Spring-summer 1964. Cover: Warren Chalk; other features: Peter Cook; silk screening: Dennis Crompton, cut-outs by whole team. “Zoom”, space comic/ science fiction issue. Space-age-sci-fi comic strip annotated with additional text and commentary text. First issue to be distributed internationally, according to Cook via critic Reyner Banham, but back cover carries list of international booksellers carrying magazine

ARCHIGRAM 4, 1964
Interview with Dennis Crompton

Dennis Crompton
Then this is when we went international: Archigram 4. And the mythology about this is: Peter had just got them from the -- well, it couldn’t have been just from the printers, although he tells the story like that, because we had to hand-cut all the centre pages, and the outer pages I had to silk-screen because the rest of the magazine was printed. The blue was printed litho and the yellow and the red I overprinted using silkscreen. And then we all sat around endless nights in Taylor Woodrow’s office and cut the ‘pop-up’ page.

Peter had a bunch of these under his arm whilst walking down Aberdare Gardens where he lived at the time, and across the road from Peter lived Reyner Banham. We already knew Reyner quite well by then, and so they stop in the street, and Banham says, ‘Oh, I’m off to the States tomorrow, anything interesting to say?’ ...

Spring-summer 1964. Cover: Warren Chalk; other features: Peter Cook; silk screening: Dennis Crompton, cut-outs by whole team. “Zoom”, space comic/ science fiction issue. Space-age-sci-fi comic strip annotated with additional text and commentary text. First issue to be distributed internationally, according to Cook via critic Reyner Banham, but back cover carries list of international booksellers carrying magazine

ARCHIGRAM 4, 1964
Interview with Dennis Crompton

Dennis Crompton
Then this is when we went international: Archigram 4. And the mythology about this is: Peter had just got them from the -- well, it couldn’t have been just from the printers, although he tells the story like that, because we had to hand-cut all the centre pages, and the outer pages I had to silk-screen because the rest of the magazine was printed. The blue was printed litho and the yellow and the red I overprinted using silkscreen. And then we all sat around endless nights in Taylor Woodrow’s office and cut the ‘pop-up’ page.

Peter had a bunch of these under his arm whilst walking down Aberdare Gardens where he lived at the time, and across the road from Peter lived Reyner Banham. We already knew Reyner quite well by then, and so they stop in the street, and Banham says, ‘Oh, I’m off to the States tomorrow, anything interesting to say?’ So Peter gave him half a dozen copies of Archigram 4.

So the next day, Banham was on a plane, and the day after he was somewhere sitting round a pool with Philip Johnson and Peter Blake (not the painter Peter Blake, the editor Peter Blake) and showed them these things. So Peter Blake, who was editor of Architectural Record was taken by it and put the magazine in the next issue of his magazine. So it became known throughout the States -- or throughout people who read his magazine.

The subsequent critical history about this always irritates me, because we became known afterwards as sort-of comic designers, you know? And it isn’t at all that. Warren designed the front cover and the first four or five pages and put together the artwork for them. And basically, he is writing an essay about the relationship between architecture, science-fiction, science-fact and comics; about how at the time when he was writing this, which was 1964, there was tremendous overlap between what was appearing in comics and what people like Frei Otto and Bucky Fuller and we were writing about years earlier. H.G.Wells had written about Leonardo da Vinci and Scouts, you know; there was a tremendous overlap. So there weren’t hard edges between science-fiction and science-fact -- and sometimes the science-fact was ahead of science fiction and other times behind it. And sometimes architecture was ahead of what’s in the comics, and sometimes it hadn’t spotted the possibilities.

So, it was an essay about that. So, it was illustrated with cut pages, illustrations cut out of comics -- but it wasn’t comic at all. I mean the text is a pretty heavy bit of text, but it’s illustrated. And there’s a certain academic – whose name I’ve chosen to forget – who took one of these cut-out-of-a-comic things and he uses it, or was intending to use it, in an essay to demonstrate that we were sort-of right-wing warmongers, because of what it says in this cartoon drawing. One of the characters in this is in a dome, with a city under the dome, like Bucky’s New York thing. He says ‘very well, tomorrow we will strike against the free nations of the world’. And this clown is saying that this is a quotation from Archigram, you know? It’s an illustration that happens to have that text. Ok, Warren could have blacked it out or something, but it’s just about the way that a dome over a city, with trees and everything else inside, is used in a comic.

And that theme carried on for another couple of pages, This is a piece of Warren’s, a quotation from the Living Arts Catalogue that accompanied the Living City Exhibition. The cover is a Richard Hamilton cover. Do you know the issue of Living Arts No. 2? As a side thing, it’s interesting because there was -- was his name Laurence White? -- a typographer and he persuaded some publisher -- he and the Independent Group basically -- persuaded some publisher to invest in an arts magazine. I think there are only three issues of it. It came out of the crowd of people like Theo Crosby, whom we were working for at the time, who were at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts], and the Independent Group.

