Sir Peter Cook - Architecture Workbook_ Design through Motive-Wiley (2016)

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COOK
PETERPETER
COOK
ARCHITECTURE
WORKBOOK
ARCHITECTURE
WORKBOOK
DESIGN THROUGH MOTIVE
COOK
PETERPETER
COOK
ARCHITECTURE
WORKBOOK:
ARCHITECTURE
WORKBOOK:
DESIGN THROUGH MOTIVE
This edition first published 2016
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Executive Commissioning Editor: 
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Project Editor: 
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© Peter Cook
Page 2 image 
Peter Cook, 
Chunk City, 
Ink and colour pencil,
2015
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To Yael and Alexander
That I should be so lucky!
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the indefatigable Caroline Ellerby, who seems never to need 
rest. Equally to Helen Castle who knows so well how to keep me on the 
case and to the point. To Gavin Robotham who is a daily example of clear 
directedness and joviality. To Christia Angelidou who kept the illustrations 
coming faster than sound. To all of those above who tolerated my natural 
disinclination to enjoy the pedantry necessary to complete a useful document!
 CONTENTS
008 MOTIVE 1:
ARCHITECTURE
AS THEATRE
018 MOTIVE 2:
STRETCHING THE
VOCABULARY
054 MOTIVE 3:
UNIVERSITY LIFE
AND ITS IRONIES
100 MOTIVE 4:
FROM ORDINARY
TO AGREEABLE
128 MOTIVE 5:
THE ENGLISH PATH
AND THE ENGLISH
 NARRATIVE
154 MOTIVE 6:
 NEW PLACES
AND STRANGE
 BEDFELLOWS
248 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
249 INDEX
255 PICTURE CREDITS
186 MOTIVE 7:
CAN WE LEARN
FROM SILLINESS?
210 MOTIVE 8:
THE CITY –
THEN THE TOWN
240 MOTIVE 9:
ON DRAWING,
DESIGNING,
TALKING AND
 BUILDING
08 PETER COOK
MOTIVE 1
AS THEATRE
ARCHITECTURE
010 PETER COOK
Thinking about architecture, I have rarely felt the need to detach myself from 
the circumstances around me – and certainly not by recourse to any system 
of abstraction. For this reason, most of the work discussed in this book is 
influenced by the episodic nature of events, by the coincidental, the referential, 
and is unashamedly biased. It seeks no truths but it enjoys two parallel areas 
of speculation: the ‘what if?’ and the ‘how could?’ that can be underscored by 
many instances of ‘now here’s a funny thing’.
Thus each chapter revolves around a motive – acting as a catalyst or driver of 
the various enthusiasms or observations, clarifying the identity of those same 
‘what ifs?’ and ‘how coulds?’. In each case the motive is elaborated upon by 
a commentary that tries to observe the world around us and the ironies and 
layers of our acquired culture. This precedes the description of the work itself. 
Of course there are times when such observations do or do not have any direct 
reference to what follows: yet I would 
claim that they sit there all the time, an 
experiential or prejudicial underbelly 
without which the description would 
lose dimension.
I do have a core belief, which I 
introduce here as the first motive: 
that for me, architecture should be 
recognised as theatre, in the sense that 
architecture should have character. 
It should be able to respond to the 
inhabitant or viewer and prepare 
itself for their presence, spatially; in 
other words, it should have that magic 
quality of theatre, with all its emphasis 
on performance, spectacle and delight.
previous spread
Peter Behrens, administration building, Hoechst 
Chemical Works, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 
1924: main hall.
An artist-turned-architect, Behrens created not 
only a dramatic – almost Gothic – space, but 
accentuated its sense of ‘theatre’ by an assiduous 
use of stratified colour.
011 MOTIVE 1: ARCHITECTURE AS THEATRE
INDULGING IN DELIGHT
If the Ancient Roman architect and engineer Vitruvius came out in favour 
of ‘firmness, commodity and delight’ as the key elements of architecture in 
his celebrated treatise De architectura (Ten Books on Architecture), we are by 
now, in the Western world, so statutorily bound into systems of checks and 
balances – standards, codes and building inspections – that non-firmness 
is unlikely. Yet commodity can be more: it is not just the common-sense 
placing of things, for these can also be placed wittily – and thus lead directly 
to the experience of delight. It is only dull architects who are immediately 
happy if buildings just have everything in the right place and leave it at that. 
But delight. This is a contentious beast; it involves evaluation, sensitivity, and 
even that difficult issue: taste.
What delights one irritates another, but both are alerted: their world is 
for the moment extended, identified, stopped in its tracks. If buildings 
are the setting for experience, then we may ask: can they influence that 
experience? It could be argued that people who are totally self-obsessed, 
or under extreme pressure, or blind, or in an extreme hurry … may not 
notice where they are. But for the rest, the combination of presence, 
atmosphere, procedure and context add up to something that architecture 
should be aware of.
It is challenging to the notion of delight when the architect and writer 
Bernard Tschumi asserts the predominance of ‘concept’ to design in 
architecture, which seems to suck all the pleasure out of it. It immediately 
prompts me to substitute the word ‘concept’ with ‘idea’ – which is of course 
more emotive and less controlling than concept, or maybe comes a little 
before it. I would claim for ‘idea’ that it can be very affected by those same 
layers of ‘what if’ and ‘how could’ that may then sway or load up upon a 
concept and cause it to be unevenly but interestingly unbalanced. In the end, 
of course, Tschumi has wit and taste, as demonstratedby his unexecuted 
competition design for the National Theatre and Opera House, Tokyo (1986). 
opposite
Vitruvius, basilica at Fano, Italy, 19 bc.
This is the only known built work of Vitruvius, 
effectively the first architectural theorist. If the 
visualisation is to be believed, it suggests that 
already by this time ‘classical’ mannerisms had 
already established themselves.
Bernard Tschumi, National Theatre and 
Opera House, Tokyo, 1986.
