S2 — EP08

Sir Peter Cook

Sir Peter Cook is a Royal Academician and RIBA Gold Medal holder. And yet his fame rests on his work with avant garde architecture collective Archigram and he continues to champion formally extravagant architecture that lives today on the margins. Tim talks to him about putting ideas out there and his beef with Kenneth Frampton.

 

 

Podcast transcript

Peter Cook: My name is Peter Cook and I’m sitting on a red chair 

Tim Abrahams: Superurbanists as the curb, your enthusiasm moratorium on wishing happy new year has elapsed. I shall dispense with that greeting and welcome you instead to the first podcast of 2025. Is this something new or is it something very old that we’re about to discuss? Not quite sure. Anyway, some 50 years after the last issue was released. So Peter Cook, erstwhile member of Archigram, has just launched at the Architectural Association in London this week the 10th issue of the magazine. 

There were only nine original Archigrams; it really brought home to me a rather obvious point that is worth remembering, I think for me. It was the magazine, one with a modest name when you think about it, a short missive sent in to the ether, that gave its name to the architectural collective, rather than the other way round. 

Archigram 10 is, of course, very different to its predecessors, published half a century later than the first magazines, which explored architecture’s relationship to technology, nature, popular culture: bright, celebratory, immediate. 

I have the massive book on Archigram that Peter and publisher David Jenkins are republishing alongside Archigram 10 next to me. I open it at random and Ron Herron’s Walking Cities are looming out at me: massive robotic tardigrades that he drew in 1964. |Each walking unit houses, not only a key element of the capital, but also a large population of world traveler workers.” Amazing. I sat down with Peter Cook for a conversation about the point of the new publication about its contributors: old names, familiar names, such as Neil Denari, but new names like Florencia Pita, and what he wants to achieve.

Tim Abrahams: Please tell me about Archigram 10. 

Peter Cook: Well, Of course, it’s a very long time since the original Archigrams, more than 50 years, in fact.

And at the time when we put them up, which was over a period of eight or nine years, one at a time, it was a period of sort of optimism and puzzlement. We were the generation that hadn’t been involved in the war and we wanted to make our mark, and we were very exposed to a lot of ideas coming from America, from people like Buckminster Fuller, from some of the people who’d made experiments in places like Japan, and then laterally interesting things going on in, for example, Austria. And so we were young and ambitious and a little bit angry, and it’s a very much more complex story, but in simple terms, a small group of us arrived at doing a pamphlet.

Alongside competition projects and other such things that we were doing ourselves. Interestingly, the pamphlet became a sort of magazine and a group of people coalesced around it, which after three or four years became known as the Archigram Group and we formed a working group in various formats.

But the Archigram pamphlet. The state mental part of it came in a variety of different formats, it very deliberately changed itself each time, different graphics, different people taking part who then coalesced around the six of us who attached our name to the magazine. We invited lots of people from all over the place to come and participate. In some time, of course as time went on, it became quite known after Archigram 4, which was the one which had a pop up page with drawings of towers and a lot of material linking design ideas with comics papers and such things, the space race. It suddenly became known about very much in architectural circles via a very influential critic called Reyner Banham, and he put it on the right tables in New York and other places, and suddenly everybody knew about us.

And then it became a focus for a whole lot of people. Some, as I said, in Austria, Japan, some on the west coast of the United States. These were the most sympathetic places. And then, as we ourselves became better known, partly through the Archigram, it became a baseline upon which many experimental conversations could be based.

And in a way, although all of us are extremely English It became an international reference for avant garde thinking, to use an old term and really, I think, basically, to do with optimism, to do with inventive and optimistic architecture. Now, it’s highly debatable what has happened to that concept in the 50 years in between. I think optimism has tended to recede, to put it mildly, and experiment has continued perhaps in territories that we would have never anticipated.

When we were doing our early designs, we were making thick floors to put big heavy computers on. Now we all carry a little tiny thing in our pocket, which is effectively a computer. And we have drones and we have AI and we have all these things that are very optimistic and there are very interesting architects still around.

