A city-sized megastructure of permanent service frames into which housing, offices and shops are plugged as replaceable units, each part renewed at its own rate.
Archigram was a group of young London architects (Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb) whose magazine (1961–74) championed an architecture of expendable, mass-produced, mobile parts. In Cook’s Plug-in City (1964) a diagonal lattice of tubes carries the services and the cranes; the units hung on it are designed for lifespans of a few years, the frame for decades.
Nothing of it was built, but its lessons (structure and services as the permanent armature, enclosure as a changeable kit) passed directly into the high-tech architecture of Rogers, Foster and Piano in the following decades.
The book, part by part
I Plug-in City
Permanent network, replaceable units, different life-spans.