AASL Column, September 2025
Column by Thomas Evans, Editorial Director, Artbook | D.A.P.
Archigram: The Magazine
Edited with text by Peter Cook. Text by Archigram et al. Reader鈥檚 guide edited by Thomas Evans, Steve Kroeter. Text by Peter Cook, David Grahame Shane, Reyner Banham, Shirley Surya, Helen Castle. Contributions by Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Aric Chen, Beatriz Colomina, Mike Davies, Odile Decq, Neil Denari, Norman Foster, Kenneth Frampton, Nicholas Grimshaw, Ivan Harbour, Tom Heneghan, Steven Holl, Bjarke Ingels, et al.
Published by D.A.P. and Designers & Books
ISBN: 9781933045856
USD $195.00 | CAD $300 UK 拢 170
Pub Date: 11/18/2025
In 2022, D.A.P. and Designers & Books undertook an incredibly ambitious collaboration: a facsimile of the legendary, rarely seen Archigram magazine 鈥� one of the most formally inventive, conceptually daring, and historically consequential small-press publications of the postwar era. The brainchild of six young architects born into the foment of the British counterculture 鈥擶arren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron, and Michael Webb鈥� Archigram was launched in 1961 as a clarion call for a new generation to arise. It quickly evolved into a global platform for the architectural avant-gardes of that era to convene and converse.
The pages of Archigram abound in irreverent energy, contagious optimism, and wild ideas. They feature proposals for 鈥渋nstant cities鈥� and 鈥減lug-in鈥� architecture, along with projects by the many architects, inventors, collectives, and theorists with whom Archigram were in dialog鈥� Buckminster Fuller, Reyner Banham, Cedric Price, Haus-Rucker-Co, Frei Otto, Hans Hollein, the Metabolists, among others. Fun, stimulus, and dialogue were the unspoken ethos of Archigram, and the allure of that ethos remains as keen today as when the magazine鈥檚 final tenth issue (issue 鈥�9 陆鈥�) appeared in 1974.
The story of our facsimile edition of Archigram begins with Steve Kroeter of Designers & Books, whose 2017 facsimile of Fortunato Depero鈥檚 鈥淏olted Book,鈥� Depero Futurista, had been much admired at D.A.P. Steve approached us with a lengthy list of other potential facsimile editions, and Archigram leaped out as an ideal candidate. We made a preliminary visit to Columbia University’s Avery Library, which owns one of the very few extant complete sets, to appraise the complexity of the production. In visual publishing, a gatefold is a somewhat uncommon luxury; in Archigram, gatefolds were the least of it. Issue four featured a pop-up; issue seven included an electronic resistor; issue nine came with a seed packet (the only element we could not reproduce, as it is illegal to ship seeds across borders). The paper stocks themselves were ordinary, but their treatment was extraordinary: wallets, inserts, folds within folds, reams of cropped paper repurposed as internal sections, simple but ingenious use of staples.
Dennis Crompton of Archigram was the group鈥檚 archivist, and the person to approach for anyone wanting to make an Archigram show or book. Facsimile production began with Dennis supplying the scans of the magazine to the acclaimed design company of Miko McGinty鈥攙ia production manager Todd Bradway鈥攚ho oversaw the work to make the scans print-ready. This process required painstaking effort (for example, Julia Ma at Miko McGinty had to manually recreate the clouds that appear at the top of the iconic pop-up in issue four, which were missing from the supplied files). We collaborated with Dennis on the accompanying reader鈥檚 guide, which includes a new essay by Peter Cook; a memoir by David Grahame Shane, one of the group鈥檚 long-standing allies; a contemporaneous text by Reyner Banham; tributes from architects including Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban, Aric Chen, Beatriz Colomina, Norman Foster, Annabelle Selldorf, and Bernard Tschumi; additional contributions from Helen Castle at RIBA and Shirley Surya at M+; bibliographic resources; and a comprehensive index compiling key names, concepts, and projects across the magazine鈥檚 densely populated pages. The complete set is housed in a clamshell box whose front cover design elaborates on one of 础谤肠丑颈驳谤补尘鈥檚 most beloved images, Peter Cook鈥檚 Instant City.
Over the course of our many visits to the generous team at Avery Library (special thanks to Terri Harris, Lena Newman, and Dylan Rosenlieb!), we learned that Archigram is among the most requested items by students. This was delightful and encouraging (which we subsequently heard elsewhere), and it is easy to see why: Archigram embodied fecundity of imagination, riotousness, hilarity, debate, provocation, and optimism. Our hope is that Archigram: The Magazine will animate people across creative professions to embrace and embody these virtues in fresh ways.