A competition project that demonstrates 
Tschumi’s often-demonstrated ability to 
create a very clear concept and strategy for 
a building; a figure that also recalls 20th-
century musical scores.
012 PETER COOK
Partisan abstraction seems so often to be the province of the pious or the 
creatively untalented. It is so easy for them to wave a finger at us indulgers 
and enthusiasts, to constantly ask us to define our terms of reference and then 
posit some unbelievably dull terms of their own with (if at all) unbelievably 
boring architectural implications. 
DISCOVERING NOVELTY IN THE KNOWN
I was always fascinated by the very creative mythology and spirituality of the 
New York architect, poet and educator John Hejduk (1929–2000) – who was 
Dean at the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture for 25 years. In his 
investigations of freehand ‘figure/objects’, which expressed his own poetry, 
and his rare built works, like Security for Oslo (1989), I admired his ability to 
gaze beyond the logical world. The latter structure, originally conceived for 
Berlin, was erected by staff and students of the Oslo School of Architecture 
and placed on a site that had been heavily used by the Nazis when occupying 
Norway. However, I remain a little squeamish about symbolism and the 
unknown, and so I tend to retreat back into the comfort of tangible reference.
At this point the observer might ask how it is then possible for such a 
mind to suggest the new or the less-than-usually-likely. Naively, I would 
answer that almost every project is suggesting the possible and has its 
hind legs in the known. In fact those that don’t are the ones that tend to be 
forgettable. The interesting thing is that the references can be scrambled, 
the antecedents taken from anywhere; they just have to contain enough 
consistency to make the scene.
For so long I trod the corridors of schools of architecture, and served as 
Chair and Professor of the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), creating an 
architectural milieu. Even now that I am back in practice with Gavin Robotham 
at CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau), having 95 per cent of my 
conversations with other architects (including those at home), the danger 
013 MOTIVE 1: ARCHITECTURE AS THEATRE
is that one makes too many assumptions and moves within a referential 
comfort zone. In this circumstance, the theatre of architecture could easily 
become a run longer than Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap (which at the 
time of writing is celebrating its 63rd consecutive year of performances in 
London’s West End), in which every move and every nuance is predicted by the 
audience. Such a condition might dangerously lead to a tradition or a system.
Thus there is a conscious intention to look at each task afresh and, if the 
projects themselves fall into a certain pattern, to invent other tasks that are not 
on offer from anywhere, but intriguing nonetheless. Hence there is a link over 
time between ‘commissioned’ and ‘off-the-cuff’ projects and a definite creative 
relationship between them. 
Looking at each task afresh leads, unselfconsciously, towards a non-partisan 
interest in the contextual; though along the way I cannot help a tendency to 
poke fun at the self-importance that local ‘worthies’ and bystanders place 
upon things that are rather obvious and quite universal. 
What conclusions can be drawn from the votes made by the readers of the 
local newspaper in Graz, for instance? On seeing the early renderings of the 
Kunsthaus Graz (2003), which I designed with Colin Fournier (see Motive 6), 
they voted 70 per cent ‘don’t like’ to 30 per cent ‘like’; and then, three years 
later voted 70 per cent ‘like’ to 30 per cent ‘don’t like’. The built project was 
very close to the competition version, and during the process the reality 
of a filmy, blue surface and 920 light pixels crawling around among it were 
certainly no sop to tradition. So maybe they just got caught up in the intended 
atmosphere of celebration, dynamic, galvanisation and realised that this 
newcomer, rather than being a threat to this quite complex little city, was in 
the tradition of its complexity and collective theatre. 
John Hejduk, Security, Christiania Square, 
Oslo, 1989.
Designed for the City of Oslo and constructed 
by faculty and students of the Oslo School 
of Architecture, Hejduk’s brooding creation 
symbolised a series of conceptual layers 
appropriate to a place that was the Nazi 
headquarters during Norway’s occupation 
between 1940 and 1945.
014 PETER COOK
Hans Poelzig, Grosses Schauspielhaus, Berlin, 
1920: reconstructed interior.
A long-since destroyed piece of ‘total 
architecture’: the insistence and large scale 
of the stalactite-like fretwork must have 
created a sense of the unreal even before any 
performance started.
015 MOTIVE 1: ARCHITECTURE AS THEATRE
HONING IN ON THE THEATRICAL STATEMENT 
Every time I walk just behind King’s Cross Station in London I become very 
depressed by the new English architecture of foursquare, mostly grey blocks: 
worthy, impassive, and – if made of brick – sitting there like dry shortbread 
biscuits. I contrast these in my mind with the lost moments of architectural 
creativity around a century before. The wonderful space created by the 
combination of audacity and originality that caused Hans Poelzig, in his design 
for his Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin (1920), to set out rings of stalactite-like 
frets that must surely have created a sense of theatre even when there was 
no performance on below. Or the circumstances in which a surely sensible 
and hard-headed organisation like the Hoechst chemical company in 1920s 
Frankfurt encouraged Peter Behrens to send cascades of colour down the 
walls of their main entrance hall. Or how a competition win in the mid-1980s 
enabled the fresh talent of someone like Enric Miralles to entirely reimagine 
the form that a cemetery might take for the living in the dramatic earthworks 
of the Igualada Cemetery, outside Barcelona. 
Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós, Igualada 
Cemetery, Barcelona, Spain, 1995.
Excavation as much as construction was used in 
the creation of the Igualada Cemetery – a giant 
earthwork in an arid river valley in the hills outside 
Barcelona. Blended into its natural setting, it 
makes use of a tiered landscape to spectacular 
effect, unfolding a visual and physical experience 
for mourners and visitors.
