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

Jul 21, 2014, @6pm

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? Los Angeles was the new locus of the urban imaginary in the vanguard circuits of 1960s London. Archigram’s projections of a future Los Angeles were, perhaps, nostalgic for California’s recent past, and really served vanguard 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, co-editor, Jonathan Hughes); and The Situationist City (MIT Press, 1998). He currently coordinates the California section of the Society of Architectural Historians’ Archipedia project.

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