The beautiful dreamers

Their role models ran from the achievements of Nasa's moon programme, then in its pomp, to the honky-tonk festivity of the English seaside town.

Their spirit and graphic style, delivered in an intermittently-published magazine, also called Archigram, was joyous, eclectic and hallucinogenic, part Yellow Submarine, part Monty Python, and preceding both.

By the early 1970s these dreamers were commissioned to design some buildings of a particularly louche kind. They won a competition to design a casino in Monte Carlo, and envisioned a babe-strewn pool house for Rod Stewart. These projects remained on paper, however. Only an adventure playground in Milton Keynes was realised.

Architects around the world have been learning from Archigram ever since. The Pompidou Centre in Paris, with its clip-on pipes and escalators, could not, for example, have happened without them. Some of the group have even seen plans turn into buildings: last year Peter Cook, the most vocal member, completed the blue blob of Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria.

The only trace of the group in London is the fabric-roofed atrium of an office building in Bloomsbury, by the late ex-Archigrammer, Ron Herron.

It seems that the English are happy to give licence to jesters and dreamers and latter-day William Blakes, but are too pragmatic or nervous to want their ideas to change the places in which we live and work.

We seem uncomfortable with the idea that buildings might provoke, intrigue or move us, in the way that art and music does. In Strasbourg, Hadid has built a tram terminal and in Naples she is designing a metro station; these cities clearly do not deem her too exotic to design for the everyday, yet there is absolutely no chance she will be commissioned by London Underground to enliven the daily commute.

The eminent architect Sir James Stirling once observed that he never discussed architecture with English clients - they found it off-putting - so he would only talk about time and money and keeping the rain out.

The most successful architecture in Britain, thanks to this national love of the pragmatic, has been the steeland-glass style once called high-tech. Like Archigram, high-tech originated from an intensely romantic idea about the benign power of modern technology, but its sales pitch has long been that it is supremely efficient, and will make the people who build it richer.

Even a building as striking as the Gherkin is justified in practical terms: its shape is said to be derived from an ultra-ecological natural ventilation system. The offence of Hadid and the Archigrammers is that they suggest things that cannot be explained with reference to purely practical arguments. They design buildings which, like human beings, are complex and not always absolutely rational.

Occasionally, it is true, there is some sort of collective spasm, and it is officially announced that we should have "visionary" architecture. But the result is projects such as the Dome, where architects like Hadid and Nigel Coates were asked to design temporary buildings in a place far removed from the everyday lives of Londoners.

They were reduced to acts in a circus tent. The Dome was a vision sump, into which dangerously exciting ideas could be poured and, with a sigh of relief, sealed up for another generation.

Yet there is no reason why London should be leadenly sensible, or why its everyday places should not be charged with extraordinary ideas. The Victorian builders of the capital, with exuberant edifices such as the Natural History Museum and St Pancras Station, were not constrained by logic.

Nor does a more creative approach to city building have to mean an outbreak of gratuitously strange shapes. What it does mean is at least giving a chance to people like Hadid to show what they can do.

Archigram is at the Design Museum, SE1 (020 7833 9955) from Saturday until 4 July.