016 PETER COOK
017 MOTIVE 1: ARCHITECTURE AS THEATRE
The theatre of architecture is also the theatre of life. When commissioned in 
2008 to make a block of 100 apartments in the new Madrid suburb of Vallecas, 
we wished to bring it to life: with sports action on the roof, community action 
in the kiosks underneath, a liveliness of coloured shuttering and a bright 
blue form. Then the Spanish financial meltdown came and all these features 
disappeared. Which leaves the building as a hulk, no doubt enjoyable for the 
private lives within, but offering little to the sense of theatre, so desperately 
missing from this vast new dusty suburb. 
Some might read the bright coloration of CRAB’s Law School (2014) at Vienna 
University of Economics and Business as a theatrical statement, but they need 
to look inside, where the theatre is that of the incidental, the gossipy, the 
casual, the essentially non-curricular potential of bright people in proximity – 
and our spaces celebrate this. 
So at this moment, CRAB’s furthest claim for the theatre of architecture lies 
in the AbedianSchool of Architecture at Bond University in Queensland, 
Australia (2014), for like many novelists, we concoct a series of potential 
scenarios within a world that we grew up among. The idea for the street-
based shed with a loose side and a tight side might come under the category 
of ‘concept’. But a loose-limbed, fold-over scoop-collecting interpretation 
introduces a series of ideas that are immediately referred to the gaggles 
and scatterings, the formality and the informality or simply the vagaries of 
architecture school life. If you are aware, there can be at least six theatrical 
situations a day in such a place.
All this, without mentioning light, sound, peering, gazing, clustering, hiding, 
shouting and much else, and neither with any explanation of my curious 
architectural predilection for ‘noses’. 
Peter Cook, A Predilection for Noses, 2015.
A collage admitting to a recurrent idea or even, 
simply, a taste that did not occur to me until 
the advent of the third example: the Abedian 
School of Architecture at Bond University, 
Queensland (2014, left) (the other two being 
the Kunsthaus Graz (2003, bottom right) and 
the Department of Law at Vienna University of 
Economics and Business (2014, top right)). Yet is 
this a question of style or quaintness? Theatre 
is full of rhetoric, after all.
018 PETER COOK
MOTIVE 2
STRETCHING THE
VOCABULARY
020 PETER COOK
Appreciating architecture can involve a practical response (‘Does it work?’ 
… ‘Is it helping me?’); it can have a visceral response (‘This place is creepy’ … 
‘Wow! This is great!’); or it can be woven into a general feeling that architecture 
is a major territory that evolves and reflects the push and pull of culture in 
tandem with science, technology or general know-how. Along with such 
territories it dare not stand still. Moreover it can be observed that periods of 
conspicuous revivalism in architecture have mirrored stagnation, decay or 
even despotism in the world around it.
I feel a frustration towards the contemporary language of architecture, 
which often seems as if it is limiting itself by some unwritten commitment to 
‘correctness’ or legitimacy of form. Even the most innovative projects seem 
to resort to the repetition of parts and the playing out of good manners, with 
a limit to the range of types of window opening, things that might happen 
at an entrance, ways in which a building could 
turn round a corner or what is an acceptable 
roof profile. 
Architecture needs to be a constant voyage of 
discovery, and this is closely allied to the tricky 
path of inventiveness. The language by which 
we make enclosures – and the total scope of 
architectural awareness – has to question those 
old, comfortable manoeuvres. Ironically the bulk 
of new architecture, even though it is backed up 
by more and more efficient technical methods, is 
remarkably – even dangerously – repetitive and 
formulaic. It could be that we might soon wake up 
with a totally ‘standard’ architecture flanked by a 
tiny number of deliberately eccentric structures as 
court jesters against the characterless mulch.
previous spread
Peter Cook, Medina Circle Tower, Tel Aviv, 
Israel, 1997: elevation detail.
021 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
WAYWARD EXPRESSIONISM
It has long been clear that such orthodoxy and the range of its interpretation 
were linked, and I increasingly became fascinated by that part of recent 
architectural history in which those who were hitting out against this 
narrowness seemed often to be labelled as ‘expressionist’. Sometimes this just 
seemed to be a loose term for ebullience or waywardness; yet surely there was 
more than a grain of truth in this word ‘expression’. It was as if these architects 
were not afraid to express: to celebrate, to accentuate.
The German architect Bruno Taut’s book Alpine Architecture (1917), through 
its associations with heroic and craggy landscape, suggested one direction 
of escape; and the complete originality (for its time) of his Cologne Glass 
Pavilion (1914) had seemed to stem from the same purposefulness of escape 
from the norm. This work suggested an architecture of homogeneous flow 
across surface and may well have underscored a desire in my mind to achieve 
an architecture of continuous surface, in which variations, instead of being 
articulated by windows and other regulated interruptions, could absorb 
degrees of transparency. More recently I have tended to use the phrase ‘the 
tyranny of the window’ as a shrill outcry against the linguistic dominance of 
this element, certainly in the architecture of the temperate zones: which leads 
one to take more seriously the relation between the later more sculptural work 
of Le Corbusier (1887–1965) and his travels in the Mediterranean, the liberality 
of Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) within the Brazilian climate and psychology, or 
the effect of the Indian subcontinent upon Louis Kahn (1901–1974). That these 
were probably the three most consistently influential architects upon me as a 
young architect could also be a factor.
opposite
Bruno Taut, Glass Pavilion, Deutscher Werkbund 
Exhibition, Cologne, Germany, 1914.
As originator of the ‘Glass Chain’ architects’ chain 
letter (November 1919 to December 1920) and 
director of the Expressionist journal Frühlicht, 
Taut was a visionary figure before becoming an 
architect of social housing projects, but here he 
is extending the structural and formal vocabulary 
and heroically grasping the potential of 20th-
century glass manufacture. 
Erik Gunnar Asplund, Law Courts extension, 
Gothenburg, Sweden, 1937.
A model for mannerisms to be found in 
European buildings up to the 1960s, Asplund 
knits together a lyrical set of timber-faced 
courts and delicate natural lighting in a 
combination of subtlety and boldness.
