“Beyond Architecture”. Seventeen loose sheets and an electronic resistor in a plastic bag. One sheet folded to make a pocket for the other sheets. Includes two sheets of “cut-outs” and three editorials. Print colours vary per sheet but include purple; blue; black, red and green. Unpriced

Editorial and production panel: Peter Cook, editor, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton in the UK, Mike Webb, David Greene in the USA (VPI, Blacksburg, Virginia).

ARCHIGRAM 7, 1966
Interview with Dennis Crompton

Dennis Crompton
Right, so this was a series of loose sheets in a plastic bag. It was loosely about the time when electronics were moving into miniaturisation. At the beginning of the Sixties, electronics was about hot valves and stuff like that. It was end of the Faraday era, if you like, where the ways of processing electrons were through valves and various devices that were based on late Nineteenth century discoveries, but in the Forties and the Fifties, and then primarily through the space programme miniaturisation, transistors have been discovered, lasers have been discovered, and the whole solid state thing. The resistor actually bridges both gaps, because resistors were being used in this form, in the valve based electronic devices. So this has got a printed circuit representation and a resistor. At that time, in Tot...

“Beyond Architecture”. Seventeen loose sheets and an electronic resistor in a plastic bag. One sheet folded to make a pocket for the other sheets. Includes two sheets of “cut-outs” and three editorials. Print colours vary per sheet but include purple; blue; black, red and green. Unpriced

Editorial and production panel: Peter Cook, editor, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton in the UK, Mike Webb, David Greene in the USA (VPI, Blacksburg, Virginia).

ARCHIGRAM 7, 1966
Interview with Dennis Crompton

Dennis Crompton
Right, so this was a series of loose sheets in a plastic bag. It was loosely about the time when electronics were moving into miniaturisation. At the beginning of the Sixties, electronics was about hot valves and stuff like that. It was end of the Faraday era, if you like, where the ways of processing electrons were through valves and various devices that were based on late Nineteenth century discoveries, but in the Forties and the Fifties, and then primarily through the space programme miniaturisation, transistors have been discovered, lasers have been discovered, and the whole solid state thing. The resistor actually bridges both gaps, because resistors were being used in this form, in the valve based electronic devices. So this has got a printed circuit representation and a resistor. At that time, in Tottenham Court Road, there were lots of shops that sold ex-military equipment and you could go and you could buy a great big bag of these things for sixpence, and it was only if you understood what the rings meant that they were any use at all!

Kester Rattenbury
Were they double sided? The printed sheets?

Dennis Crompton
Yes. I don’t remember, but it’s as though the bag was bought first and then the page was designed to fit in the bag.

Kester Rattenbury
I was wondering about that, whether you had got a job lot of bags.

Dennis Crompton
Yes, it seems very likely. Anyway, it was, it was just a pile of loose sheets of paper. One sheet was printed and then folded, so that it made a pocket for the rest of the magazine to go into. Then these were all loose sheets. Some of them are the same size, and for no particular reason. It’s got a project of Ron’s, again with Barry Snowden who we must remember to pick up in the credits. Free Time Node, a project of Ron’s, inflatable furniture Barry was doing at the time and Mike Webb’s Rent-a-Wall which is part of the Auto-Environment project.

Kester Rattenbury
Did you get all these printed together at the same place?

Dennis Crompton
Yes

Kester Rattenbury
You must have driven the printers up the wall!

Dennis Crompton
Yes. Absolutely. Totally!

Kester Rattenbury
How many sizes of paper are there here? Did they fold them or did you fold them?

Dennis Crompton
No, we did the folding and the collating.

Kester Rattenbury
I bet they were glad. Were they glad?

Dennis Crompton
Yes, yes. They just come as big blocks of printed material.
But one of the features in this was this sort of cut-out toy. Without getting into the sort-of Archigram theory behind it, basically one of the features of the breakfast table in the 1960’s was the Kellogg’s packet with things on the back for kids to cut-out and make. You know, dresses for cut-out figures or tanks or aeroplanes or whatever...space rockets... You’d get the Kellogg packet and on the back there’d be these things.

So Peter did this, partly – I suppose I need to get slightly into the Archigram theory – partly because it was to make the point that the Plug-in City was not a unified design, it was a series of components which went loosely together in order to make an urban form. He took a number of things, like, there’s a Buckminster Fuller sphere, there’s a Tony Dugdale ramp, there’s a Tony Gwilliam something-or-other-else, there’s a Cedric something somewhere. So they’re all bits that other people have designed which you can cut out and then put together. And we had a model, some years ago, twenty years ago – a long time after the event. Ben Banham, Reyner Banham’s son, asked if he could make a model of the Plug-in City using these cut-outs. And so we just gave him a whole pile of sheets with this printed on and he spent, I don’t know, six months or whatever cutting them all out and finished up with this incredible model. There’s a facsimile of that model in the exhibition. The original model was ceremoniously burnt at one stage and I have the film of the burning of the model, of course!

Kester Rattenbury
‘Architecture must burn,’ as Wolf Prix would say.

