Archigram’s Peter Cook on group’s archive in Hong Kong, designing future cities and why utopias are ‘rubbish’

The influential ’60s architecture collective, whose archive has found a permanent home in Hong Kong, visualised mobile, futuristic cities

He returned to the city as a creative director of this year’s Design Trust Gala

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Futures of the past, complete with a horde of walking cities. The Archigram archive of work, mostly drawings and models from the 1960s, is now owned by M+, the visual culture museum set to open in 2021 in Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District.

Published: 5:00am, 30 Oct 2019Updated: 5:49am, 30 Oct 2019

Avant-garde group Archigram once conceived of the super-efficient ways in which we would travel around cities in the future; not only that, but the influential architecture collective dreamed up entire metropolises that moved.

So irony must have looked on and smiled during a recent visit to Hong Kong by Sir Peter Cook, one of the British group’s six founding members.

When protests were just starting to jam the spokes and jar nerves, the architect went no farther than Hong Kong International Airport and its immediate surroundings during his stopover. In any case, Cook, 83, was destined for Shenzhen the following day in a bid to win an architectural project in the city – a landmark building (still under wraps).

“I do not underestimate the competition,” he said at the time, referring to rivals Snohetta and Foster and Partners, among others, and promising he would soon be back in Hong Kong. Last week he returned and, with Dennis Crompton, 84, the second of Archigram’s four surviving members, assumed the mantle of creative directors of this year’s Design Trust annual gala.

As fans worldwide would know, four-and-a-half decades after the group disbanded in 1974, Archigram has found a permanent home in Hong Kong. The group’s archive of work, mostly drawings and models from the 1960s, is now owned by M+, the Herzog & de Meuron-designed visual culture museum set to open in 2021 in the West Kowloon Cultural District.

Sir Peter Cook, co-founder of Archigram, was one of the creative directors of the Design Trust Gala 2019 in Hong Kong. Photo: Jonathan Wong

It was little wonder the £1.8 million (US$2.3 million) purchase of 20,000 items almost unravelled when the British government understood the cultural importance of the archive. But, says Cook about the deal, “it does make sense because the work has a sort of spirit of Hong Kong at its best.”