A ‘supplement’ produced to update readers during the busy period of the Archigram Office working on the Monte Carlo project showing projects in progress rather than a full ‘Archigram’ issue. Unpriced
Contributors: Ron Herron; Peter Cook; Diana Jowsey; Dennis Crompton; Naomi Bornstein; Kathy De Witt
ARCHIGRAM 9½, 1970
Interview with
Dennis Crompton
Dennis Crompton
By that time we’d just won Monte Carlo, had an office-
Kester Rattenbury
- A huge project -
Dennis Crompton
- A huge project, yes. So there were endless conversations, as there have been for the last thirty years, about doing another issue of
Archigram. But the most that we ever managed was around about ’72 or whenever it was. Peter did a quick thing that was just sort of reporting on what we were up to, so it wasn’t really an
Archigram, so it got called 9-and-a-half; it was a supplement.
It was really just the current projects that were working on, some real projects and some abstract projects. We were doing things, like, there were three competition entries for the Mint Housing so there was just one image of each of those; there’s the Northampton thing that Ron did with Archie McNab; and another project of Ron’s; Peter’s House of the Seven Veils; the Malaysia Exhibition that Ron and I and Diana did; one of Ron’s Suburban Sets; a bit of Milton Keynes. It obviously hadn’t been built, so it was just a rather badly produced plan. A very blurry -- actually now that I look at it, I do know what that is a photograph of -- that’s a photograph of Rod Stewart’s swimming pool, two photographs of Rod Stewart’s swimming pool. Something that Diana was doing; that was one of the late night TV programmes that we all went to, that was a photograph of us there; oh there’s Milton Keynes, but just the model. John Donat not being credited for taking photographs of the model; another of Ron’s projects.
So it was really, I mean, it was just, sort-of, friends, you know? You have these constant conversations, ‘What are you doing now?’ So this is what we’re doing now. And that’s it.