Dennis Crompton
Yes. I think the idea came from a mixture of Ben Banham, James Meller and Gus Coral. James and Gus taught with me at the AA. James had his sort-of morose side, so setting fire to something is sort-of in his character, and Gus was a photographer, film-maker – or is a photographer film-maker – so the idea of having something and setting it on fire would appeal to him. And I think Ben Banham went along with it and we just, since we’d not made the model, we didn’t know what to do with it anyway. So it was put in the centre of the Art Net space and set on fire.

Anyway, there were two [cut-out pages]; on the back of two of the sheets was this printed thing of component parts for the Plug-in City, so people were invited to do that. There was then a series of sheets. This one is folded into four and it’s again an illustrated essay of Warren’s. The actual essay is on the back of one of the other sheets, and it’s a letter from Warren to David about ghosts and phantoms. And again, it’s Warren thinking out loud, as you might say, thinking that ghosts are his memories of the past in architectural design and music and social events, and the phantoms are from the future. So this is the collage that illustrates that and, again, when you look into it you can see all sorts of things, you know, you wouldn’t automatically think of. Like Ronchamp [Chapel de Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamps, France by Le Corbusier], and so on. And then in the phantoms, Dymaxion World, bit of Op-Art, two bits of Op-Art, three bits of Op-Art, space-rockets, things like tractors with flexible arms and the Jodrell Bank telescope, electron telescope, a bit of punchtape... That was Warren.

These are in no particular order. Just to identify them, I’ve numbered them, but there is absolutely no significance to the numbering, it’s purely a way of identifying it. So, although the essay for that is on the back of this, the front of it is one of the editorials – there are two editorials in this issue – and it’s more about what’s in the issue itself than a philosophical, a theoretical piece. We need to pick up on the credits because various other people appear on those things.

And another two or three folded sheets. This one, a friend of ours who’d been a student at the AA but then by this time he was working for Cedric, a guy called Tony Dugdale.

Kester Rattenbury
He worked on the Pompidou as well?

Dennis Crompton
That’s right, yes. Yeah, so there’s a piece of his, and he appears two or three times, I think, in this issue...and the idea of networks, which gets picked up again in Archigram 9. So I mean the size of these obviously is to do with the size of the printed sheet. There are clues every now and again.

Kester Rattenbury
I can’t imagine what the printer said, I just can’t imagine! Was it always the same printer?

Dennis Crompton
It often was Grants which was a printer’s in Rathbone Place, but you’ve got to remember this is the beginning of high street offset litho, so all sorts of weirdos were coming in, wanting funny things done. I mean, it was very unusual and, if you look at, like, all the psychedelic posters and those sort-of graphics, it’s all because there was this freedom and this direct relationship between the designer of the graphic and the printer. So you’d go in and you’d know the guy. You know, it wouldn’t be a sort-of anonymous thing, you’d know the guy.

So that’s a project of Peter’s: Paddington, which is an extension of the Plug-in City project. Here we’ve got, who have we got? Chris Blinko, student at the AA; Ian Archer, another student at the AA. By this time, Peter was teaching fifth year at the AA so some of these were to do with the students that he’d had at the AA. Peter Lacey, a man that’s still around, I think; Sylvia Bartlett She was married to the guy who was banging on about Ronan Point. Sam Webb She was a partner with a guy called Lesley Fairweather who was an AA councillor. They had an office in Newman Passage which we had a part of their office for a while. But he was on the AA council, and I went along with John Lloyd, I suppose to a council meeting, and he objected that a stranger was present! Those were the days.

What else...Cedric Price has three pages in here, or two and a half pages

Kester Rattenbury
Did Cedric ever get involved with the production of the magazine, or did he just deliver you stuff?

Dennis Crompton
It wouldn’t be that clear cut; I mean he did deliver us stuff. Like the first time when he appeared in Archigram 2, he was in an office across the road from [James] Cubitt’s office where Peter and David were working. Cedric would contribute positively. Peter would say, ‘We’d like...’ – in fact, there are letters from Peter to Cedric and from Cedric to Peter inviting Cedric to contribute something for an issue of the magazine.

But then, I mean, Cedric was a mate, you know? You’d meet him at a lecture or you’d meet him in the pub or you’d meet him in his office and, because nothing was done in secret, anybody passing by who you could collar to tell them what you were doing, you’d tell them. So Cedric would be part of the conversation, as would people like Tony Gwilliam and Tony Dugdale and so on when the magazine was being produced. So there’d be comment going on, just as there would be between any group of friends who were involved with producing something like this. But I think Cedric kept his contribution separate from his comment on what we were doing, so he wouldn’t come in and say, ‘Oh, I don’t like the way that you’ve double spaced those lines,’ and so on. He wouldn’t be concerned with that part of it. But anyway, there are three pages – of just text – and again, there’s a second shot at the cut-out thing.
But, as I say, they’re all just in a random order. The editorial is...no there are not two, three editorials, three editorials. All three bits by the editor.

So, there you go, that was Archigram 7. They’re not in any particular order.