Friday 7 December 2012

Comic Built

    Amazing Archigram 4: Zoom Issue inspired the Cushicle with many new perspectives on design. To Archigram 4, technology was form, a building was no more than a bag of frozen peas and comics were predictions. Space comic technology could be built.
As stated in this editorial by Peter Cook, Archigram used contemporary imagery to represent their decade's ingenuity.

“It would have been too easy to look over one’s shoulder and fill Archigram with three dozen of the respected goodies of the last fifty years (interesting that so many would be pre-1930), and the comment ‘What have we lost? What are we missing?’ Yet set against such a feeling of loss is the continuance of something that has not yet disappeared into historical perspective -a tradition that is still developing, and is still original to many of the basic gestures of modern architecture. It shares much of its expression with thise dim, neurotic, enthusiastic days of the Ring, Der Sturm, and the Futurist Manifesto- the architectural weirdies of the time feeding the infant Modern Movement. Our document is the Space-Comic; its reality is in the gesture, design and natural styling of hardware new to our decade – the capsule, the rocket, the bathyscope, the Zidpark, the handy-pak.
Is it possible for the space-comic’s future to relate once again with buildings-as-built? Can the near-reality of the rocket-object and hovercraft-object, which are virtually ceasing to be cartoons, carry the dynamic (but also non-cartoon) building with them into life as it is? Or shall we be riding in these craft amongst an environment made of CLASP? The ridiculousness of such situation can be compared with the world of Schinkel seen by the Futurist.”
- Peter Cook, Editorial from Amazing Archigram 4