archigo

location: Chicago, IL

date: 2006, 2014

type: conceptual, collective

role:

"ArchiGO, the early 1960's radical architecture and design collective based in Chicago's South Side, could easily be considered progenitors of today's burgeoning placemaking movement. While less a formal collective than the architecture and design collectives that followed them after their brief period of activity, ArchiGO's potent visual and conceptual impact has strains of influence through many contemporary art and cultural movements.

Taking cues ranging from Buckminster Fuller to Marshall MacLuhan to the Situationists, ArchiGO combined ideas about radical utopias, effects of emerging media in popular culture, and psychogeographical movement through urban areas as a welcome counterpart to the rigid modernist dogmatism aggressively imparted to them at the Illinois Institute of Technology under the direction of Mies Van Der Rohe. ArchiGO resisted Chicago's modernist grid and emerging post-war Urban Renewal policies, seeing them as enemies of the human spirit and the urban qualities that contribute to making places unique and livable.

ArchiGO existed in a time and place where their ideas would never have the chance to reach the audience and stakeholders necessary to have influence. This awareness imparted a certain tone of dark satire and cynicism over the work, which was exasperated as the disparate members saw their work and ideas taken up by people and groups that would become much more notable in the decades to follow. In the architecture world, groups such as Archigram, Superstudio, Ant Farm, Archizoom, Office of Metropolitan Architecture etc. carried on the tradition set forth by ArchiGO."

- intro to "Archigo: 50 Years Later", presented at Co-Prosperity Sphere June 2014, featuring work by Chuck Buttons, Reuben Kincaid, John S. Pas, Reeney Muldoon, Kremit Boolhaus, Jowan P. Ingerslaben, H. Kent Urbanis, and Cruizer Perez