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The Anarchitecture Group

Based in New York in the 1970s, Anarchitecture was an artists' group whose members included artists Laurie Anderson, Tina Girouard, Carol Goodden, Suzanne Harris, Jene Highstein, Bernard Kirschenbaun, Richard Landry, and Richard Nonas, as well as the architecturally trained artist, Gordon Matta Clark (1943-1978). Their name, a mixture of 'anarchy' and 'architecture', was conceived in informal conversation, one of the main ways through which the group collaborated.

Anarchitecture were very critical of the stasis in cultural attitudes and what Richard Nonas called the 'hard shell', or resistance to change, that architecture epitomised. The group as a whole tackled architecture's complicity in capitalist modes of production, using wordplay and found photographs to explore issues related to cities, ways of inhabiting buildings and the role of property. These were transformations of abandoned buildings, split apart, sliced through and rearranged, commenting once again on society through architecture, touching on the increasing desire for material accumulation, wealth, permanence.

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