the Walking City

Archigram, the British architectural group, produced a series of visionary concepts such as the Walking City, which would, literally walk from one place to another on its giant legs, and a Plug-In City designed specifically to enable its occupants to add or subtract different units as their needs changed.

Forget being the walking city: just by cooling their heels on the subway, New Yorkers fare better in staving off obesity than those who do the same in their cars.

An actual building with a plain debt to The Walking City was even completed last year in Toronto: Will Alsop's Ontario College of Art and Design is a massive tabletop of classrooms and offices, all elevated on angled steel columns to look like a structure heading out for a stroll.

But there are plenty of high points, including the Monty Pythonesque drawings by Archigram, a group of British design theorists from the '60s and '70s whose fantasies on paper, such as The Walking City, have long since worked their way into the collective psyche of architecture students.