We were often asked, you know, about our relationship to the Independent Group; they are like a set of uncles, you know, sort-of fond uncles, who sort-of tolerated your misdemeanours. You admired what they did although you would never do it and they admired what you did, but they would never do the same thing. But it all fitted together.

But anyway. This was again a survey of science-fiction and science-fact, because this is 1964, you know? Yuri Gagarin had already been into space and a couple of Russian dogs. Sputnik was up there, but the idea of getting to the moon was still five years ahead of this being done, so, some of the things like the surface of the moon capsules hadn’t occurred. Anyway, so there’s that stuff, and again, just a whole collection of technology photographs, things like the rockets, and things like oil refineries, and water tanks.

Kester Rattenbury
Did you have different roles, I mean, were some people more likely to be doing the layouts, or was it everybody, did it vary?

Dennis Crompton
Mostly, Peter did the layouts; he was fast with the scissors. Warren obviously did those early pages; we were all doing that sort of thing, but the layouts weren’t separated from the content. So Peter was mostly doing the layouts, through all of the issues of the magazines. There’d be the odd page, like the Walking City page in the Metropolis issue: Ron did most of that, but then Peter put on the title, because at that time ‘Walking City’ was called ‘Cities: Moving’ -- and Peter we blame, for calling it ‘Walking City’, not Ron. But whereas something like this, [p. 13] this is Peter being enthusiastic about Cedric Price. Cedric didn’t ever layout a page, certainly wouldn’t ever have laid out a page like this one’s laid out. But each of the issues, apart from the first and second – no, the second did have a bit of Cedric, it did have Cedric in it – Cedric appeared in everything apart from the first issue of Archigram.

Kester Rattenbury
The text presumably sometimes came first and sometimes came second to the layout? Because in some cases they clearly...they fit...

Dennis Crompton
Yeah well, I think it’s ad-libbing rather than having written something and then illustrated it. I think the way we’ve always worked, you get a bit of text and then you cut it or expand it or you play with it to make it fit the layout, and if it doesn’t you change the layout or you change the text. So there’s a negotiation.

I mean, this was the innovation graphically at the time and various other people, like Neville Brody, and people like in ARC magazine from the Royal College of Arts, were experimenting with typography. And that freedom was purely because of offset litho. You didn’t have that freedom with letterpress as, you know, some guy had to make blocks, and you know, a compositor had to put together metal things, knock them up and wedge them in and all that. Whereas, suddenly, a pair of scissors became a creative tool.

So this freedom in graphics was very much a thing in the sixties, and people like Peter Taylor, who did the cover for the second issue of Archigram, and the third, are graphic designers; and Ben Fether and his wife, whose name I can’t remember for the moment [Rae] did the cover of Archigram 5. And then Geoffrey [Reeve] did number 6. So the typographers were working with us, not particularly on the layout of particular pages, but certainly they were sort-of leaning over our shoulders and we were looking at what they were doing. It wasn’t a commission that went out and came back as a layout spread front-cover. You know, Peter Taylor would have done that layout with Peter Cook, and the same with the later issues.

So there’s D. Greene’s house thing and the Plug-in City appearing...and the editorial is on the eighteenth page... which is fine, yeah, which is fine... And there’s Building Design Partnership and our good friend David Rock. And we had another advert, we had another three adverts actually. There was an advert, I can’t remember what it’s under there, but one of the architects’ offices paid for an advert, gave us money to put an advert on the back, and then got cold feet that they might be infringing the advertising rules of the RIBA, so we had to overprint! Talking about the layout, this overprint had to be designed so that where there was a gap on their layout we used that to put in the words and where their text was, we had to put solid ink over it.

Kester Rattenbury
So that was screen printed over the top?

Dennis Crompton
Yes, and what you can see there is a third printing, because I’d originally printed the red and the yellow on, and then that was all finished... Well, one or two issues were folded up without this, with the original... and then this office came back and said ‘Oh ooh, you know, oh ohh’! So I had to then get all the kit out again.

Kester Rattenbury
Did you get more money off them for taking their advert out?

Dennis Crompton
I don’t think so. I don’t even know if we got money out of them in the first place! I seem to remember Gordon Sainsbury was involved in whatever the office was, because his picture was on the back there. Anyway.

Kester RattenburyI’m not surprised it was two shillings then.

Dennis Crompton
Two shillings, yes. This one’s two shillings, as well you see.

So, that virtually came out at the time we were doing the Living City Exhibition. That was 1964 and the theme of that, I suppose, was the relationship between science-fiction and science-fact and architecture.