Archigram and Jay McCarroll

Jay McCarroll - spring 2007
to see entire collection go here

I learned something with Jay McCarroll (winner of the first season of Project Ruanway). I read his interview in the Fashion Wire Daily site where he explained his spring 2007 colecction recently shown in the Olympus NY Fashion Week.

“What's the inspiration/theme for this collection?
Archigram, an architectural movement in the late 60's/early 70's in England, air balloons, the B-52’s. I used to go to the library in college and procrastinate on my 15-page papers and read this amazing little book about Archigram. There is a lot of air balloon iconography in the Archigram work, and the B-52’s musically inspire the vibe I am going for.”

So I learned about Archigram and dedicated a few minutes to read more about it.

Archigram
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archigram was an avant-garde architectural group formed in the 1960s - based at the Architectural Association, London - that was futurist, anti-heroic and pro-consumerist, drawing inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was solely expressed through hypothetical projects. The main members of the group were Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene. The pamphlet Archigram I brought out in 1961 proclaimed their ideas. Committed to a 'high tech', light weight, infrastructural approach that was focused towards survival technology, the group experimented with clip-on technology, throwaway environment, space capsules and mass-consumer imagery. Their works offered a seductive vision of a glamorous future machine age; however, social and environmental issues were left unaddressed.

The works of Archigram had a Futurist slant being influenced by Antonio Sant'Elia's works. Buckminster Fuller was also an important source of inspiration. The works of Archigram served as a source of inspiration for later works such as the High tech 'Pompidou centre' [1971] by Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Gianfranco Franchini and Future Systems.

Some famous projects of Archigram are Ron Herron's "Walking Cities" and Peter Cook's "Plug-in-City", both of 1964.

Ron Herron's "Walking Cities," 1964

Peter Cook's "Plug-in-City," 1964

For more really good and detailed info, go to their page in the Design Museum website here.