And I got to the point in a discussion with publisher David Jenkins, that perhaps we could revive the idea of an Archigram publication. Now, he was also the publisher, with Dennis Crompton one of the old Archigram people, who did the editing of a big book that came out about four years ago, which is the big Archigram book, and it was very comprehensive, and it became his, 

Tim Abrahams: It’s effectively a compilation of the Archigram publications.

Peter Cook: Yes, it’s a compilation of the publications and of the projects that were done by the six members of the group over that period. 

And this big book, which sold out two or three years ago. is now just about to be republished in a smaller format, actually coincidentally with this issue of Archigram. Now what I took as my brief was to invite a whole series of people including the survivors of the old Archigram group but largely people that I’ve come into contact with of every gender, of every age, of every location, who I think are interesting. It’s really meant as a springboard; to say there are people who are still optimistic, who are actually doing new and different things or observing new and different things. And let’s put them all together in a new Archigram and see if that starts a sort of a ball rolling effectively.

And I would like to see it go way into the future as an organ that brings people together. One of the comments that was made by somebody the other day, actually, observing my son, who’s in the music business, and all of his friends, and saying that it’s interesting how they’re rivals, they all cooperate with each other and they read as a body, whereas in architecture it’s very disparate, there are pockets, but No broad gang of people who, and so in a way this is also a beckoning to people and say, what happens?

This is a very polyglot group. As I say, their ages vary from late twenties to mid eighties. We’re probably epicenter around the year mark, but it’s hard to tell. There are 44 contributors or more.

At least or 20 of them are female, as it happens. Probably 50 percent of them are based either in London or Los Angeles, but that still leaves a lot of people who aren’t. And they’re exploring all sorts of different things, which perhaps I can review as we go through.

Tim Abrahams: Absolutely. So we’ve got the cover there. You’ve got the lettering. It looks like an Archigram publication. The layering, the use of different drawing formats. 

Peter Cook: We work with a very interesting graphic designer, Pablo, who teaches in London School of Printing and he’s very exploratory. ’cause as I said each of the former nine had different graphics done by different designers. Sometimes ourselves, sometimes friends, whoever they were. But they were usually fairly unusual, 

Tim Abrahams: They’re very colorful and this is very colorful. We’ve got a green background. Pink

Peter Cook:  That’s red. And it’s embossed as well so that it looks and feels very different. The whole thing is zany and as we move in we start off with the theme of why is so much building so boring?

You see some couple of highly repetitive pieces of facade, which is really talking about the last 50 years in a way. And then against the background of some more line drawings with green pages with these red and white big graphics across. The great optimistic Archagrammatic word is cheerful and cheerful is the key word and of course inventive and resourceful and inquisitive and exploratory. 

Tim Abrahams: I interviewed Michael Webb and one of the things I associate with Archigram and I associate with your work as well as Michael’s is a layering and a structuring of drawing and a multiplicity of different techniques of drawing. 

Peter Cook: I don’t know whether that’s intentional. I think they are quite structured. There is definitely a structural sequence, they start off with a mechanism, or an idea, or a grid even, and then they diffuse it and layer it. And so layering is very important, but a key statement is here. .

“Drawings are exciting. Drawings can be wayward. Drawings can be very precise. Drawings can be prescient.” I’ve categorized them here.

Tim Abrahams: So we’re not looking at the actual publication. 

Peter Cook: We’re looking at the material of it, but slightly reordered. Within it are, for example, a group of people who are just out and out experimenting. So the first of these is a guy called Nat Chart, who’s a professor in London at the Bartlett who’s been a head of a school in Canada and Denmark, whose particular interest is in observation and perception and machines by which you look and paint.

There’s some of his gadgets, some of [00:10:00] his inventions, some of these machines that project paint and observe things. 

Tim Abrahams: I suppose there’s a lunar module quality.

Peter Cook: Though they come really from the putting together of working parts, so they derive from photographic gadgets. He’s also very interested in 19th century settings that were made for the observation of landscape and animals within landscape. And another thing that he’s well known for some years ago is his paintings of evacuated stomachs with machinery in them.

And there’s Mike Webb. Mike is extraordinary because he’s my age and he’s still reworking or rethinking and redrawing versions of projects that he started 40, 50 years ago. I can’t do that. I look at the old stuff and say yes, yes. 

