Archigram's Instant City concept enables "a village to become a kind of city…

city…

Archigram's Instant City concept enables "a village to

become a kind of city for a week" says Peter Cook

Benedict Hobson |
13 May 2020
|
2 comments

Architect Peter Cook explains Archigram's concept for a temporary

city that can be set up overnight in the third instalment of our
exclusive video series with the radical architecture group for VDF.
Developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Archigram's Instant City
concept is a transportable kit of parts that can be quickly assembled
to provide the inhabitants of small towns with access to the resources
and cultural attractions of a large metropolis.
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Archigram's Instant City concept aimed to provide small towns with

access to the cultural attractions of a big city

"Instant City was, in very raw terms, like a cultural circus," Cook said
in the video, which Dezeen filmed in London and is sponsored by
Enscape.
"It takes the cultural essence of a metropolitan city and takes them
around like a circus, so that a small town or a village could become a
kind of city for a week."
Instant City inspired by the architecture of outdoor pop
concerts
According to Cook, the concept developed from Archigram's own
experience of giving lectures with a packable set of presentation
materials and props.
"Instant City was really based on our own Archigram experience,
because we'd started giving lectures, packaging the Archigram ideas
and going round with lots of projectors," he explained.
"There was an intermediary project called Ideas Circus, which was
much more specific, which was actually a set of teaching devices put
on trucks with the odd inflatable."
"It was that, allied to the period of open-air pop concerts – I think
that was all in the air at the same time," he added.
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Many Instant City designs envisioned that the components would be

delivered by airship

Like Plug-In City, another of Archigram's metropolitan concepts,

which Cook and fellow Archgram member Dennis Crompton
discussed in the previous video in the series, there were a number of
different versions of Instant City.
Initially, the concept comprised a packable kit of parts that could be
transported by road, but later versions introduced lighter elements
that could be delivered by air.

Related story
Archigram's Plug-In City shows that
"pre-fabrication doesn't have to be
boring" says Peter Cook

"We started to speculate, instead of a city trundling around on trucks,

maybe it could all hang off an airship and it would just silently come
in the night and you'd open the bedroom curtains and there was the
city in the field behind you," said Cook.
"And then, a week later, it would have carried on. It's kind of
analogous to the contemporary thought that everybody could be
famous for five minutes, the Marshall McLuhan thing."
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Ron Herron's version of the Instant City was envisioned for

California, where he was working at the time

Archigram was a collective of six architects – Cook, Crompton,

Michael Webb, David Greene, Warren Chalk and Ron Herron.
Different Archigram members had different takes on the Instant City
concept.
"There were various different versions of the Instant City – there was
my version and there was Ron Herron's version," explained Cook.
"Funnily enough, we were both working on them in Los Angeles, but
mine were still bedded in England and his was located in Los Angeles.
There were only minor variants on an agreed set of parts."

Peter Cook's version of the Instant City was imagined for towns in
England

The group also started to extend the Instant City concept as a series
of parasitic elements that could enhance existing buildings and
structures, which Cook said could have been explored more
thoroughly.
"There are odd drawings, such as what happens if an Instant City off
an airship drops into a town, so that you then have a series of parasite
elements that are actually attached to the town itself," he said.
"You infiltrate WH Smith or the top of a bus. You don't just leave it in
a field, nice and separate. I mean there is a whole territory there that
one could have moved into, which is a mixture between an organised,
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contrived set of parts and a sort of agitprop effect on a town."
"I've never pursued that, but there's a whole territory there that I
think can send messages to the current generation."

Archigram's Instant City concept explored ideas about temporary

parasite architecture

Founded in 1961, Archigram was an avant-garde collective of

architects that became famous in the 1960s and 1970s for its radical
architecture concepts.
As part of Virtual Design Festival, Dezeen is publishing a series of
exclusive interviews with former Archigram members Cook and
Crompton.
In the first instalment of the series, Cook explained the origins of the
group and how it rose to prominence through a series of self-
published magazines. In the second video, Cook and Crompton
discussed its Plug-In City concept for an elevated city of capsule
homes.
This video was filmed by Dezeen in London and sponsored by
Enscape, a virtual reality and real-time rendering plugin for
architectural design programme Autodesk Revit.
All images are courtesy of and copyright of Archigram. You can
browse more images from Archigram's archive online at The
Archigram Archival Project.
Read more: Architecture
Peter Cook
Archigram

Videos by Dezeen
Architecture videos
VDF x Archigram

Videos
Virtual Design Festival

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