The Montreal Tower was a project commissioned by Taylor Woodrow and executed at the Euston office. It was presented to the authorities of the (then) forthcoming Montreal Expo ‘67 as a ‘central feature’. It had to incorporate a concrete tower and provide a wide variety of public entertainment functions. This brief was extended to form a ‘skin and guts’ proposition: a vertical tree with enormous roots on to which could be hung temporary exhibition elements that would be removed and replaced after the Expo. Initially, all the members of Theo Crosby’s Euston design team were invited to make sketch proposals. Three Archigram members produced preliminary schemes one of which, Peter Cook’s, was selected for further development with a model made by Dennis Crompton.

In many ways, the project served as a trial run for notions of structural and component replacement that were developed in the Plug-In City. By comparison, the structure of the tower is closer and the lift tubes – although diagonal – still form a separate structure. A skin wraps around the whole of the temporary infill.