the living city survival kit: a portrait of the architect as a young man simon sadler

The Living City Survival Kit: a portrait ofthe architect as a young man

Simon Sadler

This intriguing image (plate 4.1), announcing itself as the Living City SurvivalKit, looked very much like one of the product anthologies to be found in theSunday newspaper supplements and glossy magazines of 1963, the year in whichit was published.1 It was not from a mass-circulating magazine, however, andthough it consciously imitated the magazine page in the manner of Pop Art, itwas not quite Pop Art either. It was, in fact, an image of architecture. This essayasks what this says about the re-ordered perceptions of the city and ofarchitectural practice in the decades after the 1939–45 war, concentrating on thewry, confessional tone of the image.

The image was produced by architect Warren Chalk,2 and it appeared inLiving Arts magazine. Living Arts was published by London’s Institute ofContemporary Arts (ICA), the refuge of modernist culture amidst a pervasivelyconservative postwar British arts scene and, from the 1950s, the meeting placefor young avant-garde coalitions.3 Issue no. 2 of the short-lived, highlyproduced Living Arts magazine primarily acted as a catalogue for the ICA’s mainshow of that summer, Living City.4 Living City was a walk-through displayinstallation of triangulated panels, held by a steel space-frame. Through image,text, sound and light, this ‘assault on the senses’5 that physically envelopedvisitors attempted to convey ‘a vision of the city as an environment conditioningour emotions’.6 It was produced by five other architects in addition to WarrenChalk (Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and MichaelWebb), collaborating with furniture designer Ben Fether and graphic designerPeter Taylor (plate 4.2).

The architects were publishers of the little magazine Archigram, the thirdissue of which was about to appear.7 Two years old, Archigram and theArchigram group were poised to become the foremost avant garde inarchitecture of the period, envisioning in nine main editions of its littlemagazine, and many exhibitions, architecture transformed beyond recognitionby space-age technology, computing, serial production, consumerism and thedemands of a newly expanded leisure class (plate 4.3). For now these architects– some, like Chalk, seasoned in such prominent architectural offices as that ofthe London County Council, others more recently qualified – remained in therelative obscurity of the drawing office of Taylor Woodrow Construction, and

Art History ISSN 0141-6790 Vol. 26 No. 4 September 2003 pp. 556–575

556 r Association of Art Historians 2003. Published by Blackwell Publishing,9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

4.1 Warren Chalk, Living City Survival Kit, 1963. Reproduced in Theo Crosby and John Bodley (eds),Living Arts, no. 2, London: Institute of Contemporary Arts and Tillotsons, 1963. Archigram Archives, London.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARCHITECT AS A YOUNG MAN

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Living City was their first whole-group excursion. Archigram and its techno-libertarian agenda are most easily accessed through the group’s bullish drawingsof the mid-1960s (plate 4.4).8 Returning to Living City, Archigram’s ideasappear more hesitant, formative and poetic. Living City accepted the hospitalityof the ICA – aslant as it was from the governing institutions of Britisharchitecture, like the Royal Institute of British Architects – as space in which toreflect upon the conditions of modernity and the role of the modern architect.Irony, never more apparent than in its Survival Kit, helped Living City toaddress such architectural taboos as gender and desire.

There was little in the way of architecture, at least in so far as it wastraditionally defined, on display at Living City. A few designs (strange, cartoon-like buildings) could be detected in the Living City collages, but it is the overallabsence of ‘architecture’, surely as striking to a visitor to the show or reader ofthe catalogue back then as it is to the observer of Living City Survival Kit now,that preoccupies this essay. Even the clutter of the Survival Kit image seemedunarchitectural, while the geodesic triangulation of the display structure at theICA was chosen for its amenability to free form and prefabrication, and ‘nothingmore was intended.’9 Living City and its catalogue were not about form, but itsopposite: the pre-architectural formlessness of space, behaviour, life. In the1950s and 1960s, avant-gardes widely abandoned the intellectual and artisticcertainties of historical materialism in order to acknowledge the diversity anduntidiness of the material world and of social and psychological experience. Inpainting, the avant garde had chosen the informe over the modernist grid. Andnow in architecture, Living City was a statement of faith that built form wasonly one half of the architectural experience. ‘When it is raining in OxfordStreet the architecture is no more important than the rain, in fact the weatherhas probably more to do with the pulsation of the Living City at that givenmoment.’10 The Living City exhibition tried to describe an urban experienceunaccounted for by maps, plans or function. It concentrated on space andexperience at a micro-scale. The Survival Kit for these micro-spaces waspredominantly made up of low-brow, everyday, pocket-sized, throwaway, illicit,mass-produced consumer goods. How this selection came to be regarded asessential to city living in 1963 can be explained by reference to severaldiscourses current at the time, such as everyday life, existentialism, consumer-ism, Pop and, ultimately, survival – of the city, and of the architect.

