Archigram’s Los Angeles: A Sentimentality for the Future

The images of Los Angeles by Britain’s Archigram group are a little perplexing. Are they depicting the Los Angeles of the 1960s, or a projected Los Angeles? On July 21, architectural and urban historian Simon Sadler delves into Archigram’s Los Angeles, a city that became the new locus of the urban imaginary in the vanguard circuits of 1960s London. Sadler considers how Archigram’s projections of a future Los Angeles were perhaps nostalgic for California’s recent past, while serving London’s larger fantasy of spontaneous, populist, self-organized urbanism.

Simon Sadler is professor of architectural and urban history at the University of California, Davis. His publications include Archigram: Architecture without Architecture(MIT Press, 2005); Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (Architectural Press, 2000, coeditor Jonathan Hughes); and The Situationist City (MIT Press, 1998). He currently coordinates the California section of the Society of Architectural Historians’ Archipedia project.

Image: Warren Chalk (Archigram), Santa Monica Beach, teaching slide, c. 1968.

For more information on the exhibition, Everything Loose Will Land, click here.