022 PETER COOK
Yet as a North European, with a penchant for dampness, nuanced argument, 
soft evenings, only the occasional catching of bright light – but for short 
periods please – I sought something else than broad white surfaces and 
meaningful cut, sharp shadow and thick wall.
FROM THE TRANSPARENT … TO THE TRANSLUCENT … TO 
THE SOLID … AND BACK AGAIN
Irritation with the sycophancy of the window did not deter me from taking a 
delight in the sensuous emergence from dark to stages of grey and then, the 
revelation of pure vision: through glass. Increasing travels to Scandinavia and 
Japan have reinforced this fascination. If the Swedish architect Erik Gunnar 
Asplund could contrive such a mysterious series of lightfalls tumbling down 
within the Gothenburg Law Courts extension (1937), or his compatriot Sigurd 
Lewerentz could capture this precious Swedish light through small shafts 
that wash down the walls in his Church of St Peter in Klippan (1966), then we 
are involved in a quality of visual experience that the environment of harsh, 
regular sunshine can never enjoy.
Arata Isozaki has drawn attention to the Japanese translucency–transparency 
tradition by which the paper screen introduces light but not vision; only when 
slid open (or juxtaposed with a glazed panel) can we appreciate such vision. 
There is of course more to this, since the Japanese paper screen under certain 
conditions tantalises us by the shape of a person or object in silhouette but 
not detail – a trick that I found irresistible in the ‘hedonistic’ apartment for the 
Arcadia City project (see Motive 5).
Sigurd Lewerentz, St Peter’s Church, 
Klippan, Sweden, 1966.
A late work by the much longer-lived 
contemporary and sometime colleague 
of Asplund, who had evolved here from a 
Schinkel-like classicism through to a language 
of undulating floors, very original and dramatic 
positioning of light sources and surfaces of heavily 
cemented brickwork. 
023 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
All of this reinforced a desire to produce a building skin that could flow 
continuously in the progression: solid – nearly solid – slightly translucent– 
more translucent – almost transparent – transparent – almost transparent – 
more translucent – slightly translucent – nearly solid – solid. 
Most architects have been well satisfied by the character of strips of windows, 
in frames. More recently, there have been large glass walls where the lateral 
support has also been made with glass. Less usual is the creation of mystery by 
way of the ‘muted’ condition created with non-transparent – but translucent 
– glass troughs, laid vertically. This has been evocatively realised by Günter 
Zamp Kelp, Julius Krauss and Arno Brandlhuber in their Neanderthal Museum 
(1996) in the German town of Mettmann, near Düsseldorf. Moreover, in its 
gently flowing plan it directly recalls the competition project for Lincoln Civic 
Centre (1961) that I designed with David Greene, in which the meandering skin 
of the building was to be of those same translucent channels, but with the 
addition of transparent ‘bubbles’ that would appear from time to time (though 
rather irregularly) in the skin – in the manner of domelights used on their side.
Günter Zamp Kelp, Julius Krauss and Arno 
Brandlhuber, Neanderthal Museum for 
the Evolution of Mankind, Mettmann, 
Germany, 1996.
The combination of muted translucency 
and undulating shape serves to abstract this 
building from a more predictable architecture 
of ‘walls and windows’.
Peter Cook and David Greene, Civic Centre, 
Lincoln, UK, 1961.
An early competition scheme that suggests an 
undulating – almost amoebic – form interpreted 
by a continuous skin of translucent glass (later 
actually realised by the Neanderthal Museum), 
interspersed by occasional ‘eyes’ of transparency.
024 PETER COOK
Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, Kunsthaus, 
Graz, Austria, 2003: detail.
In two locations, the acrylic outer layer of the 
building discloses the peeling away of the 
inner layers – interspersed with the display of 
lighting rings to create a deliberately ambiguous 
interference with the homogeneity of the skin. 
Again a ‘no window’ condition that would have 
been repeated further if funds had allowed.
025 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
In a later competition project for a ‘House at an Intersection’ (the Shinkenchiku 
Residential Design Competition 1967), designed with Christine Hawley, the 
translucent side of the house followed the already described progression of 
solid through to transparent, with the solid running into the ground and the 
transparent at the pinnacle. In the drawing, there are horizontal ‘stages’, but in 
the mind, perhaps, fewer demarcations. 
So far, the nearest point to realisation of the idea has been in a couple of spots 
on the surface of the Graz Kunsthaus (2003; see Motive 6), where Colin Fournier 
and I were able to peel away the interior shell and allow a gradual emergence 
of transparency and then melt back to opacity again – until our clients became 
very nervous about the expense of too much of that kind of thing which was 
for seemingly pure artistic objectives. Yet the ‘skin’ aspect of the Graz building 
was central to its form and presence: conceptually the idea of ‘melting’ within 
this skin came with the essence and spirit of how it ‘melts’ as a total form 
into the available figure of the site, and thus the subtlety of ‘melt’ would be a 
natural consequence.
Peter Cook and Christine Hawley, house on the 
Via Appia, Rome, 1967.
A scheme for the ‘House at an Intersection’ 
competition organised by Shinkenchiku 
magazine demonstrates, among several other 
objectives, the idea of a chamber created by a 
skin of glass that descends from transparency (at 
the top) via a progressive density of translucency 
to eventual solidity (at the bottom) – eschewing 
the event of ‘window’.
026 PETER COOK
AUGMENTING THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE
Gradualness as opposed to ‘positioning’ thus emerges as an issue. If my 
irritation with conventional language has much to do with predictability, I 
almost naturally become intrigued by the potential of ‘scramble’ or ‘scatter’. 
This perhaps relates back to Taut, but equally reflects the wish to borrow from 
outside architecture in order to refresh architecture – whether this be from 
the rocky landscape, the rubbish tip, the forest, or the natural forms suggested 
by the British scholar D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson in On Growth and Form 
(1917) – and then to suggest a magic context of surface within which an 
unpredictable interior full of surprises could exist. Even the Expressionists were 
attached to mannerism of a kind, but what if this were taken one step further? 