To begin with the everyday: the Survival Kit presents the accoutrements(cigarettes, hankies, snacks, drinks, sunglasses) of a latter-day flanerie, ofstrolling around the city so as to experience its cultural and geographicaldynamics. The most famous exponent of flanerie had been the nineteenth-century Parisian poet and critic Charles Baudelaire, an advocate of theephemeral, and the Living City was equally redolent of the transient, sometimeserotic and distinctively masculine urban experience of Simmel, Proust, theSurrealists, the Beats and the Situationists. Translated into the London avant-garde language of Living City, the flaneur’s feeling for the crowds slippingthrough the streets was one of ‘Come-Go’, ‘the key to the vitality of the city’.11

Like Baudelaire, Living City regarded the relative permanence of the city’sbuilt form as merely the infrastructure of a culture in perpetual flux. As



4.3 Ron Herron and Warren Chalk, City Interchange, 1963. Estate of Ron Herron andArchigram Archives, London.

4.4 Warren Chalk for Archigram, Control and Choice Housing Study, section, 1967. ArchigramArchives, London.



Baudelaire succinctly explained in 1863, ‘By ‘‘modernity’’ I mean the ephemeral,the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and theimmutable.’12 ‘What have cities been doing over the few thousand years inwhich they have existed?’ Living City asked.

They have provided society with a physical centre – a place where so muchis happening that one activity is stimulated by all the rest. It is thecollection of everything and everyone into a tight space that has enabledthe cross stimulus to continue. Trends originated in cities. The mood ofcities is frantic. It is all happening – all the time.13

Fundamental Baudelairian preoccupations were at Living City, right down tothe rehabilitation of ‘Fashion’ which, along with the words ‘Temporary’ and‘Flashy’, had, Living City’s creators felt, been wrongly castigated as ‘a dirtyword’.14

Living City invited its visitors to collude in voyeurism. Two periscopes wereprovided at the show (one visitor found that they ‘gave fleeting glimpses of girlsin Dover Street or faces at the bar’); out on the London street, where light wasrarely bright enough to warrant protection, eyes would be concealed behind theSurvival Kit’s dark glasses.15 Living City included a prominent photograph of aglamorous young woman straightening her stocking in the rain-sweptmetropolis (plate 4.5), throwing a backward glance at the observer – thephotographer–flaneur who might use the roll of film included in the Survival Kit.The picture was entitled ‘The Passing Presence’, an embodiment of themasculine fantasy of the ephemere. Although the Survival Kit was redolent ofthe product placements to be found in women’s magazines, it was predomi-nantly a survival kit for urban man. The main anomaly in this reading was theinclusion of ‘make-up’, although that only figured women as an object of malevision, and was closely aligned with a provocatively unfurled stick of lipstick,the word ‘sex’ letrasetted along its edge. To be more specific, the Survival Kitstaked out the city as the domain of a young, reasonably affluent male,apparently free from family responsibility, and still washing his own shirts withDaz.

By invoking the flaneur, the Survival Kit portrayed a rather traditional,heterosexual masculinity, compromising what at first appeared to be agenderless, open invitation to urban adventure. But if more innovativeconfigurations of gender and identity were to be found as close by ascontemporary British Pop painting,16 they were not to be found elsewhere inarchitecture. The Survival Kit was a frank confession to the role of malesubjectivity in architecture, making it startlingly subversive for its time. Thoughthe architectural profession at the beginning of the 1960s remained over-whelmingly patriarchal in its constituency and outlook, it had brought toperfection an image of itself, its subject and its practice as disinterested.17 If theSurvival Kit really did contain the tools by which to obtain knowledge of thecity, an architectural profession still using statistical analysis and topographicalsurveys was hopelessly remote from urban life. Or it was misrepresenting theinner drives of its own practitioners to the public; that the Survival Kit’s



4.5 Anon., ‘The Passing Presence’, Living City, montage,1963. Reproduced in Theo Crosby and John Bodley (eds),Living Arts, no. 2, London: Institute of Contemporary Artsand Tillotsons, 1963. Archigram Archives, London.



masculinity was so thinly disguised only confirmed that a gentleman’s clubatmosphere still pervaded architectural practice. Moreover, the ennobledmasculinity of the gentleman’s club was in turn being degraded in the imageby subscription to a men’s club with less exclusive membership: the Survival Kitincluded a copy of Playboy magazine. Historian–critic Reyner Banham (a visitorto Living City) relayed to the Architects’ Journal in 1960 how the world ofPlayboy was typically open to a man of ‘28.3 years’, living in one of ‘168important metropolitan areas’, ‘for whom a dinner date is a regular andimportant event’.18

