‘On the Very Day’
On the very day that Archigram 9 was through the printer, a telephone call from Monte Carlo confirmed the mysterious rumours that had been filtering through to us from Milan and Vienna that we had won the competition for the bâtiment public on the sea front.

The competition was in two stages, with Frei Otto and Richardo Bofill among the final batch of 13 competitors. A jury which included Pierre Vago, Ove Avup, Rene Sarger and Michel Ragon met in December, with the responsibility to advise the Monaco Government. They apparently set up an ‘advocacy’ system, in which each scheme would be defended by a member and then attacked by the rest. The main thing that they (apparently) liked in the ‘Features’ was the retention of the open space and the view of the sea, and the emphasis of the scheme upon the workings of the entertainments.
Between December and March the ministries and departments concerned made various recommendations that extended the original brief in several ways; but they were keen that the basic ‘Feature’ scheme maintained its characteristics. They needed more car parking, a cinema, and several public utilities. We also found that there was a hovercraft station planned at the corner of the site.
Briefed by 10 tapes of recorded negotiations and a remarkably blue sky we now embark on a building programme of three and a half years … A large hole is to be dug in the autumn of next year … the mind boggles …

Peter Cook


II Features Monte Carlo

The project
We are invited by the Ministre d’Etat of Monaco to take part in a limited competition for the entertainments building on the reclaimed foreshore of Monte Carlo. The winning project is to be built.

The scene at Monte Carlo
The name Monte Carlo conjures up Glamour, Money, Indolence and the Exotic – unreality as real-life-Marienbad-in-California-cream-suits and the white Rolls Royces – and, at last, a place in the sun for Archigram.

What is there is a quiet, wistful place. Unsure of its role and committed to its myth. Even with our heavy seaside background we were not prepared for an empty promenade and the almost total absence of limousines.

Our site is well to the east of the Palace and the yacht harbour, and to the east also of the Casino. It was reclaimed from the sea. Immediately alongside is another piece of reclamation that forms the new beach: three concrete breakwaters holding bays of shingle that will encourage the drifting-in of sand. At night the beach is deserted apart from couples with dogs to walk or a few kids round the jukebox, but in daytime it is the big Sunbathing Scene. Impeccable ‘birds’ in regulation bronze from most parts of Europe and the States provide the typical vignette: two sisters are perched on the wall by the bookstall, enter Franco-Italian Alain Delon type, proceeding well, when equally impeccable and ostensibly 35-year-old mother appears from frosted and carefully detailed beach-shower: she has seen it all before, instant and impressive dissolve by Delon. The actual place is a mixture of South Bank '51-type architecture and high level servicing: choice of ice-cream parlours, restaurants, shops, choice of ramps, stairs, steps. The use of the facilities is suitably well mannered.

Our site looks over this, and is depressingly underused. It contains trees in abundance and a children’s playground, and a promenade which lacks the vitality and business of those with which we are familiar. One can, however, appreciate its inadequacy and lack of appeal without wishing to implant a monument. We watched the coachloads of American tourists do the Casino, and were taken to an inevitably impeccable (and recently built) marble gallery in which are hung architects’ perspectives and models of every new building project for the Principality. The future is impressive: having diverted the railway under the Alps, the track is now a bypass. Behind our site and the beach is the Avenue Princesse Grace: a freeway that carries only two or three cars a minute, soon to be connected with elaborate intersections to more new roads. High-rise, high-rent apartments are spreading eastwards: the significance of the project begins to emerge.

Features as an idea
The brief required facilities for a large banquet, variety shows, a circus and public events. Everyone we spoke to wanted an ice rink, the idea of ‘le sport’ always being approved. There seems also to be a taste for cultural events; a remnant perhaps of the great days of Diaghilev? The town tries to entice the holidaying French (though it is too expensive for most of them) but it is a potential catchment area for the whole of the linear city spread along the French and Italian coasts.

Nowhere else in Monaco is there a park that you can use (the Jardin Exotique is remote and steep). Here could be a place, next to the beach, that extends its services but is complementary in atmosphere and experience. David Greene’s Rokplug/Logplug provided a clue: a grassy bank with trees (in the ‘English Tradition’, etc), with service outlets at 6-metre intervals. How about a telephone-parasol-airbed-fan-TV appliance (a stick or pack) that you hire and plug in? Call for drinks. Keep cool. No rok or log needed this time, just a neat hole in the ground like a golf-hole. And the hot features? The events? They are inside.

A space large enough to take the banquet, elephants or go-karts. Ways of adapting from chamber music to ice hockey. An architecture that is made of the event rather than the envelope. So why not forget the envelope? The Features-space is buried. There are six entrances, deliberately more than necessary: each show makes its own environment –makes its own organisation and its own circulation pattern.

