Simon Sadler

From 1957 to 1972, the artistic and political movement known as the Situationist International (SI) worked aggressively to subvert the conservative ideology of the Western world. The movement's broadside attack on "establishment" institutions and values left its mark upon the libertarian left, the counterculture, the revolutionary events of 1968, and more recent phenomena from punk to postmodernism. In this book Simon Sadler investigates the artistic, architectural, and cultural theories that were once the foundations of Situationist thought, particularly as they applied to the form of the modern city.

Simon Sadler searches for the Situationist City among the detritus of tracts, manifestos, and works of art that the SI left behind. The book is divided into three parts. The first, "The Naked City," outlines the Situationist critique of the urban environment as it then existed. The second, "Formulary for a New Urbanism," examines Situationist principles for the city and for city living. The third, "A New Babylon," describes actual designs proposed for the Situationist City.… (altro)

While it’s easy to be fixated on this British avant-garde architectural collective’s fusion of SF and pop imagery, Sadler finds some real substance in Archigram’s effort to revive the concept of architecture as being a machine for living, by embracing a combination of technological consumerism and systems thinking in the face of an already stolid official modernism in a Cold War Britain lacking housing stock. The problem is that while Archigram shared much with the conceptualist turn in art in the Sixties, it’s lack of a political critique made it seem reactionary to socially concerned students by 1968 (and Archigram was always very concerned with education) while its lack of physical accomplishments always denied the collective gravitas in the eyes of working architects; particularly as architecture was on the verge of taking a historicist turn in the United States. Perhaps it just boils down to the fact that form-giving and building, not conceptualism, is the act expected of an architect, and by the early Seventies the "Zoom" moment of technological romanticism had passed. Still, it should be noted that great modern art museum that is Pompidou Center was largely a product of the students of Archigram, and arguably represents the best of their thinking.… (altro)