architectural fiction

The concept of architectural fiction seems to be an unorthodox yet interesting concept for a design assignment, especially for the final design assignment in a Bachelor of Architecture. As a cohort of students who will ultimately form a large part of the design society in the future, envisioning how this future might be will be highly beneficial and educational. The concept of architectural fiction both aims to expand on what is considered architecture as well as encouraging debate as to what aspects within society will influence the world of tomorrow. 
The first exposure that i have had with this concept of architectural fiction was through reading “Beyond Architecture. Archigram: Architecture without Architecture” by S. Sadler. Beyond Architecture is essentially a summation of the magazines published by the Archigram group in the 1960's, from Archigram 1 through to Archigram 8.

One of the first aspects of the reading that stood out to me was the idea of Indeterminacy in Architecture, and the way the Archigram used the word to mean "of varying evaluation, not one answer, open-endedness." This concept is something that is very important for architecture students to consider, and it relates to all design, not just fictional architecture. I feel that this concept also aligns with other concepts  popular with the Archigram group, in particular the concept of adaptive, changing architecture. This concept was popular among metabolist architecture in Japan, in particular Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower (below).

This idea of changing architecture was often unsuccessful due to occupant of the leaving the architecture in one arrangement, as was the case with the Nakagin Capsule Tower, which once complete never changed arrangement. However i do not feel that this is a reason to abandon the concept of adaptive, changing architecture, rather an opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past and to use new methods and technologies to create functioning responsive architecture. Personally i feel that as we move into the future, new technologies will play a major role in the success of this changing architecture. As Archigram put it, "buildings with no capacity for change can only become slums or ancient monuments". As sustainability continues to become more prevalent in architecture, surely it makes more sense to have 1 building with 3 possible functions rather the 3 buildings each with 1 function. 

As more issues of Archigram come along, they began to put forth many concepts and designs that implied not just a change in architectural style, but a change in meaning of what it is to design. It was this extreme out-of-the-box thinking that has captured the minds of so many people over the last 50 years. However as more issues were released, the ideas put forth became more and more severed from mainstream thinking, culminating in concepts of cyborg designs eclipsing the need for human function, and other similarly bleak concepts.
Indeterminacy however remained one of the core values across the Archigram releases, highlighting the open-endedness of potential architectural solutions and the need for evaluation from varying perspectives. 

Article Reference:

Sadler, S., 2005. Beyond Architecture. In. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. pp 90-138.