This particular copy of Playboy, from January 1963, featured NormanMailer, whose 1955 novel The Deer Park was placed alongside. Mailer’s hard-boiled literature portrayed a cosmopolitan, sexual, political and druggedsubculture. The melee of Soho in which Living City was staged (the ICA wasstill in its Dover Street premises) was a place where someone might submergeinto such a jazz-listening, marijuana-smoking urban underbelly, purchasing themore marginal and hedonistic of the goods depicted: a bottle of whisky and apacket of cigarettes, some hard bop jazz records, a gun and ‘drugs’. Yet noharder drug than Alka Seltzer (the corrective for indulgence in the Bell’s whisky)was put on display.19 The Survival Kit parodied the aggressive masculinity ofthe likes of Mailer20 and the fantasy of the metropolis promoted by Playboy.The gun looked like a replica in its cowboy-style tasselled holster; the foodfeatured in the image was barely more adult (the slogan of Quaker Puffed Wheatin the 1950s was ‘shot from guns’), and the sports car was no more than a toy.Through its absurd selections and juxtapositions, the Survival Kit was depictingthe inner city lived vicariously, just as Playboy magazine portrayed promiscuityand hedonism to readers stranded in more prosaic lives. One aerosol productfeatured was called ‘Top Secret’, hailing the influence of thrillers (the movie DrNo, the first in the James Bond series, had filled cinemas the previous year). Theaura of sexual deviancy that hung about Mailer’s work at the time was‘straightened’ in the Survival Kit into the bathroom paraphernalia promoted byteenage magazines to young men and women on the dating game – bright, brandnew goods, lipstick, make-up, razors, deodorant, detergent, toothpaste.

Survival, the adventure of city life, was being represented here as some sortof game, as a narrative played by the citizen with a few detective-style props – acigarette to light, a match to flick out. The city was a mere backdrop for thecitizen starring in the ‘movie’ of his (or her) life (Mailer’s The Deer Park was setin Hollywood). The notion that the self is a collection of performances that takeplace across different locations was reminiscent of the findings in ErvingGoffman’s popular study of the time, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,1959.21 Above all, one proposal that life is performed drew on existentialism, amode of thought which had been increasingly accepted in Continental Europe inthe 1950s but which was slower to take root in Britain, dominated as it was byhome-grown empiricism (visible not least by its translation into matter-of-factwelfare state architecture) and logical positivism.22 Living City took the visitoron an impressionistic existential journey through its seven themed sections –Man, Survival, Crowd, Movement, Communication, Place and Situation.Situation, the climax of the little show, developed an insight apparently



borrowed directly from Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism: ‘all of us in varyingdegrees, according to our perceptiveness,’ wrote Living City’s organizers, ‘findLiving City in Situation.’23 Situations compose the life of the individual as a sortof adventure, Sartre had argued. In order to define ourselves, each situationwould have to be negotiated. The alternative, of being a creature ofcircumstance, was a resignation of responsibility and potential. ‘Play thesocio-psycho game,’ the Living City catalogue implored, ‘The chips are down /The stakes are low / Man in the city the ultimate goal / Throw the dice and /learn about yourself and how / you fit in the pattern / that is ‘‘Living City’’ ’.24

Demand from a diversity of actors for a varied urban decor would requirethe architect–planner to call off efforts to rationalize the city spatially andculturally. Rationalization had been the ‘survival strategy’ of urban design fromthe Renaissance to modernism: Can Our Cities Survive? asked a book of 1942by architect Jose Luis Sert, propounding the rationalist architectural planningprinciples of the Congres internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM). CIAMwas the collective voice of modernist architecture and planning until its demisein the mid-1950s. Its solution to the chaos of the city was to zone it according tofour functions – housing, recreation, transport and industry – though in its lastyears it had to recognize the shortfall of functional zoning in accounting for thewhole culture of the city. The next CIAM publication to which Sert lent hisname (in 1951) admitted a fifth function, culture, calling for ‘the humanisationof urban life’ and prioritizing The Heart of the City over and above utilitarianzones.25 CIAM’s ideal city heart was, however, inspired by the classical forum,not the shopping-and-traffic artery of London’s Oxford Street that wasenshrined at the centre of Living City.

The Heart of the City envisioned a discerning body politic whose sense ofcitizenship had been enlightened by a model mass media (of the sort called forby Ortega y Gasset, the philosopher, and by Henry Luce, the paternalistpublisher of such titles as Architectural Forum, Time and Life).26 The LivingCity, meanwhile, was more prosaically populated by canny consumers schooledby Hugh Hefner’s publications. Unlike the monoculture implied by CIAM’s‘humanisation’ or ‘humanism’, Living City’s crowds were multicultural, aconcentration of tastes and pleasures of the sort found in the Soho andChinatown vicinity of the ICA’s building. ‘Who likes it straight?’ Living Cityasked. ‘Who will buy what? / who believes which? / who lives or dies? / thought,action / chain response / life forces balanced / in tension / the urban community /the city / CROWD.’27

The Survival Kit conveyed a whiff of red-light Soho that gave it a verydifferent complexion to the clean-living appeal of urban design documents likethose of CIAM and the government planning manuals of the period. Bycelebrating disorder, crowds and the Baudelairian demi-monde, Living City wasreversing the de facto anti-urbanism that had characterized much British,Continental and North American planning since the 1940s. Living City rejectedthe purging and purification, not just architecturally but also socially,economically and racially, of city-centre neighbourhoods. This architecturalexhibition without architecture, this celebration of non-architecture – of theserendipitous orders that come about without planning, and the personal



experiences that lay beyond the nib of the architect’s pen – remained, after all,an architectural excursion. Seemingly juvenile and risque, ‘an inhumanconception of the city of the future by a small group of people’, as one eminentcritic put it, all the more ‘appalling ... because it received wide publicity without,as far as I know, any corresponding protest’,28 Living City was trying to find anoverall vision of the plural, of designs within chaos.

