Clip-Kit, London

After transferring from Bristol University to the Architectural Association in London, former Megascope editor Peter Murray began collaborating with fellow AA student Geoffrey Smythe to produce Clip-Kit: Studies in Environmental Design in 1966. With Clip-Kit the medium was the message: the magazine was comprised of three installments of A4 pages published over a six-month period. Readers could “clip” the magazine pages into a plastic binding manufactured by M&M Binding Ltd. Company, who paid for advertising within Clip-Kit and provided the editors with free samples of the clip in order to promote the new product to architects. What Clip-Kit itself promotes is the embrace of diverse and new technologies in architecture, claiming that the “narrow preoccupations of both architects and students” are incongruous with “an era of unprecedented technological advance.” Articles address new materials, with a particular emphasis on plastics, and alternative technologies and systems, such as computers, space technology, pneumatics, and capsule systems. Featured architects include Cedric Price, Michael Webb, Nicholas Grimshaw, and Buckminster Fuller, whose investment in prefabricated architectural components resonate with the format of Clip-Kit, itself a kit of parts. Among the articles in the magazine are a reprint of “A Home is Not a House” by Reyner Banham, a pull-out on the Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia, and a discussion of the role of computers in design. Although Clip-Kit’s last installment forecast a forthcoming addition, Murray dropped out of the AA in his fifth year to pursue a career in journalism and art direction at the popular magazine Nova. He would later become Art Director and Technical Editor at Architectural Design. IS

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