Tuesday 23rd – Thursday 25th January: The Archigram Opera
Shoreditch Arts Club is honoured to present the Archigram Opera over three days from the 23rd to 25th January 2024, lending the space to the tremendously visionary group’s project, creating an audio-visual metropolis using our immersive prominent projected screens with physical works including banners, models and drawings on show.
Across the screens a selection of archival videos will be shown, dating back to the 1960s and throughout the years relating to the Archigram projects or the culture of that period, celebrating the group’s magnitude of influence and inspiration in the architectural and design worlds.
The three-day presentation will conclude with a Q&A panel on the 25th January starting from 7:30pm, featuring esteemed Archigram members Dennis Crompton, David Greene and chaired by Peter Cook. The Archigram Opera is presented in association with Buckley Gray Yeoman and Arup.
Members of Shoreditch Arts Club attend for free.
About Archigram
By 1972, when the Opera was made, the magazine "Archigram" had produced all of its nine issues and the Archigram Group had been published throughout the world, followed by two dozen groups of one kind or another (particularly in Italy and Austria) and imitated, misinterpreted or reviled by all sorts of young architects. Members of the group would go round schools and architects' societies clutching a box of slides.
The need to distil, summarise and (quite frankly) package a series of statements and a series of preoccupations led to a long discussion of the "roadshow". The key figure of Dennis Crompton now emerges: almost every production of the group: competition, mock-up, presentation, model, machine, robot was the product of Dennis’ extraordinary boffin-like ability with micro-switches, dark room apparatus, layers of acetate, rubber grommets. He was the key to this one-hour show that identifies, MOBILITY, ROBOTS, DREAMS COME TRUE.
The presentation that resulted from this discussion was a four-screen projection using four Kodak Carousel slide projectors with eight trays with a total of 644 slides and a quarter inch sound tape. Initially the progress of the slides was controlled by hand but this was rapidly modified with control pulses added to the tape and a magic box that triggered the advance of the four projectors.
In 1992 we were commissioned by the Centre Pompidou to represent the Opera in Paris at the celebrations of their fifteenth birthday: which we did. An audience of 20-year olds was strangely sympathetic to these half-remembered enthusiasms and the sounds of Vanilla Fudge, The Grateful Dead or Emerson Lake and Palmer.
A major exhibition of work – ARCHIGRAM : Experimental Architecture 1961-1974 – was commissioned by the Kunsthalle, Vienna and the Centre George Pompidou, Paris in 1994. This presentation incorporated the multi-screen audio-visual Archigram Arena a centrepiece of which is the Archigram Opera. This exhibition continues to tour internationally. By 2012 the Carousel projectors were reaching the end of their life and the Opera had to be digitized. The current show is presented on two HD digital projectors onto a 32:9 screen but incorporates most of the original images from the 1972 original.
Members have access to all events in our programme.