In so doing, it contributed to an ongoing paradigm shift in modernarchitecture from idealism to realism. Since the mid-1950s ambitious young‘Brutalist’ architects, for instance, had espoused design as a matter of feelingover rationality, of community before zoning, of everyday life rather than theabstraction of the grand plan, of texture beyond the planar. Modernism’s innerrevolution was accompanied by a new wave of architectural graphics thatechoed those of mass media (which were enjoying exponential expansion duringthe same period) in order to broadcast the message of vanguard modernitybeyond narrow professional architectural audiences. The graphics portrayed theexperience of modernity as fractured, simultaneous and transitory, a reversal ofthe ‘call to order’ in the 1920s which had turned avant-gardism into a ModernMovement. The task for the committed modernist of 1963 was to address actualmodernity. Archigram and the Living City represented the most completerelaxation of modernist mores yet seen, the full punch of popular culture hittinghome just as first-wave Brutalists were finding establishment acceptance.Nostalgia for traditional, close-knit social structures was sacrificed to thecasual, expendable style of a leisured consumer society.

Hence Living City’s heterogeneous city centre was shielded against culturalstandardization – yet it did not provide refuge from the market economy. Theinner city was instead seen as the market, one writ large, the Survival Kitresembling the items of the Soho shopping basket, life derived from consumerexchange. Such intrigue with the market marked a note of divergence betweenLiving City and other promotions of the carnival inner city, like those hailingfrom the ultra-left Situationists based in Paris, one of whose maps was collagedinto the Living City display.29 The Living City Survival Kit could, for example,be mistaken for a critique of the capitalist-rationalist urban ‘spectacle’, in theSituationist manner of Asger Jorn’s and Guy Debord’s Fin de Copenhague (1957),which was composed, like the Survival Kit, from the detritus of consumerismand cheap erotica (plate 4.6). But the Survival Kit showed an enrapturedamusement at living within the ‘capitalist spectacle’, while Fin de Copenhagueexhibited only disdain. For the Situationists, the deep living of ‘situation’ wouldoverturn the superficiality of consumerism; for the organizers of Living City,‘situation’ was little more than a Baudelairian frisson that made the cityweightless, dissolved tradition, and obliged people to ‘make it new’. ‘Situation,the happenings within spaces in the city, the transient throw-away objects, thepassing presence of cars and people are as important, possibly more important,than the built demarcation of space.’30 While the Situationists prepared for thereturn of the Paris Commune, Living City heralded Swinging London.

More important to Living City than European radicalism were the urbanechannels of the British avant-garde circulating around the ICA. Indeed, it wasprobably through these channels that the show imported Continental radicalism



4.6 Page from Asger Jorn and Guy Debord, Fin de Copenhague, 1957. r 2003 Artists RightsSociety (ARS), New York / COPY-DAN, Denmark.



in the first place. The potential of an exhibition to operate as a total, sensoriallyconditioning environment had already been demonstrated at the Institute ofContemporary Arts by the 1959 Place show, coordinated by a team that includederstwhile Situationist Ralph Rumney. An article of 1959, ‘The City as ScrambledEgg’,31 by ICA regular Reyner Banham, not only discussed Situationism but readas a primer for the pluralism of Living City. The Independent Group, the avant-garde incumbent at the ICA in the 1950s, convened by Banham between 1952 and1954, had very much prepared the ground for Living City.32 One IndependentGroup regular, Theo Crosby, was the boss of the Living City architects at TaylorWoodrow, and it was Crosby who proposed Living City to the ICA and whoedited its publication in Living Arts magazine. Crosby had curated the nearestthing to a group manifestation made by the Independent Group, the spectacularlysuccessful This Is Tomorrow exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in August1956. ‘The architects of This Is Tomorrow y have had great influence on thegeneration of organisers of ‘‘Living City’’,’ the Living City catalogue reverentlyacknowledged.33 Six years before Living City, Independent Group affiliates atThis Is Tomorrow had introduced the possibility of a Pop aesthetic drawn fromconsumerism, an ‘aesthetics of plenty’.

Chalk’s Survival Kit clearly toyed with the Pop aesthetic, and sharing theLiving City edition of Living Arts was Pop work by the Independent Group’sRichard Hamilton, who contributed the cover (plate 4.7). Photographed at aTaylor Woodrow building site by Robert Freeman, Hamilton’s cover featured anAmerican footballer and Playboy Playmate-style model, the former perched andthe latter draped upon a 1963 Ford Thunderbird, a Frigidaire stuffed tocapacity, a luxurious white telephone, a Wondergram mini record-player andmini-typewriter, a chromium-plate toaster, a long-hose vacuum cleaner of thesort enshrined by Hamilton’s 1956 collage, Just what is it makes today’s homesso different, so appealing? and, particularly impressive, a Mercury space pod.34

It was, at some level at least, a hot-pink shop window for the American Way.Elsewhere in Living Arts the former Independent Group convener LawrenceAlloway pondered the excess of space in American paintings and landscapes as asource for the ‘American sublime’.35 In the 1950s imaginations suffocated bythe parochialism of English landscapes, lifestyles and galleries had beenprojected into an Americana glimpsed in movies, magazines and paintings.36

