College of Architecture

In 1998, alumni of Yale University organized the symposium “Rethinking Designs of the 60s” to discuss the legacy of architecture's engagement with social issues. My essay reopens the question of this legacy by focusing on the work of activist and eco-pioneer Pliny Fisk. A colleague of Robert Venturi and Denise-Scott Brown and a student of Ian McHarg, Fisk graduated from the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971, where ideas on complexity permeated a highly interdisciplinary curriculum. Combining emerging theories in advocacy planning, appropriate technologies, and systems thinking, Fisk's  early projects, from the 1970s and 1980s, were not only pragmatic; they were also strategies for leveraging social and environmental change that foregrounded the politically radical stakes of this endeavor.

This essay uncovers an important element of Team X’s thinking, which I trace back to Giedion’s postwar interpretation of a relational theory. It argues that a relational viewpoint in philosophy underpins Giedion’s ideas on the Synthesis of the Arts and gave unprecedented direction to Team X’s search for a “new attitude” in art and architecture. However, since Giedion is often seen as an old-guard CIAM member that Team X opposed, his influence on Team X has been overlooked in the literature to date. In rectifying the link between Giedion and Team X, this essay adds two important aspects to our understanding of modern architecture at mid century. It casts new light on Giedion’s unique contribution to the postwar reinvention of modernism in the context of Team X, and offers a new interpretation of Team X’s legacy, constructed around missing pieces of the group’s intellectual history.

Perhaps more than any other movement of their generation, it was Archigram who defined the architectural style of the 1960s. This style spoke to the cultural imagination of an epoch: mass-consumer culture, pop art, the space program, the counterculture, and the idealism of youth. As an image of the postindustrial present, classic Archigram projects such as Walking City (1964) were as distinct from the modernism of the previous decade as The Grateful Dead’s Aoxomoxoa was from Elvis Presley’s eponymous album cover. Instead of serious, brutalist and monumental, Archigram’s style was light, colorful, fantastic and hedonistic. As the 1960s wore on, however, their pursuit of style proved vexingly elusive. While at first it appealed to the technological optimism of the Second Machine Age, by the end of the decade optimism gave way to self-parody and a more complicated image of the decade emerged, mirroring the events of May ’68 and student protests across Europe.