Multiplicity Versus the "Image" Of Multiplicity: An Analysis of Archigram Group's Design for the "Plug-In City"

Abstract

This paper approaches the work of English group Archigram, composed by six architects and whose collective production goes from 1961 until 1974. It focuses, more specifically, at the project for the Plug-In City, elaborated by Peter Cook (member of the group) beginning from 1964. The objective is to pose some questions about the “image” of the multiplicity and variety proposed by Archigram in Plug-In City, aiming to confront it with the complexity of metropolitan conformation and production processes which, in most cases, slip off the regulating dimension of architectural design – organizing itself, instead, in search of other forms of communication, expansion and systemic integration. To achieve it, one examines briefly the group’s discussions from Archigram magazine history, their main ideas divulgation vehicle. Next, one analyses the Plug-In City project, its graphic pieces and also some correlate elaborations in design and theory, with the aim to situate the analyzed object within architectural history. Finally, one recovers some historic formulations of interest (Reyner Banham, Manfredo Tafuri and Alan Colquhoun) which, on approaching Archigram’s oeuvre through different methodological views, give us a multiple view of the problem, pointing toward some restrictions and possibilities – not only ideological, but also historical – which were more and more emphatically affirmed at that moment, in the scope of architecture and cities’ discourse.