American products were experienced to some extent as the desired ‘other’ byHamilton’s and Alloway’s Independent Group generation. But for the Londongeneration of the 1960s, enjoying a steady influx of consumer products and anincreasingly vibrant home-grown culture, Pop was lived quite directly, withimmediate effect upon everyday life. The Survival Kit’s American consumerproducts, like the bottles of Coca-Cola, were no more sacred than any other,arraigned upon a level plane. Painters of about the same age as the organizers ofLiving City had emerged from the Royal College of Art painting Pop in intimatedetail, and the leap from the art at the Pop-dominated Young Contemporariesshow of 1961 to the architecture featured in Archigram, the magazine launchedthe same year, would not be hard to make. Warren Chalk and Living Cityco-organizers David Greene and Peter Cook had all studied in the architecturedepartments of art schools; Chalk had surreptitiously practised painting, and his



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brother went on to study painting at the Royal College of Art, briefly editing itsmagazine ARK,37 which, previously a vehicle for Independent Group ideas,reported the Pop work of the Royal College around 1958–1960.

In time the bright colours typical of Pop painting would characterizeArchigram designs, but what Living City was attempting to discover was anethos of Pop design. Mass-market taste had perturbed the Modern Movement forsome time. In 1948 Modern Movement historian Sigfried Giedion had shownreaders a packet of wrapped and sliced Wonder Bread as a reminder of theappalling impact upon taste when Mechanization Takes Command.38 Fifteenyears later the Living City Survival Kit presented the British variant, theWonderloaf – which had helped to revolutionize UK tastes from about 1953 –as the forerunner of the modernist construction of the future, stacks of buildings asinterchangeable as slices of bread and as expendable as paper wrappers. Takingpleasure in ‘plenty’ struck at the very soul of the British design ‘establishment’ stillcirculating around the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Design Council,with its high regard for the durability of ‘good design’, a hangover of elitist tasteand war-era austerity. Reyner Banham saw that what Living City promised was anexpendable environment: ‘I think it does great credit to Peter Cook and the boyswho did the Living City exhibition here at the ICA that they are trying to grapplewith the problem,’39 Banham remarked in a keynote lecture of 1963.

Messy foodstuffs came packaged and capsuled; could messy life be containedby architectural packets of equal desirability? Packet cereal and instant coffeehad re-assembled the postwar British breakfast. Could architecture lose itsdependency upon mortar and hard labour in the same way that the breakfasttable had been unburdened from lard and pans? Raw materials of food could befrozen so that they were available on demand, regardless of the seasons: whenwould building sites be this efficient? Heaped up in the Survival Kit was aselection of commercial, disposable goods, popular, as-found, and the viewerwas being asked to regard the ensemble as an object lesson, as a key to thesurvival of the city. It did indeed suggest a sort of order in disorder, feeding thecrowd yet catering to individual needs, accepting and rejecting variouscomponents of the kit, achieving consistent standards and customer satisfaction.

The danger in this ‘natural’ ordering and re-ordering by supply and demandwas that it left the architect redundant. In his ‘City Notes’ of 1959, an essay thatanticipated several of the central themes of Living City, former IndependentGroup convener Lawrence Alloway reckoned that ‘architects can never get andkeep control of all the factors in a city which exist in the dimensions of patched-up, expendable, and developing forms. The city as an environment has room for amultiplicity of roles, among which the architect’s may not be that of unifier.’40

And yet the architect was not yet willing to surrender; the very energy of theLiving City exhibition showed that architects saw themselves still as active agentsin the world. Architect entrepreneurs would be needed precisely to resist thehomogenizing tendencies that monopoly capitalism shared with its supposedopposite, positivist planning.41 And, in any case, Living City implied a richness ofurban experience that encompassed a great deal more than the market economyalone. Living City’s statement of faith in high-density living, to take one example,ran counter to the urban trends evident in America itself, its cities spread out thin



and far, centres eroded to facilitate the flow of goods and people along super-highways: ‘the Atlantic time-lag is about to catch up with us. The problem facingour cities is not just that of their regeneration, but of their right to an existence.’42

Perhaps, then, the architect’s latest role was that of facilitator, counsellingpeople through to an architecture of impermanence and exchange (which wouldcharacterize the designs published by the Archigram group). In the interim,Living City architects would themselves be the exemplars of the new living,pioneers conveying optimism in the face of the ‘crisis’ of the city. The LivingCity Survival Kit was enjoyable at a time when, less than ten months after theCuban missile crisis had prompted the assembly of real survival kits, ‘survival’was no laughing matter.43 The exhibition was inconclusive – ‘I’m not quite surewhere they have got with it so far,’ admitted Banham in 196344 – butdeterminedly optimistic and proactive. The Living Citizen was neither theimpassive American consumer, nor the resident of the British New Town orhousing estate, rendered docile by town planning. Living City prompted itsvisitors to have confidence in their choices – consumer choices and existentialchoices – and to take joy in multiple identities and lifestyles. Angst – prompted,existentialists argued, by the pressure to make life choices out of the manifoldpossibilities of which the only certainty was the eventual return to nothingness –was reconfigured as a great venture. Existence and participation in a changingand potentially dangerous world was ‘made safe’ by representing it as a game.

