Experience Archigram as a LEGO Man

It seems Archigram has taken over the minds of LEGO users all around the world. Have you ever wished you could be a little yellow head man so you could build your own city or block house? Well, Dave DeGobbi’s “Crawler Town” not only shows the extremes the creative mind can go, but it also makes us envy the little guys even more. I bet Dave has no idea that in his conception of “Crawler Town”, he is actually re-living a 1960’s posture of a new kind of town proposed byArchigram.                                                                            .

Archigram was founded in 1961. Their pop-inspired ideas of mobility – walking cities in particular– and radical urban design have inspired many contemporary architects and continue to inspire futuristic designs today. For Archigram, mobility was important and omnipresent, even for the urban landscape that became a “Walking City”. Buildings can form new clusters anywhere to deal with the changing demands of a city. Yesterday’s offices could change into tomorrow’s museums and kindergardens.

“A new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of ‘Modern’ yet in fact retains those precepts. We have chosen to by pass the decaying Bauhaus image which is an insult to functionalism. You can roll out steel – any length. You can blow up a balloon – any size. You can mould plastic – any shape. Blokes that built the Forth Bridge – they didn’t worry.”

Rather than dwell on urban destruction, with projects such as “Living City,” “Plug-in City,” “Walking City” and “Blow-out Village,” Archigram propagated an optimistic and fun approach to nomadic architecture that was supposed to set people free. How workable their architectural designs were in practice is debatable, but they sure inspired quite a few fellow architects; Will Alsop’s Peckham Library in south London and Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris are among the most well-known.

As DeGobbi describes it:

“Crawler town roams the barren wastes of a post steam-punk world after cataclysmic climate change do to excessive coal use. Several such cities exist but Crawler town is the most popular due to the Aero 500 hydrogen fuel cell Air races that are held. Many people travel the wastes to Crawler town for vacation and to enjoy rare luxuries like Pizza, fresh vegetables and Beer. Travelling the wastes in search of minerals and aquifers ( vital for survival) the mobility of the city keeps it away from the vicious sand storms of the wastes”. – Dave DeGobbi.