Agency becomes politically consequential when it is lodged in forms that continue to act after their authors withdraw. A door closer, a street layout, a colour sequence, a line of code, a museum display or a proportional rule can redirect behaviour without issuing a verbal command. Materialised agency names this migration of intention, norm and memory into artefacts, spaces and infrastructures. It does not claim that objects think like persons. It identifies how action is delegated, preserved and redistributed through designed arrangements. The material object is therefore never merely present; it carries a programme. Latour’s mundane artefacts make morality executable, while Cadere’s bars reveal how formal order can be turned against the institutions that stabilise it. Their deliberate error and mobile insertion expose the gallery as a machine of permission. Vitruvian proportion demonstrates an older form of delegation: the measured body becomes a rule capable of organising temples long after the original observation. In each case, form transfers judgment across time and situation. The crucial question is not whether form is neutral, but whose programme it sustains and which deviations it permits.

Architecture expands this problem from artefact to territory. Lynch shows that paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks distribute the capacity to orient, while Aureli insists that finite form can interrupt the continuous managerial space of urbanisation. Archigram’s nomadic systems displace architecture toward mobile services and temporary frameworks, revealing both the emancipatory and disciplinary potentials of flexibility. Spatial agency is thus neither contained within monumental objects nor dissolved into abstract flows. It is produced through thresholds, stoppages, routes and devices that regulate how bodies meet, move and separate. Benjamin and Friedlander reveal the archival form of the same operation. Historical fragments do not speak automatically; they acquire force through arrangement.

Cook’s Plug-in City envisions a flexible megastructure where modular units evolve through replacement, embodying adaptability and collective urban agency.

The speculative project Plug-in City: Maximum Pressure Area (1964) by Peter Cook, member of Archigram, articulates a radical departure from late modernist functionalism through the proposition of architecture as an evolutionary infrastructural system. Conceived as a vast, scaffold-like megastructure, the project replaces the notion of permanent buildings with a hierarchy of temporal components, wherein residential, commercial, and institutional modules—each calibrated to distinct lifespans—are inserted, replaced, and upgraded within a durable craneway framework. This strategy foregrounds planned obsolescence not as failure but as a generative principle, enabling the city to respond dynamically to technological innovation and shifting social demands. The theoretical development resonates with contemporaneous cybernetic discourse, insofar as the city operates as a feedback-driven organism, continuously recalibrated by its users’ needs and collective will. As a case study, Plug-in City synthesises infrastructural permanence with architectural ephemerality, prefiguring later discourses on high-tech architecture and metabolist urbanism. Its visual language—dense, mechanical, and infrastructural—materialises a city in perpetual assembly, where circulation, services, and habitation coalesce into a single operative system. Ultimately, Cook’s proposition advances a decisive conceptual inversion: architecture is no longer an object to be preserved but a process to be sustained, wherein adaptability, replacement, and user participation redefine the ethical and temporal horizons of the built environment.

Archigram

En 1961, à Londres, avec le dynamisme du pop art et les Beatles en toile de fond, le collectif Archigram est né, composé de six jeunes visionnaires : Dennis Crompton, Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Ron Herron, David Greene et Michael Webb. Ce groupe, dont le nom combine les mots architecture et télégramme, a transformé la discipline en la repensant comme un langage de communication visuelle et conceptuelle. L'architecture n'était plus seulement une construction, mais devenait une projection utopique de l'avenir, où la technologie et le design interagissent de manière ludique et provocante. Des projets emblématiques comme The Walking City, The Plug-in City et Instant City ont consolidé leur héritage en tant que manifestes futuristes qui inspirent encore aujourd'hui des architectes du monde entier. Archigram a imaginé un environnement urbain mécanique mais accessible, où les villes s'adaptent et évoluent comme des organismes vivants. Par exemple, The Walking City propose des structures mobiles et autonomes qui, par leur déplacement, redéfinissent le concept d'urbanité ; The Plug-in City, en revanche, propose un système modulaire où les logements et les services peuvent être insérés et remplacés en fonction des besoins des habitants. Au-delà de leur caractère spéculatif, ces idées, illustrées avec un langage graphique brillant, révèlent une critique de la rigidité architecturale de l'époque, ouvrant la voie à une expérimentation sans limites. L'œuvre d'Archigram transcende par son esprit utopique, qui combine une imagination radicale avec des propositions techniques viables. Bien que leurs projets n'aient jamais été réalisés, leur influence sur le design contemporain est palpable, de l'architecture modulaire à la narration visuelle des propositions urbaines actuelles. Le récent décès de Dennis Crompton, l'un de ses fondateurs, nous rappelle l'impact durable de ce courant sur l'histoire de l'architecture.