In counterpoint to the role of ‘unifier’ and ‘good designer’ – in defiance, thatis, to the code governing the training of postwar British architects – thearchitects of Living City were teaching an appreciation of the noise andimprovisation that filled the spaces of the city with life. The relationshipbetween form and noise could be compared to the method of theme andimprovisation found in jazz. The Survival Kit featured two ground-breaking jazzalbums of 1959, Ornette Coleman’s Tomorrow is the Question and JohnColtrane’s Giant Steps. Coltrane and Coleman were building repertoires ofbrilliant discordance, visually echoed by the fracture and kinesis of Living City’sdisplays. There was something ‘artless’ and unformed about the Living Citypresentation, and the Survival Kit in particular, even when compared tocontemporary Pop Art. The Survival Kit was literal, didactic, an inventory,lacking the smooth compositional quality of Hamilton’s cover for the Living Artscatalogue. A decade earlier the ICA had hosted another architectural exhibitionmore or less devoid of architecture, Parallel of Life and Art, 1953 (plate 4.8),intended by its curators, Independent Group architects and Brutalist prophetsAlison and Peter Smithson, as ‘some evidence of a new attitude’.45 Preoccupiedwith anthropology, biology and technology, Parallel of Life and Art was a displayof iconic images as the raw material of architectural inspiration. Living Citycurator Ron Herron described his reaction to Parallel of Art and Life:

It was most extraordinary because it was primarily photographic and withapparently no sequence; it jumped around like anything. But it had justamazing images; things that one had never thought of looking at in thatsort of way, in exhibition terms. And the juxtaposition of all those images!I was just knocked out by it.46



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Instances of a new generation of ICA exhibitions presenting provocative ideasand attitudes (rather than art works or designs),47 both Parallel of Life and Artand Living City stood in place of manifestos, as jazzy, improvised, visual non-manifestos. Even though these shows were certain about their importance asavant-garde interventions,48 they eschewed too programmatic a reading. As theSmithsons’ Independent Group colleague John Voelcker explained, the shift inthe mood of the avant garde before and after the 1939–45 war: ‘1930. Theframe building and the multilevel high-rise city, images which contained acomplete urban system. 1950. Random images drawn from many sourcescontaining single ideas which, one by one, contribute to, change, and extend theexperience of space.’49 Anticipating the break-up of the single, positivistmodernism represented by CIAM, Le Corbusier in 1956 acknowledged thearrival of a younger generation of architects who found themselves ‘in the heartof the present period y feeling actual problems, personally, profoundly, thegoals to follow, the means to reach them, the pathetic urgency of the presentsituation. They are in the know. Their predecessors no longer are, they are out,they are no longer subject to the direct impact of the situation.’50 The SurvivalKit offered very little in the way of protection from the ‘situation’ of 1963 butwarned, in its stark if humorous references to sex, drugs and hard sounds, thatmodernity in the 1960s was accelerating well beyond that foreseen even by theIndependent Group in the 1950s. Manifestos, statements of intention to imposeorder upon chaos, were to be superseded by testimonies of lived experience, of‘situation’.

The assumption of the new urbanists – Banham talked in 1959 of ‘the cooljazz connection, action painters, documentary camera crews, advertising copy-writers’51 – was that the city would be created from the street up, not from thedrawing office down. Put another way, it was an existentialist approach todesign: the problem of being had to take precedence over that of knowledge,with the architect no longer able to ‘stand outside’ his (or her) subject. ‘What wethink and feel about city is not new in the sense that it was unthought of before’,Living City admitted,

but only in that the idea of Living City has not been acted upon before byour generation. y This time / movement / situation thing is important indetermining our whole future attitude to the visualization and realizationof city; it can give a clue, a key, in our effort to escape the brittleingratiating world of the architect / aesthete, to break away into the realworld and take in the scene.52

That scene included inputs once considered distractive to the rational mission ofarchitectural planning – libido, fantasy, longing, sound, the contents of amagazine rack, and so forth.

Despite its presentation as a standard issue kit (its gun, detergent, toothpasteand razor blades not unfamiliar to someone who had done National Service,abolished the previous year),53 there was something idiosyncratic about theSurvival Kit. Symbolically, the jazz albums announced the imperative of greetingthe future – tomorrow was the question, Ornette Coleman said, and another of



Coltrane’s albums of 1960 was entitled The Avant-Garde.54 But they also gave apeek into someone’s record collection, and thus into their private life. In the yearof Beatlemania, were Coltrane and Coleman really essential listening, as centralto survival as bread? Such that several copies of one album alone were needed?Juxtaposed against general consumer ephemera, the presence of these art worksin the Survival Kit spoke of the passion of a connoisseur like Warren Chalk. Itwas the survival kit of a late-night jazz fan. The Survival Kit was, at some level,the self-portrait of a young man (and at thirty-six, Chalk was the oldest of theexhibition organizers by between three and ten years). Richard Hamilton wouldlater decide that his cover for Living Arts was a self-portrait, too;55 both it, andthe Survival Kit, could be compared to those Dadaist and Constructivistportraits of the 1920s and 1930s, in which the artist is to be found within acollage of attributes and memorabilia. Chalk had found in his anti-heroic self-image an illustration of the new architect: the architect of the streets, thehedonist, the Living Citizen.

