The beautiful dreamers

The Weekender

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There is something that will not be obvious, as you struggle up from the intestines of the Underground, or walk among the sensible, practical buildings of this grey-brown city, or contemplate, through the rectangular windows of your office building, the rectangles of the one across the street.

It is something that you might not discover in a lifetime of living here. It is that London is a world capital of visionary architects, of people who spend their time dreaming about what buildings could be like.

They don't accept received opinion about construction: that structures should be rectangular, shouldn't move or should obey established rules of proportion. Some architects, such as the Clerkenwell-based Zaha Hadid, arrange spaces and shapes in completely new ways.

Others, such as the 1960s group Archigram, propose that buildings might have moving parts and be in a "permanent state of change". Others, such as Nigel Coates, argue that cities are shaped by transient stuff such as billboards and fashion as much as by bricks and mortar.

Visionary architects tend to express themselves through drawings and words (or, in the case of Zaha Hadid, through dazzling paintings) as much as buildings. Often their work is called "unbuildable", and sometimes it is not supposed to be built.

But, when these architects do get to construct something, it can change the way you see a city, or your ideas of living in cities. This is what happened when Hadid's Contemporary Arts Centre opened in Cincinnati last year.

People in other countries value London's visionaries more than we do. Last week the jury of the Pritzker Prize, which is effectively the Nobel Prize for architecture, recognised the creative power of London's architects when they gave the award to Hadid, who made her name with dazzling paintings of constructions that were once dismissed as unbuildable.

In Strasbourg and Wolfsburg, in Rome, Naples and Beijing, public and private organisations have commissioned Hadid to show that these designs can actually be built. You will not, however, find any buildings by Hadid in London.

This week, an exhibition at the Design Museum celebrates Archigram, the group of six young men who in the 1960s set out "in pursuit of an idea, a new vernacular, something to stand alongside the space capsules, computers and throwaway packages of an atomic/electronic age". As David Greene, one of their members, put it, they were "a collection of exposed nerves/firecrackers, jumping and occasionally colliding to form even larger bangs".

"With a boundless innocent enthusiasm" and "pure faith in the future", they proposed "plug-in cities", "tuned suburbs" and "blow-out villages", in which buildings would no longer be the fixed, earth-bound objects of old, but could inflate and deflate, appear and disappear like circus tents, or be replaced as easily as a car part.

Their role models ran from the achievements of Nasa's moon programme, then in its pomp, to the honky-tonk festivity of the English seaside town.

Their spirit and graphic style, delivered in an intermittently-published magazine, also called Archigram, was joyous, eclectic and hallucinogenic, part Yellow Submarine, part Monty Python, and preceding both.

By the early 1970s these dreamers were commissioned to design some buildings of a particularly louche kind. They won a competition to design a casino in Monte Carlo, and envisioned a babe-strewn pool house for Rod Stewart. These projects remained on paper, however. Only an adventure playground in Milton Keynes was realised.

Architects around the world have been learning from Archigram ever since. The Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its clip-on pipes and escalators, could not, for example, have happened without them. Some of the group have even seen plans turn into buildings: last year Peter Cook, the most vocal member, completed the blue blob of Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria.

The only trace of the group in London is the fabric-roofed atrium of an office building in Bloomsbury, by the late ex-Archigrammer, Ron Herron.

It seems that the English are happy to give licence to jesters and dreamers and latter-day William Blakes, but are too pragmatic or nervous to want their ideas to change the places in which we live and work.

We seem uncomfortable with the idea that buildings might provoke, intrigue or move us, in the way that art and music does. In Strasbourg, Hadid has built a tram terminal and in Naples she is designing a metro station; these cities clearly do not deem her too exotic to design for the everyday, yet there is absolutely no chance she will be commissioned by London Underground to enliven the daily commute.

The eminent architect Sir James Stirling once observed that he never discussed architecture with English clients - they found it off-putting - so he would only talk about time and money and keeping the rain out.

The most successful architecture in Britain, thanks to this national love of the pragmatic, has been the steeland-glass style once called high-tech. Like Archigram, high-tech originated from an intensely romantic idea about the benign power of modern technology, but its sales pitch has long been that it is supremely efficient, and will make the people who build it richer.

Even a building as striking as the Gherkin is justified in practical terms: its shape is said to be derived from an ultra-ecological natural ventilation system. The offence of Hadid and the Archigrammers is that they suggest things that cannot be explained with reference to purely practical arguments. They design buildings which, like human beings, are complex and not always absolutely rational.

Occasionally, it is true, there is some sort of collective spasm, and it is officially announced that we should have "visionary" architecture. But the result is projects such as the Dome, where architects like Hadid and Nigel Coates were asked to design temporary buildings in a place far removed from the everyday lives of Londoners.

They were reduced to acts in a circus tent. The Dome was a vision sump, into which dangerously exciting ideas could be poured and, with a sigh of relief, sealed up for another generation.

Yet there is no reason why London should be leadenly sensible, or why its everyday places should not be charged with extraordinary ideas. The Victorian builders of the capital, with exuberant edifices such as the Natural History Museum and St Pancras Station, were not constrained by logic.

Nor does a more creative approach to city building have to mean an outbreak of gratuitously strange shapes. What it does mean is at least giving a chance to people like Hadid to show what they can do.

Archigram is at the Design Museum, SE1 (020 7833 9955) from Saturday until 4 July.

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