Tim Abrahams: I think Michael is quite unique in his, in his decision.

Peter Cook: I think so and you might dwell on something for about five years, generally. 

Tim Abrahams: When you’re going into numbers of decades, then you’re really in Michael Webb’s territory.

Peter Cook: The other thing about Mike is that he’s the consummate craftsman over and above the ideas about perception and position and scanning and, the theoretical end of it, it’s just, he’s an amazing drawer. I don’t know what other word to give it but beyond drawing, he’s a painter really.

And I’ve known him for 70 years, nearly, and he has always been able to draw amazingly in pencil. And then gradually he imposed colour on it over years.  Taught himself oil painting. Taught himself how to spray paint, taught himself. edged into the computer world, but only just.

They are extraordinary pieces and we had to have at least, we have a limited number of color pages. We had to have at least one by him because it goes beyond what you can show diagrammatically. And we have Eric Owen Moss. He’s very different and also not particularly young and known for doing buildings.

But he, too, if you take his buildings and he shows here one of his competition projects he is still experimenting and even able to build his experiments. 

With the wrapped building that he showed two or three years ago, it’s still an experimental building. And so I think it, what’s interesting here because unlike what the old Archigram would have, is that there are people in this issue who have built things. It’s not an a priori. It interests me that in such a polyglot group as this you can fold over the academic, the experimental, the person who does build but is still thinking, the person who’s, maybe has two, strings to their bows, doing simultaneously unbuildable experiments and built objects.

But what is interesting to me here is that, and I left a fairly open invitation to all of them, have you got a project, can you write about as well, that several of them are still interested in the house. This is Gavin Rowbottom, an erstwhile colleague of mine, who, if you look at the aesthetics of this, again, he comes from a very particular London drawing tradition.

Tim Abrahams: This has got a photographic quality, this drawing. It looks like a armored shelter. It’s house as a place of refuge, isn’t it, really? 

Peter Cook: Now, Neil Denari, again, is a person who has built: his block in New York on the High Line is very mechanistic, very well known, and is a new project that he sent me. They’re computer drawings actually..

Tim Abrahams: They look like a kit for an extravagant space station, but there, there’s a play there with the three dimensions and the two dimensions, i. e. it looks you have to punch it out and then form it.

Peter Cook: And again, it was interesting for this one because he has a number of projects. I think he’s got a couple of high rises on the go in Vancouver, actually, at the moment but he chose to send me a new version of house idea. 

Now Florencia [Pita] is a Argentinian lady who teaches and lives in Los Angeles and is one of the group of people at SCI Arc who are into florid extension of computer design and she does these exotic colored objects.

But in this particular project, still is also attaching such things to the notion of an extended house. Maybe grafted on, but it’s unusual to see her, which I associate with smaller objects actually doing a whole house project. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s a two dimensional product, there’s the section, which looks like it’s actually a two dimensional facade, but then there’s also this rising up and a blossoming of the flowers as if they’re popping towards you. There’s also a very strange aesthetic. It’s got 1970s hues, but done in a computer, very contemporary way. It could be a garden design, 

Peter Cook: and then Marcus Cruz another London based academic and he runs a postgraduate course in biomorphic architecture. And he actually does grow his own moulds and try to make them into an architecture. But this is a house project. , 

Tim Abrahams: It’s at the intersection between machine and plant, isn’t it? 

Peter Cook: Because it’s come from that background. He’s an extremely erudite academic, theoretically very developed, but actually in the end, an instinctive biomorphic weaver. 

Tim Abrahams: We are talking about people with a rich academic background very often, but you are not interested in the intellectual. 

Peter Cook: No, I’m interested in the product. In the end myself. This is my bias. I’m very familiar with this PhD thesis ’cause I was officially one of his supervisors, so I know it and I have it sitting on the shelf. I often refer to it but I’m interested that he’s not afraid to actually produce the object. 

Tim Abrahams: And this is what the publication is about.

Peter Cook: It is really, it’s about stuff.

Tim Abrahams: It’s about stuff, not the thinking behind the stuff. 

