Internationally renowned architect and visionary Michael Webb, the first recipient of the John and Magda McHale Fellowship in the School of Architecture and Planning, will present "Revisions," an exhibition of his past and current work, today through Feb. 23 in the Dyett Gallery in Hayes Hall on the South Campus.

The exhibition will open with a public reception and gallery talk by Webb at 5:30 p.m. today. It will be open for public view from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. weekdays.

Webb is one of the prescient and influential founders of Britain's Archigram Group, a team of architects founded 40 years ago that has posed seminal-if outrageous-solutions to provocative problems in urban building and design.

He is the author of 12 books, most recently "New Stage for a City: Designing the New Jersey Performing Arts Center," an ongoing series of monographs on residential architects, and "Architecture + Design LA." He is a consulting editor on a series of city guides and the DVD journal Draft-Form and Function. He has contributed to a+u, Domus, Metropolis and other magazines around the world.

Like the other members of Archigram, he has had a tremendous influence on an entire generation of architects, many of whose ideas-technically unfeasible when they first proposed them-are realizable today. Above all, their "sci-fi" assumption that members of a highly mobile society could plug into a sophisticated, worldwide communications network no longer is a fantasy.

Comprised of architects Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene and Ron Herron, the Archigram Group was inspired by Buckminster Fuller, William H. Whyte's "Exploding Metropolis" and Jane Jacobs' "The Death And Life Of Great American Cities."

Their early work did not consist of completed designs for commissioned structures, but formed experiments in concept, process and system conjured up to provoke their passionate visions of a dynamic city-buzzing hives of activity, completely unlike dreary housing estates and tower blocks that defined British urban life in the 1950s and '60s.

The Archigram Group loathed the separation and isolation of human activity caused by rigorous zoning regulations and decried the evaporation of individual freedom in the human habitat. Expanding upon Jacobs' belief in street life, the architects designed high-density settlements that turned flat street grids into a three-dimensional webs of interaction. Webb's "Wankelhaus," or drive-in house project, envisioned an intriguing and humorous integration of habitation and transportation.

The team's work, like that of the earlier Fluxus group of artists-which included John and Magda McHale and Yoko Ono, among others-reveled in technology, pop art, consumer culture, the aesthetics of the comic book, the amusement park and the spaceship. Like Fluxus, Archigram grabbed public attention by incorporating techniques like collage, photomontage, airbrush and psychedelic graphics into its eccentric celebrations of possibility. Its provocative experiments in urban design soon began to be presented widely in mainstream architectural journals, and as technology caught up to its creative vision, many of the concepts introduced by the pioneering Archigram Group have been incorporated into contemporary urban planning and design.