Plug-In City
Peter Cook designed a permanent craneway whose homes, offices and streets would be replaced like appliances before the city itself could become obsolete.
Quick facts
- Existence state
- Never Born
- Peak stage
- documented concept
- Research confidence
- high
- Last verified
What it was
An unbuilt modular megastructure developed by Peter Cook and Archigram.
A long-life structural and service frame would accept shorter-life capsules for housing, work and public uses, allowing constant mechanical renewal.
Existence timeline
Cook combines cranes, services and replaceable building capsules.
A detailed drawing establishes the city's plug-in logic.
Archigram circulates the proposal through its experimental network.
Drawings test how residences and institutions would be exchanged over time.
The group ends without a full-scale Plug-In City prototype.
A major original joins the museum's architecture collection.
Why it ended
The project remained a speculative drawing and publication rather than a commissioned development or tested building system.
Last confirmed trace
Original collages, axonometric drawings and explanatory texts are held by MoMA, the Centre Pompidou and other archives.
What it left behind
Plug-In City became a central reference for metabolist, high-tech and adaptable architecture even though its cranes never moved a real home.
How we classified it
The proposed archive unit never reached ordinary public access in the form being documented.
The strongest verified milestone maps to documented_concept under Arrival Score V1.
Sources & verification
Last reviewed 2026-08-01. Sources are linked so readers can inspect the evidence directly.