Peter Cook: I think so. Then I move on to another, what I categorise as space waiting to be explored. Thomas Saraceno is known now as an artist. When he was an architecture student, he was doing projects with smoke and so on. He didn’t do a building per se. He was already moving into exploring space, really. And he has a series of formulae and his object, not to put them down, are always extremely agreeable, as well as suggesting to you that you could live up in the net. Interestingly looking at the end result of the magazine there’s far more writing in it than there would have ever been in an early Archigram.

Now that’s something that, partly because we actually invited them. We said, “plus a description of up to 500 words.” And the majority of them ate up the whole 500 words. I thought this would only be three or four of them . What would have happened way back when, you’d say, “do up to 500 words?”

And you’d say fuck, I’ve got to do 500 words. 

Tim Abrahams: Really? That’s interesting

Peter Cook: I think so. Yeah, 

Tim Abrahams: Why do you think that is? 

Peter Cook: I think it’s just the culture. I think we have become more wordy, more of these people have done PhDs, 

Tim Abrahams: It’s possibly also to do with the fact that the original Archigrams there was a network, a very clear network of people to whom they were communicating.

Peter Cook: In the early early, like number two, number three, actually number two had texts. Yes, but number three where we were saying expendability seems to be the theme of number two. And here we’ve asked people like Cedric and I and others, we didn’t write that much. We were quite capable of writing, but they tended to be short verse. 

Tim Abrahams: Maybe it’s a position of slight insecurity in the fact that these people feel that they have to describe.  

Peter Cook: I think it’s, something that’s happened in the culture over 50 years just, this morning, I’m doing something which you will know about later in the year, which will appear in a park, and I’ve had to write a blurb about it already though it’s some months early because once it’s out there and publicised, the blurb will be an important sign, and whether they’ll use my blurb, I’ve made it quite provocative a bit naughty, but we’ll see if it’s officially used.

Tim Abrahams: Is that a park in London? 

Peter Cook: Yeah. 

Tim Abrahams: So there’ll be something in a park in London later in the year, which will have, or have not, some provocative words attached to it. 

Peter Cook: can’t, I can’t tell you what it is but, I’ve lived through that last 50 years. Conscious that you can’t just do something you have to write a page about it. You have to explain it. . 

Tim Abrahams: Can I just ask one question we’ve touched on it, nearly approached it, but I think the question, why now?

Peter Cook: One should have done it much earlier. I should have done it 20 years ago. And it was only really the prompting of a publisher, who, on the back of the unexpected success of the big Archigram book, we realized there are a lot of people out there who are actually very interested in it.

Tim Abrahams: Why was it unexpected? I’ve got the book. It’s one of the books which I return to. There was a huge appetite for it, I felt earlier in many ways, it’s really reassuring to hear that it has sold well, but in many ways, the climate in which you have published Archigram 10 into is perhaps, shall we say, of all the years since the second oil crisis, it’s the year in which the political, social climate is perhaps most resistant to the ideas.

Peter Cook: And that’s probably when it needs it. I have a hunch that a lot of people will hate it. In fact, I would be rather delighted if they hated it. In, in that I think, yes, we are in this presumed gloom. I just listened to the radio this morning when they say, X percent of people will be buying less and doing less but I, I’m still here to tell the tale. We’ve lived through various glooms. There was a period of the eighties, I mean, Archigram was grossly unfashionable. I could still go and lecture in obscure places, but nobody in the hot places wanted me and then towards the nineties it came back into fashion. People started doing books about it and PhDs and there’s various books usually getting it wrong, came out.

And you probably could have done it then, because it was on the roll. Then, inevitably it goes off again. Everybody’s got their Archigram book, or has said what they think about it, and it goes away. And then, maybe it waves back again. And I think the heroicism of the big Archigram book is quite important, the fact that it was just, it was big. 

Tim Abrahams: There was also, before that, there was the University of Westminster’s web project. 

Peter Cook: Yeah, that was a bit of a weird one. I have reservations about that. I’m not sure they were very well served by it. Whether [00:20:00] they really understood it, or did much with it.