Simon SadlerUniversity of California, Davis

Notes

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London,during the preparation of this essay.

1 An observation made by David Mellor in TheSixties Art Scene in London, London, 1993, p. 58.

2 Correspondence with Dennis Crompton, 18 July2002; conversation with Michael Webb and PeterCook, London, 19 November 2002.

3 For discussion of the ICA’s role in British culture,see, for instance, Mellor, The Sixties Art Scene,and Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties,London, 1996, chap. 6.

4 The show was at the ICA from 19 June to 2August 1963, and then toured to Manchester CityArt Gallery and the Walker Art Centre,Cambridge.

5 Robert Maxwell, ‘The ‘Living City’ exhibition atthe ICA’, in Theo Crosby and John Bodley (eds),Living Arts, no. 3, London: Institute ofContemporary Arts and Tillotsons, 1964, pp. 98–100, 99.

6 Foreword to Theo Crosby and John Bodley (eds),Living Arts, no. 2, London: Institute ofContemporary Arts and Tillotsons, 1963, p. 1. Mythanks go to Jonathan Hughes for loan of thismaterial.

7 See Archigram, no. 3, August 1963.8 Discussion of early Archigram can be found in

Peter Cook (ed), Archigram, London, 1972; inArchigram (ed), A Guide to Archigram1961–74, London, 1994; and in Alain Guiheux(ed.), Archigram, Paris: Centre Georges

Pompidou, Collection Monographie, 1994. In1997 the Kunsthalle Wien published theproceedings of Archigram: Symposium zurAusstellung, eds Eleonora Louis et al., Vienna.A valuable ‘companion volume’ to A Guide toArchigram 1961–74 appeared from Londonin 1998, when Dennis Crompton editedConcerning Archigram, published by theArchigram Archives and including a major essayby Barry Curtis. The present author’s essay, ‘TheBrutal Birth of Archigram’, Twentieth CenturyArchitecture: The Journal of the TwentiethCentury Society, vol. 6, 2002, pp. 119–28, studiesthe relationship between Archigram andBrutalism.

9 Peter Cook, ‘Introduction’, in Crosby and Bodley(eds), Living Arts, no. 2, p. 71.

10 Cook, ‘Introduction’, in Crosby and Bodley (eds),Living Arts, no. 2, p. 70.

11 Peter Cook, ‘Come-Go’, in Crosby and Bodley(eds), Living Arts, no. 2, p. 80.

12 Charles Baudelaire, ‘The painter of modern life’,Le Figaro, 1863, ed. and trans. in J. Mayne, ThePainter of Modern Life and Other Essays,London, 1964, p. 13.

13 Cook, ‘Come-Go’, in Crosby and Bodley (eds),Living Arts, no. 2.

14 Cook, ‘Come-Go’, in Crosby and Bodley (eds),Living Arts, no. 2.



15 Robert Maxwell, ‘The ‘Living City’ exhibition atthe ICA’, in Crosby and Bodley (eds), Living Arts,no. 3, p. 99.

16 Issues of identity and the body in relation to Popare discussed in, for example, ‘Bodies and Gender– Heroines and Heroes’, in Mellor, The Sixities ArtScene.

17 On the representation of architects and theirpractice, see, for instance, Andrew Saint, TheImage of the Architect, New Haven and London,1983; for the British context, see, for instance,John R. Gold, The Experience of Modernism:modern architects and the future city, 1928–53,London, 1997; for discussion of architecture andmasculinity (including the role of Playboymagazine), see, for instance, Joel Sanders (ed.),Stud: Architectures of Masculinity, New York,1996.

18 Reyner Banham, ‘I’d Crawl a Mile for y

Playboy’, Architects’ Journal, 7 April, 1960,reprinted in Reyner Banham, Design By Choice,ed. Penny Sparke, London, 1981, p. 130.

19 See Anon., ‘Living City Survival Kit’, in Crosbyand Bodley (eds), Living Arts, no. 2, p. 103.

20 Mailer was heavily critiqued by feminists in the1970s.

21 My thanks to Ben Highmore for sharing hisobservations on the theorization of everyday life.

22 Warren Chalk’s increasing mistrust of positivism isapparent in his later essays of the 1960s and1970s. For discussion of the role of logicalpositivism in relation to the Independent Group,see Isabelle Moffat, ‘ ‘‘A Horror of AbstractThought’’: Postwar Britain and Hamilton’s 1951Growth and Form Exhibition’, in ‘TheIndependent Group’, special issue of October, no.94, Cambridge, Mass., 2000.

23 Anon., ‘Situation’, in Crosby and Bodley (eds),Living Arts, no. 2, p. 112.

24 Anon., ‘Man’, in Crosby and Bodley (eds), LivingArts, no. 2, p. 100.

25 See E.N. Rogers, J.L. Sert, and J. Tyrwhitt (eds),The Heart of the City: towards the humanisationof urban life, New York, 1952.

