In the tutorial, one of the readings we discussed was Imagining Urban Futures by Carl Abbott. It was about a variety of fantastical, impossible moving cities, mostly shown in science fiction movies. For example, Ron Herron’s Walking City was a self-contained city that looked like a robotic insect-like creature, and could move around on its legs like some giant monster seen in fiction. It was designed in such a way so that its citizens wouldn’t need to leave, almost like it was a “giant caravan”. They could leave if the situation of wherever the city was at turned bad, a concept of impossible freedom, without consequence or losses.
The city was designed this way because of the mentality of Ron Herron’s group, known as Archigram, and introduced it in an era when many new and innovative ideas were popping up every where in British society. Archigram was a group of British architects who rebelled against what Abbott called “stuffy academic modernism”. I stated that there aren’t any consequences or losses, and that the freedom felt “impossible” because I was thinking with the mentality of the Archigram group. To them, this city might be the ideal city, because people who lived there wouldn’t be restricted by their country’s politics, their social class, gender, age and many other parts of their identities. Because of the city’s freedom to move anywhere its inhabitants desire, it makes them unanchored by their identities, giving them freedom in every part of their lives. In my opinion, it would be such a fascinating concept to try out in the real world, but the politics in most countries likely wouldn’t allow such a thing to happen as it would be out of their control.
In the end however, these fascinating, impossible, sci-fi cities introduced in Abbott’s book are all great definitions and representations of the incredible innovative minds of young architects, who use their designs as a medium to express their concerns or displeasures with social, political, environmental, and many other problems within the modern world.
Ip Fung Yuen, Edward 3035821415
I appreciate that you discussed the societal and historical driving forces in Archigram’s work. If you would like to focus on their work, it would be great if you can cite one of their projects which demonstrates the nomadic vision of a moving city such as Instant City to elaborate further.
I also share the same fascination with cities or spaces that are not bound by politics and celebrates equality . With the rise of cryptocurrency and DeFi which aimed to decentralise and destabilise the monetary system of the real world, there is a whole new world of NFT artworks or even the possibility of buying a piece of virtual plot of the real world – all these digital movements leads to the question of: Could the virtual real / cyber spaces exploit this potential of liberating the aforementioned constrains from the real world?