Tim Abrahams: I remember its launch, and I remember that was a moment in which something which had been in the back of my mind floating away suddenly came to the forefront and I perhaps didn’t engage with that project itself, but I learned and I knew and I found out. 

Peter Cook: So you think it was useful?

Tim Abrahams: It highlighted the. wider significance of Archigram and I don’t know whether it enabled you to be part of a conversation, but I think there was also a broadening of the church of architecture and it bled into literature at that time. In the early noughties,, I remember London at that time, you being central to a critical conversation, 

Peter Cook: if I didn’t notice it at the time. I was probably busy with other things.

Tim Abrahams: You’re probably busy designing an Olympic stadium. I don’t know. Maybe that could have took up your time. Sorry. I think that’s an important historical placing. This I love. Who’s this? 

Peter Cook: This is a guy. This is a case where, 

Tim Abrahams:Cesare Patelli

Peter Cook: At the time I was simply scouring the internet, and seeing certain things. This guy kept cropping up. And it’s all done by AI apparently, so experts tell me. And he’s an Italian, I think, teaching in Madrid somewhere and he came back and said, I was actually a student of yours at one point. I’d completely forgotten him. It was the time in Frankfurt when. Enric Miralles had taken the chair, but I was still going there for three days a month.

Tim Abrahams: If there is a space between you and Enric Miralles, then Cesar Batelli is in it. 

Peter Cook: Occasionally I, I do this. taking people on board to work with me. I don’t necessarily go through, this is a friend of this friend of a friend. I just look at stuff and say, who’s that? This stuff is bloody interesting. Now, people then say you know he does it all by AI. I say, OK. So what, somebody else does it with burnt cork and a pencil, 

Tim Abrahams: The image we have there looks like it’s a composite. It is a very wooded structure, it looks like, but then also a very complex form. It looks like a superstructure that’s been grown. 

Peter Cook: It also looks like a crazy bit of ship building somehow.

Yeah. Drapes and even the heavy part of the structure is very only semi controlled, in a sense. There’s a sort of scaffolding running around at all, it has that liveliness of construction. I noticed that Aaron Betsky, the well known architecture critic has done a book with him. 

Tim Abrahams: You can’t tell which part is organic, whether it’s all organic, which part is the structure around which something else is being made, and which part is the made thing.

Peter Cook: I’ve done this a few times before now, with other publications, when I’ve been a guest editor or something, where you have a list of people you want to use, you’ve got 30, 40, 50, whatever number of people, a lot of people, and, the usual suspects are very well organized, their stuff comes in, the next week and then you’re fighting three or four of them. You want them to be in there and they don’t bloody reply. They send something that’s too small or too odd or not odd enough or something. And then there’s another group who, spew out, they have got so much stuff and you could have chosen anything from 20 items. They’re prolific. And they’re waiting to send it, which is nice. 

Hernan: Alonso quite an important figure in the academic world. You’ve got, actually, within the magazine, you’ve got three heads of SCI-Arc. Neil Denari, Eric Moss, Alonso

Tim Abrahams: That’s interesting. 

Peter Cook: What’s interesting about SCI-Arc this is to digress, I think, but the only school of architecture that I know, where since its inception, sort of 45 years ago or whatever, has always had a designer as the head. Every one of the heads, Ray Capay, Michael Grittondi, Eric Moss, Neil Denari, Hernan, they’re all in their own way designers.

They all do stuff. 

Having said that, I then have invited five people to comment. None of them are English. Quite deliberately.

Tim Abrahams: Todd Gannon, Trevor Boddy, Dora Epstein Jones, Craig Hodgetts, and Gilles Re 

Peter Cook: Retzin. 

Tim Abrahams: Gilles Retzin. I’ve not heard of any of them. 

Peter Cook: Todd Gannon is somebody who came out of came out of California. He’s now the head of a school in Ohio and he wrote one of the most interesting books about Cedric Price. He’s also a very astute observer of, creativity.

Trevor Boddy is a very jolly Canadian. I like his sort of cuteness. Rather similarly 

Dora is now in Austin, Texas. But she was the theory person in SCI-Arc, very pithy, they’re very pithy people. Craig is, of course, one of the old key LA architects. And Gilles Retsin, who’s the youngest of them, he’s a London based Belgian, he’s known on the computer making network. He’s a doer academic but he wanted to do a statemental piece. So these are all critics. And I deliberately didn’t use any from London.