Inside, the area needs optimising: in the floor are service outlets, once more at 6-metre intervals. The ceiling is a gantry, similarly served. We found that the optimum space and structure suggested a circle covered by a concrete dome. Not our favourite shape, but such taste was an old formal hangup; the envelope is never seen. Even the total shape is never seen as there is always something dropped down or hung or compartmented off – the whole thing is a stage.

A set of apparatus was needed, facilities that are standard to all types of public. The toilets, payboxes, lights, seating banks, that are normally fixed and normally dictate the rest of the atmosphere, could now be mobile, serviced from the nearest 6-metre spot – above or below. Over and above the essential kit, some extras suggested themselves and these immediately exploded the old constraints of the stage show and single-medium spectacle. Television monitoring and re-projection could augment the thing going on in front of you. Of course the whole place is in many respects a live television studio. The Instant City is a location. No dividing line between performance and transmitted event (projection, Eidophor, overlay of media); no dividing line between this space and the unknown (dissolving screens, sliding, lifting, multi-direction). Hopefully a visitor might need several visits to the place to even guess its colour or sonic distance, since it would on each occasion be the place of that day or that day’s producer.

A note for architects
In designing the scheme we were subjected to an unusual situation for an Archigram project: not since Euston days had there been such a large unitary project with obligations of scale, type of drawings and the rest of the limitations that are implied in a competition.

One more proposed method of organisation was far more expressionist and elemental than the final scheme: with the ice rink and auditorium tied to a servicing strip that held ‘Robot-Railway’. At one stage it seemed as if the park above would sprout pretty toys or glass domes and robotry. This idea was replaced by an ‘exposed land-pier’ in which the Robot-Railway was the only structure, the rest appearing and disappearing out of ‘submarine pens’. There was a constant debate as to whether or not it could be rolled out of a shed somewhere. But, clearly, this place is not ‘anywhere’ in the way that it could be in an Instant-City Kit. The scheme presented is bloody-minded about blandness and optimum conditions for the shed and services, bloody-minded about the open space on top.

The decision to present so much of it by way of the Events themselves, one-by-one, came at the point of establishing the project.

In a way, this already seems to be one of our coolest and most theoretical productions. It is ephemeral by necessity.

Archigram Group


PRESS RELEASE
ARCHIGRAM GROUP TO BUILD MONTE CARLO ENTERTAINMENTS CENTRE

The Government of Monaco have asked the Archigram Group of London to proceed with their design for the new entertainments centre on the sea front at Monte Carlo.

This project was recently the subject of an international competition and the winning project by the Archigram Group was judged by Pierre Vego, René Serger, Michel Ragon and Ove Arup It was the only English entry invited into the final stage together with twelve other projects (by architects from France, Spain, Poland, America, Finland, Norway and Germany).

Underground Cytbernetic Toy
The building will be totally underground with a large uninterrupted circular space 260' in diameter. Almost any show can be provided including ice hockey, the circus, large banquets, theatre, audio-visual exhibits, go-karting and sports. To make this possible, Archigram are designing a series of approximately twenty different robot-type machines which plug-in to a service grid above and below. Everything: including the seating, lavatories, stages and walls will be moveable and the "architecture" of the building will depend upon the wishes of the producer of the show. There are six entrances - so the layout of the building can be constantly changed. The entire building is seen as a giant cybernetic toy in which the architecture plays a similar role to the equipment in a television studio.

Plug-In Land Beach
Since Monte Carlo has very little open space the entire site will consist of a "land beach" which is an open park immediately adjoining the sea. It is proposed that this will also be serviced by a system of hidden appliances buried just below the grass and it will be possible (y renting a special attachment to plug into air, electricity, sound and telephone - you can dial for drinks from anywhere in the park. Since the project is not visibly a 'building', Archigram have called it 'Features - Monte Carlo as they regard the provision of features as the main design objective. As a result the building does not force itself upon the scene - in fact the view of the sea is uninterrupted - there is just a slight bump in the landscape.

Following the competition, the Government of Monaco have increased the scope of the project to include a cinema and car parking and these too will be underground. There will however be one edge of the complex that will simply consist of a giant electronic wall which will show in electrical pictures what is on the entire Côte d'Azur and will relay world news. Total cost of the scheme is estimated at £3,000,000 and building work is expected to start late in 1971. The Archigram Group Design Team consisted of Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, Colin Fournier, David Greene, Ron Herron, Ken Allinson and Tony Rickaby.

Further Information from: Peter Cook, Archigram, 6 Newman Passage, W.1. 01-636 0974

Archigram