Franchises tend to thrive on frequent releases: You don’t want your fans to forget that you were ever around. Any producer would sputter at the idea of a half-century wait for a next installment, but Archigram—the zany 1960s paladins of paper architecture who have just done exactly that—have not been running your typical fantasy series. They’ve recently released the latest edition of their magazine, Archigram Ten (Circa Press), a full 50 years after publishing the previous one. It’s a welcome occasion for them to reflect on once crazy visionary ideas that have now become almost routine while still agitating for things that remain half-mad, if fully appealing.

We now live among the kinds of things that Archigram dreamed of—biomorphism, Burning Man, prefab revivalism, working from home, smart homes, van life, private space exploration, high-tech architecture as a venerable quantity, and other things both demotic and highbrow—so it is exhilarating to have the band back together to tell us their thoughts on where architecture is heading, and why.

Archigram’s surviving founding members—Peter Cook (who edited the issue), David Greene, and Michael Webb—do so alongside Dennis Crompton, who died in last month at the age of 89, and contemporaries including Winka Dubbeldam, Thom Mayne, Odile Decq, and Tomás Saraceno, and their emphatically droll but enthusiastic tone remains fully intact.

Early on, Cook answers questions from an imagined reader:

So Archigram never went away…?

AS AN ATTITUDE IT HAS NEVER GONE AWAY
IT IS EVEN MORE NECESSARY THAN EVER
ARCHITECTURE MUST MOVE FORWARD
ARCHITECTURE MUST INVENT

Archigram were the great mod dreamers, a London collective that took square aim at all the square ideas prevailing in architecture—and blew them up on the pages of their proto-zine, in exhibitions, and elsewhere with anarchic glee. The magazine, whose nine-and-a-half-issue run (they’re more fun than most people) unfolded between 1961 and 1974, featured a torrent of architectural fantasies: “Walking City” (self-explanatory), “Plug-In City” (enormous scaffolding and Metabolism-esque capsules designed to fit into cities that already existed—or didn’t), the “Cushicle” (a sort of self-propelled spacesuit for planet Earth), “Info-gonks” (TV-projecting glasses and headsets). There were rocket-objects and hovercraft-objects and all sorts of other utopian visions somewhere between Modesty Blaise and Barbarella.

Many were fairly well plotted out; some were loose suggestions. They explained their “Instant City” traveling spectacle, essentially a balloon-borne music-and-anything-else festival, in characteristic form: “The likely components are audio-visual display systems; projection television; trailered units; pneumatic and lightweight structures; and entertainment facilities, exhibits, gantries, and electric lights.” It was Monty Python’s (conceivably) Flying Circus, with enough illustrations to rival Terry Gilliam.

Archigram liked mobile architecture. They liked intestinal mechanical elements as the source of form. They liked architecture that could expand or contract, the idea of pneumatic enclosures, and the dissolution of visible enclosure altogether. Their curtain walls gave way to shower curtains, and yes, there would be swinging fun inside.

They borrowed ideas from space shuttles and submarines and Airstreams and sci-fi, operating in a shambolic mode with tongue partly in cheek—and yet fervently believed that something like all of these things would be great if only it might be figured out. Michael Sorkin pointed out that, “Ironists, they never were. Satirists for sure, but the power of their imaginings abides in a fundamental straightness, the absence of the distancing wink, the nondestructive drollery.”

The group was inspired by Situationism, but their cause wasn’t Marxist revolution: Archigram loved situations and adored spectacle. Their mode was Dadaist-Futurist-Advertising Supplement. As aesthetic radicals, they loathed the drab torpor of late rigor-mortis Modernism, in both its corporate and council-estate forms. They once exclaimed, “WE HAVE CHOSEN TO BYPASS THE DECAYING BAUHAUS IMAGE WHICH IS AN INSULT TO FUNCTIONALISM.”

They nailed their 9.5 theses to the door of the Modernist cathedral, arguing against the theology of the architect-god creating a perfect world in which mere users could only degrade perfection. Their federalizing platform was simple: “The determination of your environment need no longer be left in the hands of the designer of the building: it can be turned over to you yourself.”

The mode was, as Simon Sadler puts it in his 2005 monograph on Archigram’s work, “techno-pop-libertarianism” before the term took on more unfortunate connotations. They imagined “the possibility of an architecture without architecture, organizing experience without incarcerating it.” They wanted liberation, and wondered: “Do buildings help towards emancipation of the people within? Or do they hinder because they solidify the way of life preferred by the architect?”

Archigram’s print run, largely distributed through student channels, was a collage riot. You’d find Anna Karina and the Yellow Submarine and Louis Armstrong and almost anyone else cut-and-pasted in. This wasn’t merely impish surrealism, but seemed instead an active reaction to the Modernist tendency to excise humanity from any depictions of its built work.

The group was given to musing about how, say, rainfall, or someone lighting a cigarette, might actually be more important to an urban vibe than any buildings in a given setting—the kind of self-effacing thinking that architects tend to never do. Theirs was a fascination with the ephemeral and the mutable as elements ultimately perhaps beyond the realm of architecture, but in any case, to be encouraged.

