CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 10/14/2025

The Cooper Union presents 'Archigram: Making a Facsimile'

Tuesday, October 14, through Thursday, November 6, The Cooper Union presents Archigram: Making a Facsimile, an exhibition on the making of Archigram: The Magazine, a complex and ambitious architectural publication—initiated by D.A.P. publishing and Designers & Books in February 2024—that has resulted in the first full facsimile of one of the most formally inventive, conceptually daring and historically consequential small-press magazines of the postwar era.

Archigram: The Magazine (D.A.P., 2025).

Organized in partnership between D.A.P. and The Cooper Union, Archigram: Making a Facsimile traces the process of recreating all ten issues of this legendary magazine by focusing on its highly inventive uses of paper—from ingenious folds and cut-outs to wallets, pockets and pop-ups—while celebrating a feat of bookmaking that remains unrivaled in the history of little magazines.

Facsimile running sheet from Archigram 5 featuring Ron Herron's A Walking City (1964).

The brainchild of six young architects born into the foment of the British counterculture—Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb—Archigram magazine was launched in 1961 as a clarion call for a new generation to embrace experimental technologies and paradigms for living. Over the course of the 1960s, it quickly evolved into an energetic global platform for the architectural avant-gardes of the time, synthesizing influences from comic-book culture, Pop art, psychedelia, Constructivism, sci-fi and the space race.

The pages of Archigram abound in irreverent energy, contagious optimism and wild conceptions of what buildings and cities can be. They are packed with proposals for “instant cities” and “plug-in” architecture; they feature pioneering projects by the many architects, inventors, collectives and theorists with whom Archigram were in touch, such as Buckminster Fuller, Reyner Banham, Cedric Price, Haus-Rucker-Co, Frei Otto, Hans Hollein and the Metabolists. Fun, stimulus and dialogue formed the magazine’s unspoken ethos, and the allure of that ethos remains as keen today as when its final issue (number 9½) appeared in 1974.

Archigram 8 (D.A.P., 2025).

Archigram’s influence has proved enduring, perhaps most famously in its impact on Richard Rogers’ and Renzo Piano’s Centre Pompidou, and on a later generation of nineties and noughties modernists embracing the potential of technology, including Future Systems, Foreign Office Architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. Archigram’s members have also taught several generations of architects—in particular at The Cooper Union, where Michael Webb was a faculty member from 2010–2017 and Dennis Crompton taught in the spring of 2010 as the Irwin S Chanin Distinguished Professor.

Archigram stood for fecundity of imagination, riotousness, hilarity, debate, provocation and hopefulness. Unique in architectural publishing, the group’s magazine represents a fertile collision of architectural and print aesthetics. As such, Archigram: The Magazine remains a trove of inspiration, for students not only of architecture, but also of art and design.

Archigram 8: Collage by Ron Herron (1968).

In memoriam Dennis Crompton (June 29, 1935–January 20, 2025).

Held in the Foundation Building’s Third Floor Hallway Gallery.

Open to the public:
Tuesday–Friday, 12 PM–7 PM
Saturday & Sunday, 12 PM–6 PM