Tim Abrahams: Why was that?

Peter Cook: I got another version of this lecture, which I might just show you the slide later, where I show, I said, not these. I haven’t shown it in London, but I might show it.

Tim Abrahams: Because you feel that within. 

Peter Cook: Oh, they’re all crabby. 

Tim Abrahams: Crappy or 

Peter Cook: crabby? 

Tim Abrahams: Crabby sorry. London Architecture critics, you’re not crappy, you’re crabby. Crabby in that they are…

Peter Cook: Even if they’re slightly praising, they’re very mealy. Usually they’re saying it’s not relevant enough. They don’t like this sort of stuff.

Tim Abrahams: Do you think it’s an aesthetic thing?

Peter Cook: It comes across as a moralist thing, but it’s also, I think, hidden, an aesthetic thing. I think it’s also an irritation with people who enjoy architecture. 

Tim Abrahams: Really, architecture is not to be enjoyed. Architecture should be what?

Peter Cook: It should be good for the community and, modest and, 

Tim Abrahams: Yet London’s where you’re based. 

Peter Cook: Yeah that’s why I thought I’d get some North American critics instead. 

Tim Abrahams: The listener will be pleased to know that Sir Peter Cook has just done a V’s up sign.

Great. Thom Mayne. 

Peter Cook: Thom Mayne, is somebody I see fairly often. I’ve been watching him move from being a successful building architect to becoming an artist really. And he has a separate studio down the street from the Morphosis’s main office where he works his sort of layered sculptural pieces. 

Tim Abrahams: The headline is “Gardening between the mechanical and the natural.” This looks like an organic form, albeit a hypertrophied manic one. But yet it’s a very fecund, powerful image. A crazed image of nature. 

Peter Cook: And on the opposite page in the magazine. Again, this is somebody who builds. Odile Decq and But is then using the mag to explore pictorially. Odile Decq and Thom Mayne opposite each other. It’s a provocative picture. 

Tim Abrahams: Because, because this is very unorganic, whereas Thom Maynes is, 

Peter Cook: but they’re both people who build stuff, in, in quantity. 

Tim Abrahams: This is constructivism. This image is the red, even the colours are constructivist colours. Angular, redolent of Zaha Hadid’s early work. But also, what she’s always done. And still does. So it’s very international. And If you were to talk about some of the big differences, of course the historical and sociological context into which this Archigram as opposed to previous ones arrives, you can’t really compare them. But if we were to look at the stuff to use your phrase, one of the things that’s different about this stuff is that it’s the mechanics of nature, it’s actually operating a cellular or at least the architecture of branches and leaves and 

Peter Cook: Even way back, as I said, between number two and number three, we realize that it turned out of the sort of 15 people who were invited that there was a clear interest in this throwaway architecture thing. And therefore the next one took that as a theme. You just threw out the cards into the air, collected them and said, Hey, People are talking about this and I’m a great believer in that over the years that there are things in the air for a few years and then they will recede and only when you do throwing the cards in the air, like if I had the good luck to do another Archigram it will almost certainly be more concentrated because one will have drawn, one will sniff the air and probably looked to a more consistently young group of people to see where that air is going.

 Anyhow, this is a pair of people you may know. 

Tim Abrahams: No, I’ve never heard of them. 

Peter Cook: Ecologic Studio are a couple of Italians who work out of London and Turin, mostly out of London.

They do a lot of, again, they own the biomorphic territory. They do a lot of exhibits. They had a whole thing a couple of years ago in the Building Centre, which was a working laboratory biomorphics. 

But they have chosen not to talk about the stuff that they usually seem to be doing, but actually the implications of the biomorphics on what could be a city.

