How the Archigram architectural collective, profiled in a comprehensive new book, designed for a more radical, and random, future Neatly bound, colorfully illustrated, and comprehensive in its scope, Archigram: The Book, a new exploration of the influential and imaginative ?60s British architecture collective, ticks all the coffee table boxes. It?s a big, bold look back at a group whose big, bold ideas?collectivist housing, flexible design, and architecture with wit, verve, and humor that seems transposed from comic books?made a massive impact on design.

Circa Press

The problem with that framing is that Archigram?s work still looks decidedly like the future, half a century later. Collected in whole for the first time, this compendium of the collective ideas and inspirations of Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb reads like a more colorful, creative, and upbeat view of where modern design should be headed. Isn?t their Walking City concept from 1964?self-contained pods that roam the city streets?an early premonition about the future of autonomous vehicles" Or the Plug-In-City, also from 1964, a machine-like megastructure of modular units that constantly rearrange and rework themselves, a framework for today?s micro apartments and co-living" Sketches for wearable architecture (such as the ?cushicle?) and other ideas dismissed as glib simply viewed design as something flexible, responsiv...