What if, even, architecture attempted to be scattered, discreet almost to the 
point of indecipherability? How does this fit with a continual and moderately 
well-educated attitude towards architectural language as a signifier? Perhaps, 
in the end, it is an ambitious wish to augment that language, to add some 
of one’s own signs and marks that nonetheless must start with an attack on 
vocabulary. To what extent such an attack demands a rethinking of process is a 
more difficult question that, hopefully, this book will continually ask. 
The series of drawings for ‘lumps’ or ‘mounds’ came out of this interest and 
repeatedly posited the ‘architectural’ clues as small domes or fragments of 
window-wall or suddenly straight objects in among craggy landscape. It 
was years later that I realised that the Austrian architect Günther Domenig 
(1934–2012), who had grown up among the Alpine foothills of Klagenfurt, 
had made drawings that were similarly inspired. With rather less success I 
attempted to depict the interior of such a mountain-that-is-a-chamber, but I 
have continued to scatter tectonic elements among vegetated elements on 
suggested hillsides, fields, ambiguous landscapes and towers in projects that I 
will describe below.
 Illustration from D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, 
On Growth and Form, first published in 1917 
(author’s interleaved copy, 1942 edition, 
annotated, page 396).
This book is a key work and telling reminder to 
architects and engineers that the plant and animal 
kingdoms have so many clues regarding the 
beauty and logic of fundamentals. 
027 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
Peter Cook, Smooth Lump, 1973.
My first essay in the pursuit of the ‘non-window’, 
gradual morphing from solid through translucent 
to transparent – and back again. 
Peter Cook, Vegetated Lump, 1973.
A deliberate ‘scrambling’ of both quasi-
natural elements (rocks, vegetation, etc) and 
the revelation of some ‘architectural’ clues 
or elements. 
Günther Domenig, Steinhaus (Stone House), 
Steindorf am Ossiacher See, near Klagenfurt, 
Austria, 1986.
Domenig grew up in this area – overshadowed 
by the form of the craggy Alpine scenery above 
– which created a strong Expressionist influence 
upon much of his work.
Image not available in this digital edition.
028 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Nests, Sponge Project, 1975.
The Sponge Project is a deliberate essay in 
developing new formal elements based upon 
the hypothesis of a conceptually ‘sponge-like’ 
replacement building formed round a pre-
existent concrete frame structure. The ‘nests’ are 
intense pockets within the sponge. 
Peter Cook, Patchwork, Sponge Project, 1975.
Effectively in the tradition of the patchwork quilt: 
suggesting that an enclosure can be faced by 
a semi-ordered but very richly varied series of 
patches of facade.
029 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
Normally I have a general 
concept, develop the 
organisation and then opt for 
a language of parts. Reversing 
the process, in 1975, I started 
with the conscious series of 
elements that could be applied 
to an unstated programme. 
The core idea was a vocabulary 
of encrustation that I called 
‘Nests’, which could be 
draped around a pre-existent 
structure and involved a series 
of drawings. The clearest of 
these is ‘Patchwork’, in which 
a standardised square surface 
can be interpreted 12 or moreways. In another, the solid-to-
transparent preoccupation 
is played out via a bulbous 
growth titled ‘Orifices’. In 
another, entitled ‘Gunge’ (a word borrowed from the critic Reyner Banham), 
the inspiration is clearly – and perversely – taken simultaneously from rubbish, 
vulgarity, slurping, disintegration and a general louche atmosphere that could 
include the meretricious – celebrated by an unlikely pink tongue. Such a 
project, since it had no brief and no client, needed to make a statement with its 
components hovering somewhere between documentation and iconography. 
I would claim for them a buildability of 80 per cent, which is probably a rather 
English objective: wanting to be taken seriously as contributing to architecture 
rather than to rhetoric.
Peter Cook, Gunge, Sponge Project, 1975.
‘Gunge’, a term much loved by Reyner Banham 
and others at the time, means an ad hoc 
combination of the unlike with the unlike – 
especially rubbish and things melted together in a 
form of mulch and softly embedded.
Peter Cook, Orifices, Sponge Project, 1975.
A further attempt to suggest a hybrid between 
the ‘non-window’ progression of the smooth lump 
(see earlier illustration) and the bursting-out from 
the sponge itself.
030 PETER COOK
The likely morphing into the unlikely then emerges as a way in which the 
vocabulary of architecture can keep moving on. In the architect Yong Ju Lee’s 
Dispersion (2015), a sculptural memorial to a defunct narrow-gauge railway in 
South Korea, the railway carriage is clearly and solidly depicted (though without 
the distraction of coloured details), but then it melts in a manner that makes 
such clear reference to computer pixellation and the world of the graphic that 
the language upsets our conditioned thinking that this is architecture and that 
is print, or for that matter any hard and fast attitude towards legitimacy … or 
even reality. Just as in the past, large areas of glass were espoused by modern 
architecture as it pursued a belief in the ‘there but not there’.
Yong Ju Lee, Dispersion, Su-in Line Memorial 
Park, Suwon (South Korea), 2015.
On the edge of reality: a familiar object – a 
train carriage – progressively ‘melts’ and is thus 
abstracted. It follows in the tradition of the Lump 
and Orifices projects.
031 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
Rex Pierson (designer), Wellington bomber, 
airframe, 1936.
Using the geodesic principles evolved by Barnes 
Neville Wallis, the structure and its ability to 
withstand partial destruction has become an 
inspiration for such architects as Jesse Reiser and 
the notion of structural–surface continuity.