Betraying a common British bohemian feint, the Archigram fellows were somewhat less raffish than they seemed. A number of them worked as architects for the London County Council, all of them worked for Taylor Woodrow Construction, and if they didn’t get around to building much collectively (it’s Monte Carlo’s loss for their one near-project), they did so separately. These were real architects who were providing provocations in their spare time, not permanent dabblers. They also published and encouraged content from a number of far-out architects, including Hans Hollein, Paolo Soleri, Claude Parent, Paul Virilio, Frei Otto, and John Outram.

They subsequently acquired an air of ill repute; their paper architecture seemed for a time about as dated as paper dresses. This often wasn’t quite their fault; lesser talents were offering constant unbuildable provocations and flooded the market. We don’t blame Duchamp for Catalan, and Archigram remains innocent. It didn’t help that architecture’s next swerve was to the past—to postmodernism—instead of to the future Archigram envisioned.

Their view of disposability as a desirable architectural quality also received due criticism amid a rising sense of the burgeoning landfills, befouled rivers, and warming climates it produced. This knock was a little unfair: Archigram’s ninth issue, on gardening, amplified an interest in an architecture that was more like nature, featuring elements whose decay and seasonal variation might be productive and not toxic elements of the broader ecosystem. Archigram was also always sure to make clear that their propositions were not immutable. “If we really believe in change,” they wrote, “it will be a change in what we believe in, rather than a change in the means towards a different ideal.”

Archigram Ten is part retrospective and part futurism. The tone is proud, as it should be: “We don’t apologize for having ideas and forms and interweaving dreams with reality. In fact, we embrace strangeness and even inconsistency and even (occasionally) nonsense.” They aren’t just engaged in self-congratulation; the issue seems to radiate gratitude for others for realizing things that the group imagined. Gathered on this starship are dreamers from around the globe; more than half of them, the issue notes, weren’t even born when the previous issue appeared.

Some of these represent a continuation of Archigram’s old aspirations and dreams: People’s Architecture Office proposes plug-in elements for suburban infill—Missing Middle and Missing Monorail elements to boot. Winka Dubbeldam extols biophiliac “mutant” construction, “an altogether different model of buildings as hybrids, in constant exchange with their ecosystems and energy flows.” Marcos Cruz suggests a Biocene house; Tonkin Liu proposes mollusk shell–inspired lightweight structures; Ricardo de Ostos and Nannette Jackowski imagine rattan nesting structures for all sorts of things.

You’ll find well-earned reveries on things, such as contemplations on work-life melding and smart homes, that the group hoped for and have sort of come true. It’s welcome just to see Archigram and kindred thinkers muse on things that have come to seem prosaic in everyday life—but were emphatically not so just a few decades ago.

Some things remain the same. Craig Hodgetts complains about contemporary “glistening skins”—most architecture is intensely conformist still—just in a different way: “If we were talking about music, our cities would be made up of what’s heard in the confines of lifts, not the rowdy sounds of the arena.”

There’s also fretting about contemporary build-nothing miserablism. Our voyagers remain hopeful, and stress “cheerful.” Take Gilles Retsin, who extols robotic building possibilities as a still inadequately exploited prospect for an environmentally sustainable future: “Rather than virtue-signaling good intentions with small-scale, laborious building processes, an automated architecture could actually address the millions of sustainable homes that the world so urgently needs.”

The polyphonic approach here also frustrates any simple quest to determine what these architects think of architecture and design at large today—if their thoughts are ample elsewhere on such points.

A real kernel of interest can be found in things in the publication that Archigram didn’t quite as clearly imagine previously: Tomás Saraceno’s Cloud Cities and paint-splattering robotic architecture, for instance, or David Garcia’s vision for a series of radiation-instantiating visitor infrastructure for … Chernobyl. Odile Decq praises AI in an essay, as several contributors do—all channels of creativity are good! (Cook provides a note of caution that we humans are still necessary, writing that sometimes “computerized sequences generally follow straight paths, when what you need to do is think sideways.”)

If there are any slight criticisms to be made, one is that some of the renderings in the volume bear an anonymizing stamp of computerization, pallid compared to its glorious original hand-drawings. These folks believe in technology more than most of us do, though, so this is to be forgiven. Many of the new contributors are hugely talented architects and designers—but almost no one rises to the level of prose wit of the original troupe. Thankfully, we have several of them within.

If you need additional proof, consider an excerpt from an email about the publication written by founding member David Greene—run sideways, almost as a throwaway, in Archigram Ten:

“... in the past Peter was the creative impetus behind the very varied issue which often had a theme ... is it weird shit still...? ... What is the format? How many will be printed... if indeed it is on paper, is it ? or like Abb’s greatest hits presented in new media? (...) As you know [...], Archigram originally was a pamphlet with a very small audience and the first one reviewed in the AJ as lacking any rational thought ... as I guess so is this email (...).”

Who can resist that?

The magazine Archigram Ten will be the focus of the February 6 gathering of the New York Architecture + Design Book Club, a quarterly book subscription and event series organized by Untapped and the Brooklyn bookshop and cultural space Head Hi. The program will feature two of the publication’s contributors, Winka Dubbeldam and Barry Wark, in conversation with architect Michael Young. Find out more and RSVP on the book club’s website.