26 For further discussion of CIAM’s ‘humanism’, seeEric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse onUrbanism, Cambridge, Mass., 2000; and BarryCurtis, ‘The Heart of the City’, in JonathanHughes and Simon Sadler (eds), Non-Plan:Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change inModern Architecture and Urbanism, Oxford,2000.

27 Anon., ‘Crowd’, in Crosby and Bodley (eds),Living Arts, no. 2.

28 Constantin Doxiadis, Encyclopaedia Britannica,Book of the Year 1968, p. 21, cited Jencks,Modern Movements in Architecture,Harmondsworth, 1973, 2nd edn 1985, p. 291.

29 For further discussion on the relationship betweenArchigram and the Situationists, see Simon Sadler,The Situationist City, Cambridge, Mass., 1998. Inthe following November of 1963, some Archigram

personnel attended a lecture at the ICA by theSituationist Constant.


31 Reyner Banham, ‘City as Scrambled Egg’, Cambri-dge Opinion, no. 17, Cambridge, 1959, pp. 18–23.

32 The Independent Group officially met between1952 and 1955. An outstanding source formaterial on the Independent Group remains DavidRobbins (ed.), The Independent Group: PostwarBritain and the Aesthetics of Plenty, Cambridge,Mass., 1990. Further discussion is to be found inAnne Massey, The Independent Group:Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain, 1945–1959, Manchester, 1996; and The IndependentGroup, special issue of October, no. 94, 2000.


34 The space pod was provided by Shepperton FilmStudio.

35 Lawrence Alloway, ‘The American Sublime’, inCrosby and Bodley (eds), Living Arts, no. 2,London, p. 12.

36 One landmark in the introduction of Americanvisual culture was the New American Paintingshow at the Tate Gallery in 1959. My thanks toSteven Gartside for sharing his insights into 1950scuratorial policy in Britain.

37 See Barry Curtis, ‘A Necessary Irritant’, in DennisCrompton (ed.), Concerning Archigram, London,1998, p. 56.

38 See fig. 103, ‘Advertisement for Wrapped andSliced Bread. 1944.’, in Sigfried Giedion,Mechanization Takes Command: a contribution toanonymous history, London and New York, 1948,reprinted 1969, p. 196.

39 Reyner Banham, ‘The Atavism of the Short-Distance Mini Cyclist’, Terry Hamilton MemorialLecture, November 1963, published in Crosby andBodley (eds), Living Arts, no. 3, pp. 91–7,reprinted in Banham, Design By Choice, pp. 84–9,p. 87. For more on expendability, see Archigram,no. 3, 1963.

40 Lawrence Alloway, ‘City Notes’, ArchitecturalDesign, January 1959, excerpted in Robbins (ed.),The Independent Group, p. 167.

41 Something of the dualism between institutionalconsumer culture and individual need is found inthe contemporary work of Richard Hamilton. SeeWilliam R. Kaizen, ‘Richard Hamilton’s TabularImage’, in The Independent Group, special issueof October, no. 94, 2000.


43 A certain levity about the Cold War has beennoted, too, in regard to the Independent Group.See Julian Myers, ‘The Future as Fetish’, in TheIndependent Group, special issue of October, no.94, 2000.

44 Banham, ‘The Atavism of the Short-Distance MiniCyclist’, reprinted in Banham, Design By Choice,p. 87.



45 Alison and Peter Smithson, ‘Texts documentingthe development of Parallel of Life and Art’,reprinted in Robbins (ed.), The IndependentGroup, p. 129.

46 Interview with Graham Witham, January 1983,reprinted in Robbins (ed.), The IndependentGroup, p. 25.

47 Other instances include Richard Hamilton’sGrowth and Form exhibition in 1951, and ManMachine & Motion in 1955.

48 Living City positioned itself within the history ofmodernist exhibitions, from the ‘demonstrations’of ‘the 1910s in Germany, 1920s in France andItaly, 1930s in Sweden and so on’ to the ‘reviews’more typical of England – the 1938 MARS groupexhibition and the Festival of Britain. See Cook,‘Introduction’, in Crosby and Bodley (eds), LivingArts, no. 2, pp. 68–71, 68–9.

49 Published in Oscar Newman, New Frontiers in

Architecture: CIAM 59 in Otterlo, New York,1961, p. 16, quoted in Joan Ockman,‘Introduction’, in Joan Ockman (ed.), ArchitectureCulture 1943–1968: A Documentary Anthology,New York, 1993, p. 19.

50 Le Corbusier, ‘Letter to CIAM 10’, 1956, inNewman (ed.), New Frontiers in Architecture, p.16, quoted in Ockman (ed.), Architecture Culture1943–1968, p. 19.

51 Banham, ‘City as Scrambled Egg’, in CambridgeOpinion, pp. 18–23.


53 Warren Chalk failed his medical for NationalService. Correspondence with Dennis Crompton,21 February 2003.

54 Recorded with Don Cherry.55 Hamilton later titled the image ‘Self-Portrait’. See

Mellor, The Sixties Art Scene, p. 142.



the living city survival kit: a portrait of the architect as a young man simon sadler

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