The title Archigram came from the notion of a more simple and urgent item than a Journal, like a telegram or aerogramme - hence, "archi(tecture)-gram."".

The first book-length critical and historical account of an ultramodern architectural movement of the 1960s that advocated "living equipment" instead of buildings. In the 1960s, the architects of Britain's Archigram group and Archigram magazine turned away from conventional architecture to propose cities that move and houses worn like suits of clothes. In drawings inspired by pop art and psychedelia, architecture floated away, tethered by wires, gantries, tubes, and trucks. In Archigram: Architecture without Architecture, Simon Sadler argues that Archigram's sense of fun takes its place beside the other cultural agitants of the 1960s, originating attitudes and techniques that became standard for architects rethinking social space and building technology. The Archigram style was assembled from the Apollo missions, constructivism, biology, manufacturing, electronics, and popular culture, inspiring an architectural movement—High Tech—and influencing the postmodern and deconstructivist trends of the late twentieth century. Although most Archigram projects were at the limits of possibility and remained unbuilt, the six architects at the center of the movement, Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb, became a focal point for the architectural avant-garde, because they redefined the purpose of architecture. Countering the habitual building practice of setting walls and spaces in place, Archigram architects wanted to provide the equipment for amplified living, and they welcomed any cultural rearrangements that would ensue. Archigram: Architecture without Architecture—the first full-length critical and historical account of the Archigram phenomenon—traces Archigram from its rediscovery of early modernist verve through its courting of students, to its ascent to international notoriety for advocating the "disappearance of architecture."

Beyond Archigram is the first study of the prehistory of digital representation to focus on the magazine Archigram, the magazine published in London irregularly between 1961 and 1970 and the name of the group that created it. Archigram is among the most significant phenomena to emerge in post-war architectural culture. The wired environments first advertised on its pages formulated an architectural vocabulary of metamorphosis and obsolescence that cross-pollinated industrial and digital technology at the same time as complex systems were becoming commercially available. Through archival, theoretical and visual analysis, Hadas Steiner explores the process through which this model was envisaged and disseminated within an international network of practitioners and shows how the assimilation of Archigram imagery set the course for the visual output of what are now commonplace tools in architectural practice. This book will provide a foundation for further inquiry into the integration of digital technology at every level of design.

In the decade of the Beatles and the moon landing, cybernetics and megacities, an ambitious group of young British architects burst on the scene with a bold manifesto for urban building. The Archigram group pioneered a playful brand of architecture that was visionary, utopian, and grounded in social need. Through a provocative series of publications and exhibitions, the avant-garde cooperative challenged an architectural establishment they felt had become reactionary and self-serving. They advocated a complete rethinking of the relationships between technology, society, and architecture, rightly predicting today's information revolution decades before it came to pass. A Guide to Archigram 1961-74 is a compact history showcasing the group's most interesting and influential schemes, from walking cities and plug-in universities to inflatable dwellings and free time nodes. This book, the most comprehensive guide to Archigram's voluminous output, collects the critical responses of the period, in addition to hundreds of drawings and photographs.

Focusing on the creative and inventive significance of drawing for architecture, this book by one of its greatest proponents, Peter Cook, is an established classic. It exudes Cook's delight and catholic appetite for the architectural. Readers are provided with perceptive insights at every turn. The book features some of the greatest and most intriguing drawings by architects, ranging from Frank Lloyd Wright, Heath-Robinson, Le Corbusier, and Otto Wagner to Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Coop Himmelb(l)au, Arata Isozaki, Eric Owen Moss, Bernard Tschumi, and Lebbeus Woods; as well as key works by Cook and other members of the original Archigram group. For this new edition, Cook provides a substantial new chapter that charts the speed at which the trajectory of drawing is moving. It reflects the increasing sophistication of available software and also the ways in which 'hand drawing' and the 'digital' are being eclipsed by new hybrids—injecting a new momentum to drawing. These 'crossovers' provide a whole new territory as attempts are made to release drawing from the boundaries of a solitary moment, a single-viewing position, or a single referential language. Featuring the likes of Toyo Ito, Perry Culper, Izaskun Chinchilla, Kenny Tsui, Ali Rahim, John Berglund, and Lorene Faure, it leads to fascinating insights into the effect that medium has upon intention and definition of an idea or a place. Is a pencil drawing more attuned to a certain architecture than an ink drawing, or is a particular colour evocative of a certain atmosphere? In a world where a Mayer drawing is creatively contributing something different from a Rhino drawing, there is much to demand of future techniques.

'Exquisite Corpse' was a game played by the surrealists in which someone drew on a piece of paper, folded it and passed it to the next person to draw on until, finally, the sheet was opened to reveal a calculated yet random composition. In this entertaining and provocative book, Michael Sorkin suggests that cities are similarly assembled by many players acting with varying autonomy in a complicit framework. An unfolding terrain of invention, the city is also a means of accommodating disparity, of contextualizing sometimes startling juxtapositions. Sorkin's aim is to widen the debate about the creation of buildings beyond the immediate issues of technology and design. He discusses the politics and culture of architecture with daring, often devastating, observations about the institutions and personalities who have dominated the profession over the past decade. Their preoccupation with the empty style of 'beach houses and Disneyland' has consistently trivialized the full constructive scope of contemporary architecture's possibilities. Sorkin's interventions range from the development scandals of New York where 'skyscrapers stand at the intersection between grid and greed', through the deconstructivist architectural culture of Los Angeles, to the work and ideas of architects, developers and critics such as Alvar Aalto, Norman Foster, Paul Goldberger, Michael Graves, Coop Himmelblau, Philip Johnson, Leon Krier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Rogers, Carlo Scarpa, James Stirling, Donald Trump, Tom Wolfe and Lebbeus Woods. Throughout Sorkin combines stinging polemic with a powerful call for a rebirth of architecture that is visionary and experimental--a recuperated 'dreamy science'

Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham’s writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham’s habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham’s early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the “clip-on” approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of “well-tempered environments” fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late-career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano. Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham’s late work, including fresh archival materials related to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes of High Tech, the manuscript he left unfinished at his death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham’s previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.