If you have a shop you might as well sell something in it. The choice of Endell Street in Covent Garden was circumstantial – as all such things are. I doubt if we really knew or cared that Covent Garden would become the tourist town that it is now, or thought that if were canny enough to hang on in there we could become real estate barons. No, we were fascinated by the fact that the premises had been the studio (and, by the look of it, the playground) of a famous theatrical photographer, Angus McBean. Inevitably and painfully, our own superimposed gadgets and rounded corners overlaid his cherubs and miniaturised cornices. With two or three tiny floors of ‘office’ and ‘workshop’ … what to do with the shop?
So came about, for only three shows, the gallery ‘Adhocs’. The first was by the Coop Himmelblau pair. In town to do some things at the AA, Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky were demonstrably more propitiously chosen as allies than we could ever have realised at the time. Remember that Austria had already spawned Hollein and Pichler, Abraham and St Florian, Haus-Rucker, Domenig and Huth … with Zund-up and Missing Link to follow shortly. Superstudio, Archizoom and 999 already existed in Florence and Clip-Kit and Multimatch were somewhere down the street. But in Himmelblau (though only two guys) there was something more of ourselves. For years they hung on in, pushing boundaries, with the circular room at Sielerstatte, which is still the core of their office. Like Archigram, they used rhetoric and events, yet did their most serious stuff when apparently sending it (or, rather, pompous architecture) up.
When asked if Archigram stuff was intended to be built, one often goes into elaborate detail about the scalar accuracy of pieces; one talks about half-step and full-step projects, about sequences of influence. With their permission, I could more usefully point to Himmelblau. At the time of Adhocs (1972), Archigram had an office and a gallery in which other young experimenters could show. Himmelblau developed an office from which large buildings have emerged. There is no conceptual dividing line. Ron’s Imagination building is 95 per cent like the drawings, which are themselves 95 per cent like Archigram drawings. The Cook/Hawley ‘mouth’ roof in Frankfurt is a straight piece of Archigrammic arm-movement.
Art Net [1974] became, in reality, the much-expanded manifestation of Adhocs … and was in the next street.
To say that this means that Archigram was ready to set up a series of families – Austrian cousins and Japanese nephews and nieces, English clones and a whole system of fragmentations – might be an extravagant claim or, more accurately, an ‘add ho(c)x’ situation.
Peter Cook
Archigram, Edited by Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron & Mike Webb, 1972 [reprinted New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999].