STEALING FROM ELSEWHERE
My work has developed within a continuously revisited territory of craggy, 
vegetational push and gleaming, glassy-plasticky pull. But lest we forget, 
many of the instincts and enthusiasms of the projects I and my Archigram 
colleagues developed starting in the 1960s were identical to those of 
the priests of British High-Tech: Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Nicholas 
Grimshaw and Michael Hopkins – our contemporaries and (in broad terms) our 
allies. There is a shared enthusiasm for working parts, the expression of joints, 
bolts or the use of steel and aluminium and a closeness to such engineers 
as Peter Rice, Frank Newby, Tony Hunt and Ted Happold. Thus the ‘cage’ 
implied by my own Plug-in City (first drawn in 1964) and realised at Renzo 
Piano and Richard Rogers’ Centre Pompidou (1977) in Paris or the exotic, 
spindly roof of Foster’s Renault Distribution Centre (1982) in Swindon excite 
through their Meccano-like gadgetry as much as through their general form. 
Our mutual collection of admired objects and ‘steals’ from outside territories 
that we hailed as escape tools from the narrow architectural language spread 
from ‘space-race’ icons, via aeroplane and car technology down to gadgets, 
production runs, clothing, circuses, paper hats, things that can be done with 
string along with a consciously English penchant for the absurd invention that 
ranged from the lamella construction of the Wellington bomber of the 1930s 
and the bouncing bomb of Barnes Neville Wallis (1887–1979) to the cartoons 
of William Heath Robinson (1872–1944). The lateral thinking of the former 
and the perverse near-reality of the latter can be more readily understood 
if one observes carefully the inventiveness (and near-inconsequentiality) of 
situations portrayed in the Monty Python television series and films of the late 
1960s to early 1980s. 
032 PETER COOK
William Heath Robinson, Carrying out the 
Correspondence Course for Mountain Climbing 
in the Home, 1928.
Heath Robinson’s often zany or ironic 
contraptions were famous enough to be 
absorbed into the English language as a 
reference to absurd or extreme inventions. As 
such they imperceptibly link through to the 
British predilection for gadgetry that (perhaps) 
led to the architecture of High-Tech.
The fundamental English recourse to silliness is a defence mechanism and 
plea to be allowed to play, leading imperceptibly to a mandate to combine 
the unlike with the unlike. (I shall look at this aspect in more detail in Motive 
7, including at the sharing of this attitude by the Japanese who likewise 
enjoy silliness in combination with laterally thought invention.) History also 
suggests that this is a resource that has stood well for us in times of adversity: 
if the Second World War caused a series of inventions to be made for military 
purposes, the 1950s period immediately after was in some ways more insidious 
in its low-key atmosphere and the reality of food rationing and austerity – 
hence the recourse to irony and silly inventions paralleled by a simmering 
creativity in the British art schools, and a caustic irritation with the old, 
comfortable methods and devices.
033 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
In terms of architectural tyrannies, that of the window can be joined by two 
others: that of the roof and that of the ground plane – a straitjacketing of 
both activity and language. Perhaps in primitive times it was cheap to stick a 
rain-shedding top onto a building, enabling the builder to concentrate upon 
the grammar of the dreaded windows and intellectually dismiss the roof as 
mere functionality? Similarly, the ground plane could be used to dictate the 
hierarchy of interpretation, based not a little upon an assumed hierarchy 
of activity – in the classical sense of the major activities being lifted above 
possible flooding, frost or maybe attack and thus creating the tradition of the 
piano nobile (the ‘noble’ floor of the Italian palazzo on which the major events 
took place). Retaining its position as most cherished, most decorated, most 
fulsome layer of buildings of every category for hundreds of years afterwards. 
Dragging behind it a formula whereby there would be a humble cellar 
beneath, and a series of floors above in a descending hierarchy of scale and 
architectural significance.
Such a formula, brought to a high level in the Renaissance palaces of Rome, 
could be transmitted through to the public buildings of an America that had 
reached maturity: thus McKim, Mead and White’s Boston Public Library (1895) 
could exist as a quotation of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1850) in Paris 
whose architect, Henri Labrouste, had displayed his scholarship of Rome.
With such a heavy cultural load to contend with, even Modernism had to work 
hard to escape; thus my heroes created and enjoyed ramps, cantilevers and 
the sheer abstract nature of the sharp, white wall. Clever architects developed 
systems that gained energy from hillside conditions, with major points of entry 
at the top and the bottom, yet the implications of the three-dimensional city 
whereby significant moment or significant level might be anywhere remain 
elusive. Once it does become a generator, we start to enjoy a true explosion of 
follow-my-leader composition in architecture.
McKim, Mead and White,Public Library, 
Boston, Massachusetts, 1895.
A building that demonstrates the cultural 
longevity of High Neoclassicism for buildings 
of importance: for here these notable American 
architects derive directly from the famous 
Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1850) in Paris 
by Henri Labrouste who in turn had spent some 
years in Rome.
034 PETER COOK
035 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
HIDDEN CITY
Cast again into the forest, my drawing of a Hidden City (2013) is so far my most 
intense conglomeration of parts that questions their progeny and their status 
as architecture. In other words, there is a scattering of clues and families of 
elements that superficially originate in either (a) the vegetated world or (b) the 
constructed world. Though soon afterwards one realises that (c) the drifting 
soil or stones and meandering water are equally loath to conform to type.
The drawing was set up with one determining factor: a 70-degree diagonal 
shift, top left to bottom right, which I pencilled in onto a series of small sheets 
of paper that I could carry easily from London to Oslo and back again. During 
a three-week winter stay in a familiar friend’s studio house 
I drew for three or four hours each day, with a view of trees 
and wooden houses in the near distance and the fjord and 
western hills in the far distance. As with the long garden 
behind my home, of which I am aware when drawing, I 
am never sure whether the occasional glance out of the 
window is a form of ‘crib’ (in the way that we run to the 
Internet for reassurance), or fairly irrelevant to a person 
who is concerned with invention as much as depiction – 
remembering that I once made drawings for the Instant City 
project with England in mind, while sitting in Los Angeles. 
