Archigram was an avant-garde British architectural group whose unbuilt projects and media-savvy provocations "spawned the most influential architectural movement of the 1960s," according to Princeton Architectural Press study Archigram (1999). Neofuturistic, anti-heroic, and pro-consumerist, the group drew inspiration from technology in order to create a new reality that was expressed through hypothetical projects, i.e., its buildings were never built, although the group did produce what the architectural historian Charles Jencks called "a series of monumental objects (one hesitates in calling them buildings since most of them moved, grew, flew, walked, burrowed or just sank under the water." The works of Archigram had a neofuturistic slant, influenced by Antonio Sant'Elia's works. Buckminster Fuller and Yona Friedman were also important sources of inspiration.

"Their attitude was closely tied to the technocratic ideology of the American designer Buckminster Fuller," Kenneth Frampton confirms, in Modern Architecture: A Critical History, "and to that of his British apologists John McHale and Reyner Banham. ... Archigram's subsequent commitment to a 'high-tech,' lightweight, infrastructural approach (the kind of indeterminacy implicit in the work of Fuller and even more evident in Yona Friedman's L'Architecture mobile of 1958) brought them, rather paradoxically, to indulge in ironic forms of science fiction, rather than to project solutions that were either truly indeterminate or capable of being realized and appropriated by society."

Based at the Architectural Association in London, the main members of the group were Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene. Archigram formed in late in the year 1960, shortly before the first issue of their magazine of the same name, which appeared in 1961. Designer Theo Crosby was the "hidden hand" behind the group. He gave them coverage in Architectural Design magazine (where he was an editor from 1953 to 1962), brought them to the attention of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, where, in 1963, they mounted an exhibition called Living City, and in 1964 brought them into the Taylor Woodrow Design Group, which he headed, to take on experimental projects. The pamphlet Archigram I was printed in 1961 to proclaim their ideas. The group experimented with modular technology, mobility through the environment, space capsules, and consumer-culture imagery. Their projects offered a seductive vision of a glamorous, high-tech future. Social and environmental issues were, however, left largely unaddressed.

The group tapped into the zeitgeist captured by Richard Hamilton in his "This Is Tomorrow" exhibition in 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, by Pop Art, by the turned-on, tuned-in psychedelic counterculture, and by the gnomic pronouncements of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan. Then, too, some of its guiding principles were premonitory of what the politically radical French avant-garde would later call Situationism. In the Living City exhibition, Archigram "collected images from any part of the city—the accepted Pop iconography of spaceman, superman, robotman, and woman—but presented them in a way and with a message that was new to architecture," Jencks writes, in Modern Movements in Architecture.

The city was seen not as architecture (hardware), but as people and their "situations" (software). It was these infinitely variable and fleeting situations which gave the real life to the city: in this sense "the home, the whole city, and the frozen pea pack are all the same." Not only are they all expendable, but they are all products which interact with man in the same level, the situation.

Archigram agitated to prevent modernism from becoming a sterile orthodoxy, rendered safe by its adherents. Contrary to Buckminster Fuller's notion of "ephemeralization," which assumes more must be done with less and less (because material resources are finite), Archigram presumes a future of inexhaustible resources.

According to Jencks, Archigram's "extraordinary inventiveness" and delirious, Pop sci-fi imagery attracted international media attention throughout 1963–65. The group designed cities "that looked like computers and molehills, that crawled on the shoots of a telescope like Eduardo Paolozzi's Bug-Eyed Monsters, that bobbed under the sea like so many skewered balloons, that sprouted—swock!—out of the sea like a Tom Wolfian, hydraulic umbrella, that zoomed down from the clouds flashing 'Destroy-Man! Kill-All-Humans,' a space-comic-robot-zaap, that clicked into place along pneumatic tubes, a plug-in plastic layer cake, that gurgled and spluttered over the old city like creeping, cancerous, testubular, friendly Daleks."

"The strength of Archigram's appeal," wrote the architecture critic and historian Reyner Banham, "stems from many things, including youthful enthusiasm in a field (city planning) which is increasingly the preserve of middle-aged caution. But chiefly it offers an image-starved world a new vision of the city of the future, a city of components on racks, components in stacks, components plugged into networks and grids, a city of components being swung into place by cranes."