as one overwhelmed by nature, that is, literal nature—soil, plants, and trees. It is her contention that these visions and others like them from that era established a unique paradigm between architecture, technology, and nature which invades contemporary trends of vegetal architecture as well as urban policies of greening and wilding cityscapes.
