![]() I meet up with Peter Cook in Amsterdam, and then again a couple of months later at the north London office of CRAB Studio – the architectural studio he co founded with Gavin Robotham in 2006.Ĭook brims with fun, energy and a kind of endearing British eccentricity. Designed and edited by Dennis Crompton, it’s an entertaining and enlightening journey through the 14 years of Archigram, and starts with a touching dedication to Herron and Chalk. The four surviving members are still friends and collaborated on the recently published Archigram: The Book. ![]() Chalk and Herron died too early – Chalk died in 1988, and Herron in 1994 – but they left behind a legacy of thought-provoking projects, art and ideas. ![]() Cook, Greene and Webb were the younger members of the group – more or less fresh from architectural college when they all met – while the other three were older and more experienced. The six members were Peter Cook, David Greene, Mike Webb, Ron Herron, Warren Chalk and Dennis Crompton. We felt architecture should be part of all that.” “We were interested in the space race, the American beat poets, robots, how the pop art scene had exploded painting. The group were awarded a RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2002, and Cook received a knighthood from the Queen in 2007 for his services to architecture and teaching. Their exuberant, highly detailed drawings for projects such as Plug-In City, Walking City and Instant City inspired the likes of Zaha Hadid and Will Alsop, and their influence can clearly be seen in later buildings – most famously in Richard Rogers’ and Renzo Piano’s Pompidou Centre in Paris. While their bold, fantastical, futuristic designs were never built, they provoked debate and encouraged architects around the world to question the status quo. You couldn’t accuse Archigram of being predictable, polite or commercial, and they certainly succeeded in shaking things up. “It was so predictable – either very commercial or very polite.” ![]() “We were utterly bored with the stuff that was going on in the offices that we had to work for,” says Peter Cook, one of the founding members of the group. The ‘Archigram boys’ were a group of six architects, ranging in age from their early twenties to their early thirties, united by a desire to shake things up and bring fun, freedom and creativity back to what they saw as a staid, unimaginative architectural scene. When the members of the avant garde art and architecture collective Archigram met almost 60 years ago, the future seemed up for grabs. Their work draws heavily from pop culture imagery, introducing a technocratic vision of the future that remains optimistic, despite plans that might otherwise appear oppressive.Peter Cook Credit: Photo: Paul McLaughlin It was printed by a small-press printer, assembled at home by the group, and distributed to and by students at universities throughout the UK and at a limited number of booksellers throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States (including Barbara's Bookstore in Chicago).Īrchigram took a democratic view towards architecture, proposing a customizable, disposable, often mobile product, which the consumer could assemble, add to, and remove from as desired to modify according to changing needs. The Archigram Group published 9 1/2 issues between 19 (Issue 9 1/2 was devoted to the work done by the Archigram studio, rather than being conceived as a complete Archigram issue on its own). The suffix "gram" was meant to convey the collective's desire to stand apart from the architectural mainstream in publishing-to reflect the magazine's resemblance to a telegram or instant communication, rather than a traditional magazine. The new group founded a magazine of the same name. Cook described it as a reaction against "the crap going on in London, against the attitude of a continuing European tradition of well-mannered, but gutless architecture that had absorbed the label 'Modern' but had betrayed most of the philosophies of the earliest 'Modern.'" In 1961 a group of young London architects-Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb-formed Archigram out of dissatisfaction with the Modernist architectural status quo.
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