In the burble about housing shortage, there is a depressing acceptance of the inevitability of brick walls, pitched roofs and back gardens. Already during the 1960s, a group of young British architects were bridling at these stilted traditions.
Archigram were blending a cocktail of the visionary and the humorous, radical propositions examining everything from inflatable living pods to walking, plug-in cities. Their brilliant, sometimes barmy designs look remarkably un-dated and this Design Museum show usefully documents how much they contributed to an architectural vision which embraced everything from dwelling clothes (the wonderful inflatable "Suitaloon" and the roomier "Cushicle") to cities (the itinerant Walking City on huge telescopic spider legs). Their ideas about mobility and plug-in capsules, umbilically attaching users to a network of power and communication are being primitively realised with mobile phones and Wi Fi, virtual reality sex-suits and the nightmares of The Matrix. But very obviously, not in suburban housing.
Archigram's contribution shifted the architectural debate from aesthetics to technics, less interested in beauty than ideas, their comic-book manifestos and whacky designs inquired into every aspect of modern life. Archigram presaged the high-tech architecture which exploded from Britain in the 1970s. But, just as it took the French to build the first high-tech masterpiece, Richard Rogers' Centre Pompidou, before anything appeared in Britain, Archigram realised nothing concrete and founder member Peter Cook's extraordinary, lumpy blue monster of an arts building has just been completed, not here but in Graz, Austria.
The show is a riotous splurge of pop art. The mix of drawings, collages, models and texts is conspicuously lacking in good taste but giddily rich in ideas and humour so prescient we haven't nearly caught up with them yet. The unique blend of Max Ernst, Terry Gilliam and Flash Gordon is infectious, good-natured and both funny and relevant. Walking between Lord Foster's nearby GLA Building, his wonderful new inflated condom, the Swiss: Re Building and Rogers' technocratic money mill, the Lloyds Building shows how enduring Archigram's benignly mischievous influence remains. Tel 0870 833 9955
