Archigo
[Installation, mixed media]
Archigo started as an urgent message, a broadcast about a "new generation....(which) must arise", and continued with a rapid succession of publications and exhibitions in a span of a few years, all of which were characterized by audacious criticism and provocative synthesis. These works were among the most influential shock vibrations of the 1960's for architects and planners around the world. In a decade that ended with riots expressive of social and political disorder, the group of young Chicago- based architects began and sustained a campaign of environmental revolution.
The Archigo virus spread to various "Archigo-zones" across the world and found seeds in London, Amsterdam and Tokyo. Archigram and other noted archiutectural provocations followed the Archigo.
Recently acquired works, models and objects discovered at the Illinois Institute of Technology show the influence of Archigo's utopian visions on a generation of urban planners and designers who resisted the Chicago School of Architecture and tuned into the radical visions of the New Babylonian movement. The exhibit shows a sampling of Archigo's remixing of the city of big shoulders from their first garage show 1 mile west of the IIT campus in the neighborhood of Bridgeport.
Aligned with the Yippies, and the peace Movement, the group fused radical politics with liberatory architecture. They went beyond function to images of fantasy based on mechanical invention and pop culture. Personal air balloons and imaginary lake front landscapes merge into geographic liberation from war and the state of crisis.
