C.S.8.634
Stage one stationary field control unit specification notes.
Population max. 8 no.
Use, personal habitation.
Unloaded wt. sea level 18 cwt. 3 no. points. of penetration. 42 no. suspension points. Select 3 no. min. no. compression.
Usable vol. max. 16,000 cu. ft. min. 10,000 cu. ft. Instantaneous selective vol. change.
Operational criteria limits: internal pressure maintained up to limit of 3deg. per hr. & 5kpsi/hr. external fluctuation.
Equipment. 3 no. microthermic balances & equalisers capacity per ¼ deg. 97.304g. (preset) couplings: fegane pressure heat and gravity correction units all accessible [sic] from cocoons.
Finishes: externally, mechanical equipment vacuum sealed transparent polymerogenic film. Opaque areas colours selected from 10 yr7.5/12, 2.5y5/2, 7.5r3/16, 2.5pb3/8.
Internally surfaces sprayed to customers specification max. finish ld. 1lb. sq. in.
Cooking & hygiene apparatus any conforming to U.N.B. dim. & fixing standards.
Guarantee free inspection every 12000 hrs. Components up to 10000 hrs. Delivery & fixing max. 17 hrs. Within 3500 miles.
Project Stage One:
A static type field control unit. A suspended machine for personal habitation in a location of any latitude, gravity or altitude condition. It attempts to manifest visually a separation between the spaces required for human occupation and the technical equipment for maintaining the physical conditions and apparatus for this use.
Any new architecture will have its roots not in art but in the world and total world problems. Vitalism was lost with the first synthesis of organic compound amino acid, yet we have yet to develop the first mechanist attitudes of Seurat and ‘Towards a New Architecture’ into a consistent non-art product. The burden of the woolly fine art tradition of Europe is too heavy. Florence and parts lost out to the Ford assembly line. Rubens and Pollock lost out to the admen and the revelations of the electron microscope. Sculpture lost out to biochemical models and the God-fingers on the test pads.
Zoom: Archigram Magazine Issue no. 4
This project was devised whilst Greene and the other Archigram members were employed in the offices of Taylor Woodrow to work on designs for Euston Station.
There is one collaged drawing of this project. In retrospect it seems to be a hybrid of Spray House and Living Pod (which we will come to shortly). In Living Pod, the machine has found itself a site, it clings precariously to the surface of architecture rather than being buried within it, sometimes crawling or nestling in crevices - a building becomes a kind of host to these mechanical visitors.
The origins of ICSB63.4 are a bit confused in my memory...but I think it harks back to the ‘Story of the Thing’, a floating space deck mega-structure that hovered above our own or between planets. Mike Webb and I made it under our desks whilst we were supposed to be working on drawings for Essex University at the Architects Co-Partnership, until one of the partners became overwhelmed by the smell of Evostick and gave us ‘an official warning’. ICSB63.4 was a detail of that floating network. At the time I saw it as being a single large machine-house that would try to secure itself onto ‘The Thing’. But now, having observed the way that robotics has reached into ever smaller devices, I wonder if the mechanized pod might be quite small - part of a swarm - its behavior would have then been quite particular then. The words were as, or maybe more important, than the collage of bits of machinery. Words as a kind of picture. They attempt to describe a building in the language of the space programme or the notes on an engineer’s drawing, an entirely mechanical explanation, a precise performance specification. For someone consumed by the modernist idea of the house as a machine for living in to re-present it in this literal way seemed a logical step. How can you change architecture if you do not change the language and vocabulary by which it is described and explained? The drawing was printed white on black so as to remember the blue-print or perhaps make it more suitable for publishing in Popular Mechanic, my favorite magazine at the time.
The Disreputable Projects of David Greene,
Written and edited by David Greene
and Samantha Hardingham, (London: Architectural Association, 2008)
