Peter Cook, Entertainment Tower, Montreal, Canada, 1963 

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Arcadia City [1977/1978] by Peter Cook + Christine Hawley

More info: Arqueología del Futuro

Peter Cook | Architecture: action and plan

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Biblioteca Publica de Mexico | Alberto Kalach

Peter Cook evokes the existence of the incredible building that is the Biblioteca Publica of Mexico City by Alberto Kalach. This Mexican Architect seems to have succeed to create a library influenced by both Borges’ fantastic atmosphere and Kafka’s ambiguous and intriguing fascination for bureaucracy.
The beautiful pictures from Tomás Casademunt succeeds to reinforce in an incredible way this feeling.

The motive force of architecture | Peter Cook

PETER COOK

WAY OUT WEST-BERLIN, 1988

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Mechanical Living | Nelson Larroque

Mechanical Living is a project designed by Nelson Larroque within Peter Cook’s studio at the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris. This project is a very literal vision of dwellings created in former industrial sites which facilities manage to supply energy.

Peter Cook | a tower for SWISS COTTAGE

THE FINER GRAINS OF RADICALISM

Richness of investigation that can be found in the grain of the work distinguishes certain exploratory architecture that has been going on in London for the last 30 years. Given that the resulting compositions are sometimes weird, there is a tendency for outside observers to admire its craftsmanship (as drawing or physical fashioning—or its will to surf between various modes and programs of digitalization). Such observers often seem shy to discuss its uncomfortable relationship with either the Broad Mainstream of built and projected architecture or the more shrilly political/theoretical thrusts of European Statements and Positions. A clue might be found in listening to a Review session at the Bartlett School—where all of the exhibiters are to be found. A certain tradition of discussion still lingers—far less “positional” than an American session and less declamatory than in France or Germany. The non-British are often puzzled that a discussion can stray far away from the motives or maneuvers of the project and engage in speculation, whimsy, pernickety detail, gossip, nostalgia, raconteurship and probably avoid (at all costs) the definition of the project as “good” or “bad.” The same waywardness has often been observed in the English Novel, where identification of good, evil, heroism or villainy are replaced by messy and complex situations—but full of intriguing side-issues that months later strike you as containing the essence of the message. Of course only two of our exhibitors are English by birth and the territories that they severally explore range from the imagined to the prosaic, the delirious to the stubbornly measurable. Yet the common culture they share is of teaching or studying in a school where individuality has been cherished and the teachers have a tendency to re-define their interests without notice. Those same speculations, details and an assumed mandate to slither from one territory to another are then interpreted through formal objects and drawn imagery.

Sometimes the Bartlett is assumed to be hung up on gadgetry, sometimes on an over-refinement of the drawn (or plotted) line. Sometimes it’s believed to wallow in fantasy: yet its graduates are statistically the most desired by offices in a city with a dozen nearby schools—as well as the plane-loads that come over from the technische hochschulen. When Eric Moss asked me to round up some specimens, I had no second thoughts that these three syndromes were the ones to have—anyhow, anywhere and not as much to make a pedagogic point as to simply get some great stuff on the wall. All of them at their best when being full-on—or should I say, fully indulgent. The art of indulgence is a threatened species. God preserve us from all those reasonable architects, those cool manners, those careful Buildings—go look elsewhere for that—there’s plenty of it around.

PETER COOK | The London Eight « LEBBEUS WOODS

Peter Cook | Plug-In City

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