Archigram Paper One. Edited (nominally) by David Usborne, 64 Regents Park Road London NW1. Produced by Peter Cook and David Greene; text largely by Greene; composition largely by Cook. Produced in James Cubitt’s office. Copies are rare
ARCHIGRAM 1, 1961.
Interview with
Dennis Crompton
Dennis Crompton
The very beginning of things. It was just two sheets. The first sheet was produced on an office duplicating machine; one of those things where you write or cut a stencil and then sort-of wind it around. And a piece of potato was cut out to make the red dot on it. This, basically, was done by Peter [Cook] and David [Greene]; David providing the sort-of-poetry words and Peter putting it together.
When I talk about these magazines, what’s interesting from my point of view as somebody who does books, is that this was the beginning of the availability of offset litho[graph], as a generally available thing, rather than something within a professional context. So this was right at the beginning.
This was, as you might say, ‘properly’ produced – the second sheet of the first issue – and had the projects that Peter and Mike [Webb] and David had been working on during the previous two or three years [at university]; like Mike’s Furniture Factory from the Regent Street Poly [now University of Westminster], David’s Mosque from Nottingham [School of Architecture] and Peter had worked on this Piccadilly project with a guy called Gordon Sainsbury. There are various others by two or three other people who were interested, like John Outram who at that time maybe had just graduated from the AA [Architectural Association], I don’t know, and people that I don’t know what’s happened to. Oh well. Obviously, in 1961 Edward Reynolds had died already, but this was a student project from the AA for a theatre, I think in Leicester Square. But they were the sort of things that were going on at the time.
As I said, when this came out -- this sheet is actually a facsimile, it’s not an original sheet -- the two pages were stapled together at the top corner. I can’t remember precisely, I think about 400 were printed, and after some time Peter still had like 350 of them left! But they’re all gone now, a long time ago. So that was that, and that was after Peter and David and Mike had all graduated, well, had all finished in their full time education.
Kester Rattenbury
Where did they do it?
Dennis Crompton
The magazine was done in James Cubitt’s office
Kester Rattenbury
Was the second page folded or was it just flat as you’ve showed it?
Dennis Crompton
Well, it was folded for being transported, I think. I wasn’t witness to this because it was before I met Peter and David and Mike, but the copies I have from that time, the first sheet wasn’t folded but the second sheet had a Z-fold so that it folded to be the same size as the first one. But whether that was general… I can’t imagine Peter sitting down and folding them all, you know. Hazel [Cook, Peter’s first wife] might have folded a few of them.
