Ron Herron, 1964
The Robotic City That Could Wander the Earth and Go Where It Is Needed
Between 1964 and 1966, the world of architecture was introduced to the Walking City, a concept for a metropolis consisting of a series of mobile structures that could move about on enormous telescopic steel legs. The idea seemed to come from the world of science fiction, and to owe more to the art of drawing and collage than to what people usually see as architecture. Yet the creator of the Walking City was Ron Herron, an architect who, as he puts it, ‘attempts to make architecture by fusing building, technology, and art to make something “special” for the user’.
Herron was a member of Archigram, a group of British architects that proposed numerous far-out schemes in the 1960s and 1970s. The members of Archigram – Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb – did not earn their livings by getting things built. They were and are important for their ideas and their influence, which they spread through exhibitions, pamphlets, lectures, teaching and a kind of multimedia show called the Archigram Opera. They were very good at publicity – Peter Cook even got himself photographed (with Twiggy, Tom Courtney and Joe Orton) for Queen magazine.
Their most famous projects – all unbuilt – included the Plug-In City (a framework into which standard dwellings could be fitted), the Living Pod (a movable dwelling), the Instant City (an airborne city that could arrive where it was needed, hovering above the ground suspended from balloons) and the Walking City. These were designs that stood on its head the idea that architecture was about creating fixed, permanent structures. They embraced technology. They accepted consumerism and the idea of disposal commodities. They looked beyond the conventions of building to produce structures that could resemble machines or organic growths.
The Walking City consists of multi-storey buildings mounted on legs – the most famous drawing shows structures that seem to be at least thirty storeys high. The ambulant buildings mostly have an ovoid, rather insect-like form. The city is designed to be movable so that it can shift to another site if the existing one proves unsuitable, or so that it can go where it is needed. If it looks like something out of science fiction, this is because the drawings prepared by Herron bristle with technological detail. But they tell the viewer little about how the structures were meant to work in practice.
These great walking forms are very much of their time. They seem to draw their inspiration in part from military technology. One possible source is the Second World War Maunsell forts – steel, anti-aircraft forts moored to the riverbed in the Thames estuary and supported on tall, metal legs. These were in the news in the mid-1960s because in 1964 a pirate radio station had started to transmit from one of the forts, having added a long scaffolding pole (on which flew the skull and crossbones flag) as an antenna. The structures of the Walking City reminded some people of the forts, and Herron’s architecture was criticized by some as war-like. At a conference in Folkestone in 1966, Herron was heckled with shouts of ‘fascism’, ‘war machine’ and ‘totalitarian’ when he spoke about the Walking City.
Herron may have been interested in the appearance of the Maunsell forts, but he was no fascist. For Archigram and its supporters, the metallic forms of the city were more like survival pods than weapons, structures that could protect people in the face of a disaster – nuclear war being the most pressing such fear in 1964. The city might be needed anywhere: a wilderness or a conventional metropolis. Herron’s drawing shows the Walking City striding towards New York City, knee-deep in the water of the Hudson River, with the Manhattan skyline behind. The image conveys its designer’s daring, not only to have the pods walking through water, but also to juxtapose it with one of the great cities of the world.
There was something jokey about this coming together of opposites – solid, permanent New York and the shifting, water-borne Walking City. This hint of humour was emphasized by Archigram’s visual style, which drew on collages using magazine imagery, space-age typography and Day-Glo colours. But there was also a serious point: that it would be useful to rethink the city, and that technology might have solutions to the world’s problems. This, too, was an idea very much of its time – shifting a city around on insectile legs was going to require a huge amount of fuel, and the design could only come from a period when consumption was not the issue it is now.
So if they were unbuilt, unbuildable and impractical, why are Archigram’s designs so important? First, because they make people look at things differently. Like Richard Buckminster Fuller’s ideas (see Dome over Manhattan entry here), they overturn existing notions and ask difficult questions (as Fuller asked: ‘How much does your building weigh?’). If you question orthodoxies about buildings being permanent, heavy, rectilinear objects, that questioning might lead to new and promising paths.
Some architects certainly thought so. When Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano designed the Pompidou Centre in Paris – with its eccentric exterior, all coloured ducts, pipes and escalator-carrying tubes, and its adaptable interior spaces – they were influenced by Archigram. Other architects who have been given the label High-tech at some point in their careers, such as Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw (whose work has celebrated the way a building is constructed or has used grid-like structures to which prefabricated modular elements have been added), are working in the same area as Archigram. And the team influenced thousands of architects through their teaching. Concepts such as prefabrication, lightweight structures and adaptability were not invented by Archigram. But their questioning, their provocative graphics and their flair for publicity brought such ideas into the public eye, and made it possible to entertain, seriously for a while, the notion that a city could walk through water and plug itself into the infrastructure of Manhattan.