Is it that we prefer to claim total creativity for that which 
must – even subconsciously – derive from a physiognomy 
made up of a combination of memories, typical 
conglomerations, sequences, favourite forms, preferred 
colours, or manoeuvres that just come out in the hand in 
the same way that we might find ourselves humming a 
familiar tune? In a sense, we are returning once more to the 
essence of the term ‘vocabulary’. 
opposite
Peter Cook, Hidden City, 2013.
Within this drawing there is a provocative 
ambiguity: is the evidence of architecture merely 
a few half-hidden eccentric outcrops within the 
vegetation? Or is much of the vegetation itself 
quasi-architectural in its growth and form?
Peter Cook, Hidden City, 2013: detail.
036 PETER COOK
So the Hidden City started somewhere in the middle, ‘spinning itself’. General 
bushes and leaf-like sequences (trying hard not to become too regular) were 
soon joined by some shard-like runs that resembled a Canadian logjam, then 
by hints of a watercourse. Then more bushes and leaves and trees that could 
act as a setting for occasional slivers of ‘tectonic’ form, not unlike those years 
before in the mound and lump drawings. Then, suddenly, a ‘clown’s hat’ 
037 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
element of considerable size: hardly modest, hardly ambiguous, deliberately 
unnatural and naughty. A deliberate break with all the drifting and creeping 
and ambiguity of the rest. And then more drawing and drifting, a watercourse 
that becomes a creek and a seashore: by this stage there are sufficient ‘carrier’ 
elements, sufficient repeated elements and a comfortableness of the language 
set up by near-repetition to be able to carry the thrust of the research: the 
plant-like forms could say something about formation, cover or organisation, 
but were not tectonic. In other words, suggesting an extension of architectural 
language egged on by the language of nature.
Returning to London, needing a few more days to add in sheets and complete 
the drawing, I then set forth into colour. Necessarily making the ‘logjams’ 
(and some of the lateral slivers) blue, so as to suggest them as ‘cliffs’ of glass. 
Distinguishing, by the choice of colour, the role of the dried-out riverbed, the 
role of hidden elements, the presence of water, the jokiness of the clowns’ hats.
There seemed no hesitation in giving it the title ‘Hidden City’, just as I have in 
the past used that word as a portmanteau (Living City, Plug-in City, Layer City, 
Real City) to suggest inhabitation rather than conventional urbanism. Yet the 
hiddenness really exists as a comment upon typology and our expectation of 
typologies – again, parallel to the question of a vocabulary’s role in a language.
In so many spheres of creativity, the haunting (or maybe escapist), quality 
of nature or the countryside hovers around us, and as we realise through 
the pages of Simon Schama’s book Landscape and Memory (1995), the forest 
is the most evocative. Therefore we should not be shocked by the ‘spooky’ 
and quasi-natural form of the Dragspelhuset (Accordion House, 2003) in the 
Glaskogen nature reserve in Sweden, where the couple of Dutch architects 
who created it – Maartje Lammers and Boris Zeisser – escape from the well-
behaved urban or architectural world of northern Europe at the outset of 
the 21st century.
Maartje Lammers and Boris Zeisser (24H 
Architecture), Dragspelhuset (Accordion 
House), Övre Gla, Glaskogen nature reserve, 
Sweden, 2003.
The combination of planning restrictions and a 
rich imagination result in a building that avoids 
the expected niceties of formality. It is woven and 
unselfconsciously organic – as befits a house for 
‘escape’ from the day-to-day world.
038 PETER COOK
THE SWISS COTTAGE TOWER
Later I compounded some of these meanderings back into a 
project that could be regarded as a building – effectively hauling 
in the drifted phenomena. Almost immediately though, the 
discipline of ‘tower’ suggested the necessity of some logic; so, 
despite my irritation with the ground plane, the Swiss Cottage 
Tower (2011) recognised an obligation to entice people into it, 
and thus has high and wide apertures at its base. My procedure 
of creating the project from the bottom upwards retained for 
a while a certain awareness of the responsibility of the lower 
storeys to be solid and circumspect, as if to suggest that there 
was much sitting on their shoulders. So a quantity of concrete 
maybe and then another ‘regular’, the establishment of a 
diagonal bracing system – seen through the glass and very little 
affected by the occasional incursion of an untidy parasite or two 
clinging onto the surface. 
Yet as the thing developed, and as it crept ever upward, the game 
emerged as one involved in cohabitation: of vegetated elements 
clinging and then infiltrating and then asserting themselves, 
or of clearly mechanised patches being thwarted by almost 
irrational neighbours. Moving on upwards and really beginning 
to enjoy myself, I pushed the ‘old steadies’ of the tower into 
ungainly echoes of themselves, so that the bracing system starts 
to keel over (but not totally – as it then deliberately turns itself 
on its side and then continues happily upwards). Its cuts and 
cleavages, dropping noses, sudden shifts and hovering reveal 
the aim of challenging that part of architectural formation that 
suggests good manners – or at least a consistency of manners. In 
a way it also illustrates the fact that extending the vocabulary of 
position is far more limited (or more difficult) than extending the 
vocabulary of inserted elements or surfaces.
039 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
Peter Cook, Tower, Swiss Cottage, London, 2011.
An essay in both etching-away and surfacing a high-
rise structure in a deliberately eclectic language of 
conditions: regular, distorted, vegetated, rough, 
smooth, disintegrative – all together. 
Yet there is a certain élan that comes out of an accumulative climb to the top 
as I started to prepare for it, with more – an almost manic – use of the animal-
like and the implicitly tubular and in the end, at the peak, an invitation to fly. 
In accepting and even enjoyingthis acknowledgement of bottom and top, I 
am admitting the comfortableness of these two conditioners. Implicitly I am 
criticising the Modernist/Minimalist delight in the lack of incident. A search for 
vocabulary is born of boredom, maybe.