This is a favorite of mine. Pedro Pitaj. Elias Engelis and I just before the lockdown period were on a jury in Cyprus at the Cyprus Museum and this guy, actually wowed us and we tried to get him to win, we lost by one vote and I think they were scared shitless of this extraordinary young man who had a very competent engineer in tow, he looked like he really could do it, and he constructs these…

Tim Abrahams: what a beautiful drawing that is. Let’s stop just to try and describe what that drawing is. It’s a line drawing. It’s, cityscape of sorts and it’s under construction. It has 

Peter Cook: big formalized elements, some of which look like domes, like airships, like big cubes, circular areas riddled with walkways.

And a wall like edge. It was, 

Tim Abrahams: but, and it’s a compound as well, isn’t it? It’s a compound. 

Peter Cook: It’s meant to be a museum. Okay. This is a Chinese. That looks, 

Tim Abrahams: this, we’re in, that looks not a million miles away from Archigram. 

Peter Cook: And it’s Chinese. 

Tim Abrahams: It’s [00:30:00] interesting. What is it about that drawing which is so redolent of Archigram? It’s an urban landscape and a multi layered 

Peter Cook: With gadgetry 

Tim Abrahams:and Temporary shelters. 

Peter Cook: And strips of layering one on top of the other.

Tim Abrahams: And  I’m not a trained architect. What is that an isonometric? 

Peter Cook: Yeah, it’s an isonometric. 

Tim Abrahams: Fantastic. And Eleanor Manfredini. 

Peter Cook: Barry Walk is a very young guy, Scottish, now teaching at Penn in the States, living in New York, but was part of young London do it, make it circuit. Yeah. Very articulate, very amusing. And he, I didn’t, I invited him.

And I’d invited  Gilles Retzin quite separately. And I got this letter back saying, Can we do a conversation between us? And so this is their conversation comparing different projects that each of them has done. And this is Walk’s work. So yeah, that’s Retsin. 

Tim Abrahams: That’s Retsin. 

Peter Cook: And that’s Walk. 

Tim Abrahams: Oh my goodness. That’s nice. 

Peter Cook: But if you ever hear these guys they’re both very articulate, very amusing, very sharp, bright.

I’d love to have them actually do a gig together. 

Tim Abrahams: There’s a hidden idea about migration of ideas in this as well.

Peter Cook: It’s international, but subterranean, half of the people in here would know each other from a conference or a show. But it’s not all the same network. Another pair of people based in Frankfurt who’ve done a lot of installations.Very delicate. Formal Haut. No, it means formal skin. 

Tim Abrahams: That’s very interesting. Whatever that means. 

Mark West. 

Peter Cook: Mark West actually did a lot of research in Canada of concrete structures, drapes of concrete. And then they shut his institute. And so he retired and moved to Montreal, but he’s gone into drawing laterally. But he connects again with people like Mike Webb. There’s a network of people who are on the drawing scene. 

Tim Abrahams: Drawing is the thing that connects them, keeps them connected. 

Peter Cook: And finally, this is the last one. This is a really interesting, nutty guy. A sort of situationist joker in a way: Japanese, teaches in China, always wears a hat. 

Tim Abrahams: Taki Suzuki. 

Peter Cook: Yeah. He won Japan’s biggest novel prize. when he was in his twenties. 

Tim Abrahams: Whoa, before we completely disappear, we’ve got some of the old crew. There’s David Green and there’s Dennis Crompton and they’ve contributed

Peter Cook: mostly words

Tim Abrahams: It’s interesting because, you’re a sir, you’re a Royal Academician so in many ways, you’re a figure of the establishment.

Peter Cook: Yes, it’s strange, isn’t it? nd yet I’m not. 

Tim Abrahams: And yet what you’re presenting here is a network that, as you’ve said, exists outside the critical narrative. How do you feel about that? 

Peter Cook: Think it will be, it’s really not local. 

It speaks out into the air, the local scene, to my mind, is one of the most repressive that I’ve come across. Now if I go and take it like I did the other day to Seoul, and I gave a couple of lectures as far as I could tell, even. There were piles of them. People rushed up to buy them at the end of the lecture, but that’s within a room or another room. You don’t really know what 100 copies of Archigram do in a country of 50 million, but the key people have them. You never know. My experience of that way back is you never know. Something leads to something. 

Tim Abrahams: I mean, in your experience, that’s what publishing is, isn’t it? 

