Sir Peter Cook is curious for having built the Kunsthaus Graz (in partnership with Colin Fournier), sharing a rare commonality with comrade Cedric Price in having an enourmous educational effect on a generation of architects (both at the AA, but Cook moved to Frankfurt then the Bartlett in the 2000s), but very little built work. It’s a pretty intriguing phenomenon, one that probably needs a type of analysis that plays the Kunsthaus against any of his previous works (drawn or otherwise), as well as somehow engaging with his teaching practice… I’m not sure exactly how to do that, but it seems like a valuable task. His rhetoric would be invaluable and revealing in that investigation. Cedric Price has been published quite thoughtfully by Samantha Hardingham.

Im also reminded of Daniel Libeskind’s frightening (for him) leap from academic and theoretical works (also the AA for some time), to winning the Jewish Museum competition & commission. They are very different architects, and have had very different careers, but there seems to be a thread between them in terms of a complex and theoretically founded practice -one which is played out in the built environment to different degrees by both. My spontaneous reaction is that Libeskind’s work has become awkwardly stylistic (formal repititions) since moving more predominantly to building practice, where Cook seems tactfully (and characteristically) debonair with the Kunsthaus and practice is general. Maybe the comparison is arbitrary. Peter Eisenmann should probably be in that conversation too I suppose, given my criteria.

Visual culture is definitely a ripe avenue to reconsider the ‘contemporary archigram’, which I would link most closely to post-humanism, an idea being played out in quite a few music videos (which I considered here: http://respeak.net/articles/when-the-going-gets-weird), literature (Warren Ellis’s ‘Transmetropolitan’ is an excellent and frightening graphic novel) and of course film.

I think a similarly radical group of curious and ambitious speculators these days would get pretty weird pretty quickly…

In some ways I feel Archigram did a lot of good in reinforcing an ‘anti-hero’ status i.e. where the architect isn’t the ‘Fountainhead-demiurgic-form-maker’, as the futurist world city ideal they were proposing had no place for such creatures in it’s complex and ever-evolving universe (instead the architect became a sort of anthropological shape-shifter).
An interesting by-product of their influence has been a sort of ‘fetishism of the technological aesthetic’ amongst architects of subsequent generations (Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano et al.) where the use of technology as an aesthetic becomes symbolic to the ideals of the ‘new/future’ and progress (whether one thinks this is positive or negative is up for debate – it’s interesting from a visual culture point of view nevertheless).
It’s also interesting when one thinks of concurrent groups that were happening around the same time as Archigram, like the Japanese Metabolists – the ‘Nakagin Capsule Tower’ in Tokyo by Kisho Kurokawa (built in 1972) is widely seen as one of the important examples of Metabolist architecture, which is also in a constant state of disrepair and has dated horrendously…

The question of how they should respond is an interesting one.. Perhaps if they were to reform and have one last gig, would it be as awkward as the The Velvet Underground’s brief reunion after all those years? Who would replace Ron Herron on drums? Can Peter Cook still sing? etc. etc. In some ways, I believe it would be more poetic if there was no answer at all, as I think the answer is absorbed within the reverberance of Archigram’s influence – whether we like it or not…

It would also be interesting to consider HOW they might answer… there’s a great image here [http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=9210] of Peter Cook antagonising his contemporary audience, which to me makes some linkage to the issue.. is he talking about a contemporary radical group,, is he talking about if archigram’s designs ‘happened’…

I also agree with your comment on idealism, in some ways paper architecture and its associated research has become more important than ever as a way engaging with this idealism, in order to confront the problems we’ll face in the future.

Let’s also not forget the work of people like Constant Nieuwenhuys, who even preceded the work of Archigram.