Webb, Michael

Bio Sketch

Michael Webb (b. 1937, Henley-on-Thames, England) is an English architect and a founding member of the 1960s Archigram Group. He studied architecture at Regent Street Polytechnic in London (famously taking seventeen years to complete a five-year curriculum), moved to the United States in 1965 to teach at Virginia Tech, and has since taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, NJIT, Columbia, Barnard, the Cooper Union, SUNY Buffalo, Pratt, and Princeton. His oeuvre is almost entirely drawn rather than built — a corpus of experimental projects (Sin Centre, Rent-a-Wall, Cushicle, Suitaloon, the Drive-in House) exhibited internationally, most comprehensively in the travelling exhibition and monograph Michael Webb: Two Journeys (Lars Müller, 2018). The least built-oriented member of Archigram, he is sometimes nicknamed "Michael 'Spider' Webb" for his obsessive drawing practice.

Key Works

Drive-in House (1968; redrawn 1985 and 1995) — the car ingested into a rotating drum, the house walls as "a distended negative of the car exterior": Inside out (2018)
Sin Centre (1962) — early Archigram-era project for a fashion-boutique facade (not yet ingested)
Cushicle (1966) and Suitaloon (1967) — inflatable, wearable dwelling-environments; the portable interior carried on the body (not yet ingested)
Rent-a-Wall (1966) — the interior as rented, mobile partition (not yet ingested)
Michael Webb: Two Journeys (Lars Müller, 2018) — monograph and exhibition organized around two themes: a train of thought deriving from Reyner Banham's A Home is not a House (1965), and a study of linear perspective projection (not yet ingested)

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Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

drive-in-house — his culminating drawn project and the chapter's thesis object
automobile-vernacular — the Banham-derived vernacular his project theorizes
interior-architecture — "the outside is the inside distended"
inside-outside-dialectic — surfaces belonging to both interior and exterior
perspective — the perspectival cone of vision solidified as the "ice core"

Relevance to the Core Research

Webb supplies the interior cluster its practitioner-theorist pole: where Hollis historiographs, Deyong genealogizes, La Coe historicizes, and Qureshi philosophizes the discipline, Webb designs its boundary problem. His chapter gives the wiki's interior cluster (a) the double-membership surface thesis, (b) the "ice core" — the perspectival cone of vision extracted as a solid, inhabitable interior, directly continuous with La Coe's Pozzo material — and (c) the drive-in house, the machine-age negative-space definition of interior architecture ("the outside is the inside distended"), which links the discipline to the automobile vernacular (Banham, Learning from Las Vegas), to consumerist architecture (SITE's Best Products showrooms), and forward to the post-analog condition Qureshi theorizes (note 4's self-driving car eliminating "pressed metal deserts"). His Henley-on-Thames birthplace is also the site of the chapter's central painting.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

Inside out (Webb 2018)

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.