The speculative project Plug-in City: Maximum Pressure Area (1964) by Peter Cook, member of Archigram, articulates a radical departure from late modernist functionalism through the proposition of architecture as an evolutionary infrastructural system. Conceived as a vast, scaffold-like megastructure, the project replaces the notion of permanent buildings with a hierarchy of temporal components, wherein residential, commercial, and institutional modules—each calibrated to distinct lifespans—are inserted, replaced, and upgraded within a durable craneway framework. This strategy foregrounds planned obsolescence not as failure but as a generative principle, enabling the city to respond dynamically to technological innovation and shifting social demands. The theoretical development resonates with contemporaneous cybernetic discourse, insofar as the city operates as a feedback-driven organism, continuously recalibrated by its users’ needs and collective will. As a case study, Plug-in City synthesises infrastructural permanence with architectural ephemerality, prefiguring later discourses on high-tech architecture and metabolist urbanism. Its visual language—dense, mechanical, and infrastructural—materialises a city in perpetual assembly, where circulation, services, and habitation coalesce into a single operative system. Ultimately, Cook’s proposition advances a decisive conceptual inversion: architecture is no longer an object to be preserved but a process to be sustained, wherein adaptability, replacement, and user participation redefine the ethical and temporal horizons of the built environment.
