The Neo-Avant Garde of the 1960's and 70's: Cohorts and Ongoing Legacies

1 Course Unit

The 1960’s and 70’s saw the emergence of a number of counter-cultural groups across the world which challenged modernist universalist concepts. Most of these groups were young and iconoclastic, presenting their ideas as visionary statements, well outside the constraints of built architecture, which were identified with the problematized “establishment” architecture officially sanctioned by the academies and professional publications. Most of these groups were short-lived, but their radically charged ideas continue to influence ideation to the present day, in work which moved from rhetorical statement to built fact. Theirs was an architecture of resistance, an architecture positioned against the status quo, an architecture of renewal which embraced complexities of references, inspirations, and ambitions. This seminar covers the early manifestos and projects through the work and ideas of the latter day. The original groups and individuals to be addressed: (1) Archigram and Cedric Price (UK), (2) the Situationists, Utopie and Yona Friedman (France), (3) Soleri/Arcosanti, Ant Farm, Drop City and Ambasz (US), (4) Hans Hollein and Hans-Rucker-Co (Austria), and (5) Metabolism (Japan). Tying the work of the era through a series of topical themes entails the construction of a network of influences, story lines, hermeneutics--latter-day reappearances of vestigial sources, phantoms of radicalisms past. Through a series of readings, presentations and discussions, we will weave these together, addressing concepts of the utopian and the visionary, radical ecologies as environmentalism emerged in the sensibility of the era, megastructures built and unbuilt, how architecture was influenced by the sciences of communication, biology and information, how science fiction entered into architecture, how ideas of housing evolved from megastructures into dwelling of soft membranes and finally, ideas of event and happening in 1960's theater and performance art, then and now. Coming into the present day, these groups prophesied, to an uncanny degree, many facets present in contemporary architecture, from to the impact of technology in general on the architectural project, to the active exploration of early environmental hybridities, to immersive and responsive environments, to the challenge of material tangibility by virtual realms, and simultaneously, the introduction of new types of organic and plastic materials.” Fall 1 Course Unit