Peter Cook: Yeah. I’m always intrigued, like we talk about the big Archigram book, it probably was a significant thing and needed to be done, otherwise you’d get a succession of people doing their version of an Archigram book and taking their own take on it. And I got very irritated by one of the Archigram books, which is the one done by Simon Sadler.

Tim Abrahams: What irritated you about it? 

Peter Cook: It was concentrated upon the political scene at the time and the words. It didn’t talk about the stuff. It had its own agenda to talk about the political scene and the cultural scene and I got really pissed off because one of the blurbs on the back was a very grudging piece by Ken Frampton who’s always been very snotty, I have to say that. I didn’t give him the Gold medal. I sat on a committee. I wanted somebody else to get it. 

Tim Abrahams: There’s also an ideological difference. You’re very stuff focused and he’s very 

Peter Cook: prescriptive. 

Tim Abrahams: Two modes from that great exuberant moment of the 60s When a lot of amazing work was done in the UK, there is that more sober one, which he represents 

Peter Cook:But he’s very political. 

Tim Abrahams:  It’s different approaches. But it’s interesting that the timing, the timing of this no one really knows where anything’s going anymore. And it is, it is either pessimism or a sense of the future. 

Peter Cook: I’m most in despair about the state of the architecture schools because I’ve spent a lot of my time in, you not only in the three places that I’m associated with, but, a lot of the American schools and Australian schools. And it’s all rear guarding and apologising. I thought “woke” was good when it came in now I use it in the pejorative. Definitely, it’s, it became a puritan, puritanism, really. 

Tim Abrahams: And do you see an end to it? 

Peter Cook: Oh inevitably. People will get bored with it.

But not necessarily a good end, I think Trumpism and the right wing thing in Europe is probably the end to it. Of course, that’s not woke, but then it’ll lurch into something probably worse. On the other hand, it might be more libertarian.

That’s a terrible irony that people of my generation, your generation, have to face, which is that the opposite to this extreme dreary, non-creative prude is probably a, libertarian / fascist. God knows, but I think there’s still people doing stuff and they’re doing it and saying, not saying fuck you or, or hiding in the, in the corners of the academy because I know several of these people who are doing what they do despite the trajectory of the academy that they’re in. Or you get places like the AA at the moment, which I have great affection for, and it’s pleasant, it’s agreeable, the head of it is a nice lady and she greets you with a glass of wine, but I don’t see where it’s going architecturally.

It’s polite and you know, and the other place, has gone weird. So what do you do then? 

Tim Abrahams: You wait for the next thing, I think. 

Peter Cook: Yeah, and it will come from somewhere. My wife comes from Tel Aviv. I was in this, it wasn’t even a big boutique, it wasn’t even a big mall, it was a little sort of slightly pricey mall, with mostly women’s fur coats and stuff in it, and there was a little branch of a bookshop, it had seven Lebbeus Woods books in it. 

Peter Cook: Look. I know that Cook is the Don of weird stuff. And some of you may not like it. I myself have my favorites of the contributors. Some others I am not interested but I think his attitude to the condition that his chosen art form finds itself in. As worthy, not just of note. But actual imitation. published. Publishing is an act of faith.  It’s about putting things out there and wondering what will happen. And that’s very much what happened with Archigram. I suggest to anyone considering. Whether they are going to do so or not to do it. You won’t regret it. The life of a book, as Peter makes clear, is a strange, sometimes miraculous one: Lebbeus Woods in a mall. Also, I never imagined this podcast would be the conduit for architectural beef, especially not between octogenarians one, a Knight of the realm, no less. 

And the other Kenneth Frampton, perhaps our greatest living architecture greater, but there we have it. I love the reference to, to the collaborative environment that his son AG Cook a Charlie XCX collaborator, no less enjoys and how that might be imagined in architecture and network, which is both overt, but subterranean, its members understand they are constituent elements , but not aware of networker as a whole, until moments like this, when it’s revealed. 

I’m looking forward to the journey that this podcast is going to go on in 2025. Who knows, maybe one day it may become a book, a magazine. Maybe we’ll just stay a podcast. Onwards, we go. 

 

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