No-Stop City as Building

Abstract

Archizoom’s hypothetical project of 1969–72 is the ultimate interior. Comprised of a floor, ceiling, and grid of columns, No-Stop City stretches infinitely in all directions, potentially consuming the whole world in its fluorescently lit belly. The project and its aims are commonly thought of in relation to other radical and speculative projects of the 1960s and 1970s—those of Archigram and Superstudio, for example—and to the sociocultural critique they posed. However, it also belongs within another lineage of architectural discourse, which might be said to run from the polemic image of a co-op interior published by Hannes Meyer in 1926 to the diagrams and sketches of Claude Parent and Paul Virilio arguing for the oblique as a mode of inhabitation for Architecture Principe (1966) to the perspective drawing of boxers inside a locker room made by Madelon Vreisendorp for Rem Koolhaas’s seminal publication, Delirious New York (1978). This second set of unbuilt projects is inseparable from the critique engaged by those of the first group, yet the discourse is differently centred. While all are equally theoretical in nature, the first set ultimately led away from buildings and toward their contents—to furniture and installations—while the second reinforced buildings and their constituent elements as the domains of influence. This essay examines the double life of No-Stop City by comparing it to these two sets of projects, each of which raise questions about the notion of building. In place of building-as-form, these readings of Archizoom’s unbuilt interior offer building-as-act, as an action tied to unbuilding, rebuilding, and reconceiving of the limits and possibilities of both contemporary life and the discipline of architecture.