PAST THE CITY LIMITS

Splash! Bang! Archigram is back! Or so you would think from the show of the 1960s architectural group’s work now on view at the Art Center College of Design’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery. With its comic-book images of superstructures, anthropomorphic machines and coy models in mini-dresses, Archigram--the British group that dominated the architectural imagination through the ‘60s much as the Beatles dominated pop--epitomizes a culture awash in anarchic impulses.

Such innocent exuberance, of course, died decades ago, as a generation turned its attention to mortgages and child rearing. Freedom, after all, comes at a cost. But gazing at the collages and drawings presented here, you can’t help but feel a nagging sense of what we’ve lost.

Archigram’s belief was that spontaneity and fun, with a healthy measure of sex, would be the foundations for a new social order--one marked by a giddy faith in human nature. Naive or not, it was an escape from the increasingly dreary dogmatism that was one of the legacies of high Modernism. And Archigram’s founding members--Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb--seemed to capture that sense of freedom with a euphoric optimism that we can’t seem to muster anymore.

Archigram, of course, did not launch the revolution. During the ‘50s, British architects such as the Smithsons sought to counter the abstractions of Modernist planning methods with urban schemes that reintroduced the scale of the pedestrian street as a viable public forum. In the United States, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown celebrated the chaos of Main Street and Las Vegas as similar antidotes to the devastating alienation of many urban renewal plans. Conceptually, Archigram’s desire to invent a vibrant public forum stemmed from those earlier experiments.

But by gleefully embracing pop advertising and consumer culture, Archigram took that vision to its limit. Theoretical proposals such as “Plug-In City,” designed by Cook in 1964, were essentially giant structural frames for flexible, self-generating cities. Office buildings move around like Hovercrafts. Inflatable skins seal off the city from above in bad weather. Huge cranes move around pod-like houses and shops, locking them into the frame and then removing them again when they are out of fashion in a cheerful take on planned obsolescence. Society, here, is in a perpetual state of flux.

In Herron’s 1969 “Instant City”--a sort of nomadic adult playground that is one of the highlights of the show--the city itself becomes mobile. The structural frame drops away entirely. The city becomes a kit of interchangeable parts transported by a huge dirigible. Massive tent-like roofs are suspended from above by balloons. Large rubberized domes line the beach, surrounded by enormous video screens, and steel platforms extend into the water on pontoons. Each of these components can be rearranged at will, its inhabitants in a perpetual state of anarchic bliss.

In one version, “Instant City” plops down over the intersection of the Santa Monica and San Diego freeways, a few cars cruising by underneath. Domed huts lining one side of the freeway are now opposed by a row of bungalows on the other. A couple stands in the foreground playfully embracing. All around, screens project fragmented images--a face, an eye, race-car-like giant rear-view mirrors. The image could be an advertisement for Los Angeles’ expansive freedom, the ultimate mobile culture.

These designs are more potent as images than as architecture. After all, anyone who has come to a grinding halt in the congestion of the intersection’s offramps would find it a dubious place for communal celebration. Yet they suggest a vision of social freedom that fits neatly with the idea of Los Angeles as a city shaped by the automobile, a city of invisible patterns that is seemingly always on the verge of sudden anarchy. What better place for such spontaneous hedonism than here, the ultimate ephemeral metropolis?

Other projects are more grim. Herron’s 1964 “Walking City” is a mechanical village that travels on telescoping legs, complete with housing, shops and schools. The project can be read as either an escape pod or a prison, take your pick: In one image, a phalanx of machine-cities stands in front of a dark cityscape, seemingly beckoning to its gloomy inhabitants. In another, they appear like giant insects slowly marching across an orange desert, ready to gobble up two alluring models posing in the foreground.

Sex, in fact, is a leitmotif in all these designs. Webb’s 1966 design for the “Cushicle,” for example, is meant as the ultimate expression of nomadic freedom: a portable container in the shape of an erect phallus that inflates into a bubble-like bachelor pad for two. Other images are less explicit, but you get the point. Living pods can be clustered into little villages or set up in a more secluded setting. Plug-In houses are usually only big enough for short-term coupling. And most of these images beam with the faces of bikini-clad models, tucking a loose strand of hair behind an ear or coyly pawing the ground with a bare foot. Sex here is playful, innocent and easy.

Each of these projects, in fact, carried with it the conviction that technology and the consumer culture that it spawned would ultimately liberate us all. Technology would not only give us freedom from repressive social norms; it would give culture at large a remarkable, newfound flexibility. Architecture would become as disposable as fashion.

As Archigram put it: “We are used to the idea of changing a piece of clothing, year by year. . . . We should not be surprised if housing also becomes recognized as consumer products that can be bought off the peg.”

Of course, to accept all of this requires a high degree of self-delusion. Sex and culture--and architecture, in its broadest definition--are more complicated than that. Sex--especially free sex--turned out to also be mean, oppressive, sometimes violent. Architecture, too, can isolate, oppress, strip you of identity. In that sense, Archigram’s schemes represent a cruder innocence than we are willing to accept today. Yet the notion of a truly flexible culture still resonates, the more so as our cities become increasingly cynical versions of fun factories.

At the very least, Archigram’s sense of fun was spontaneous. It was not manufactured by Disney, nor was it driven by a desire for profit. In that sense, it still has something to teach.

* “Archigram: Experimental Architecture 1961-1974,” Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art Center College of Design, 1700 Lida St., Pasadena, through Oct. 4. (626) 396-244.