TEL AVIV
But what of a vocabulary born of response? Tracking back to the 1990s and 
suddenly plummeted at around the age of fifty into Tel Aviv, a city of which 
I knew little, and engaged very closely with some of its rather articulate 
inhabitants, I could turn bewilderment, fascination and quiet observation into 
a very different ‘vocabularal’ search. There is a circular patch of land near its 
centre that is surrounded by a ring of apartments and smart shops instigated 
by Erich Mendelsohn (1887–1953) and then interpreted by local architects. 
Mendelsohn suggested that there should be towers inserted in the middle, 
but they have not been. This seemed an ideal context for making a statement 
about language and culture. In my drawing for the Medina Circle Tower (1997), 
a deliberately understated (pink) apartment tower sits behind the main tower, 
and on the other side a vegetated stack with water storage above is fairly cool. 
It is the central tower that sets up the action, and here the theme is that of 
entrepreneurship. 
Tel Avivians are quick, assertive and resourceful and there is a higher than 
normal number of specialists, consultants, entrepreneurs, people sitting in 
rooms arguing, discussing, dealing, inventing – with the highest ratio of start-
up technology companies in the world. Yet do they all want to hide away in 
yet another ubiquitous block? Surely it is a chance for these characters to sit in 
an articulate building? So the showrooms on the lower floors are distinctively 
different from the smaller showrooms above them. Then a break, a garden. 
Then seven floors of consultancies with a distinctive conference suite above 
040 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Medina Circle Tower, Tel Aviv, 
Israel, 1997: elevation.
Representing the strata of enterprise in this 
vibrant city: a virtual ‘kebab’ made up of 
showrooms, hotels, professional offices, clubs, 
consultancies etc, the drawing sits in the 
collection of the Royal Academy of Arts in London 
as Peter Cook’s diploma work as Academician. 
041 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
them. Then a stack of day-hotel rooms. Then a garden break that dribbles 
down onto the parking tower. Some more consultancies above, then a hotel, 
then more exclusive consultancies and finally a club.
Each group is strung up on a version of vertical kebab sticks and, as with the 
edible kebab, the distinctive flavour of each group can be enjoyed. So the 
sets of parts form a related vocabulary. Just as one set is establishing itself (or 
getting pleased with itself), it is broken and often challenged by an irritant 
such as a slurp of greenery, a descending sculpturesque element, a cracking 
open of an edge. The attack here is upon the pomposity of so many towers 
and, by implication, the orthodoxy and pomposity of so many corporate 
organisations. The characters inside this building trade ideas and know-how, 
or at least gossip. 
Linguistically, there are echoes of the Archigram language and in my mind 
the mechanistic quality seems to fit this scene. There is little room for 
nostalgia, tradition or sentiment, so raunchiness is the chosen corollary. 
Thus the pitch, the psychology of approach, the conscious distancing from 
(or alliance with) other architectural attitudes has to be a central issue of 
the search for new vocabularies. Often these can exist more easily within 
an academic environment than in the world of production architecture, so 
many of the contemporaries that interest me and make me feel creatively 
jealous seem to have honed their designs through an accumulation of 
ideas that are theoretical, or deliberately exploratory – the mandate of the 
creative academic.
Hernan Diaz Alonso (Xefirotarch), Still 
Flesh, 2012.
The sheer virtuosity of Diaz Alonso’s digital 
work and his personality as a provocateur 
(as well as his Argentinian love of meat) 
combine to edge us towards an architecture 
that has all the succulent qualities found in 
the organic world but rarely experienced.
042 PETER COOK
Looking at the inventions of the 
Los Angeles-based architect 
Hernan Diaz Alonso was first of 
all scary, and then weird, and 
then provocative. His vocabulary 
has become a tugged and 
stretched and sometimes 
suppurating world from which 
there is no escape into repose. 
Ironically he attaches such a 
world to known programmes, 
and since I do not believe him 
to be a charlatan, I accept that his ideas are for buildable, usable form. That 
for him the digitally driven process is dominant and must adhere to a certain 
morality (or consistency) of procedure, sets it into a tradition, without being 
formally traditional. In that sense, my own explorations have their basis within 
a certain anarchy but are, by comparison, well mannered, even narrow. So 
a few years ago there was a fascinating and productive moment when Diaz 
Alonso and I taught the same group of undergraduate students at the Los 
Angeles school SCI-Arc in alternate sets of weeks. Maybe we drove them crazy, 
but they have survived well enough.
Stimulus without necessarily leading to imitation comes from watching a 
talented newcomer emerge through a combination of wit, fearlessness and 
talent and most often following the vagaries of a very different mind from 
one’s own. Such a person is Marjan Colletti who, within the first week of his 
postgraduate presence at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University 
College London, presented himself with soft-toy animals attached to his head 
(to be further explored in Motive 7), but proceeded rapidly to invent the hybrid 
of ‘besking’ – from bed to desk – and then, over the last few years, moved 
onward into a computer-generated language of almost embroidered formal 
Marjan Colletti, 2&1/2D Drawing representing 
line and spline-based blots rather than NURBS and 
surface-based blobs, 2004.
As with Diaz Alonso, the combination of virtuosity 
and creative imagination take us to a new way 
of regarding architectural language and here, 
without any apparent reference to analogous 
substances. In other words, we have a total, newly 
conceived architecture.
043 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
intricacy that contrasts significantly with Diaz Alonso’s fleshiness. Though 
Colletti’s vector-based compositions are the more published and the more 
luscious, his 2&1/2D Drawing representing line and spline-based blots rather than 
NURBS and surface-based blobs (2004) represents quite another but perhaps 
parallel approach to my own, in its mixing and scattering. It reveals a key 
motivation, where he so often writes about the simultaneity of technological 
and poetical awareness.
This simultaneity is perhaps the clue, for vocabulary can only come out of both 
observation and knowledge.
This business of consciously extending may well demand a temporary 
suspension of the reasonable and a probe into the undesirable or unthinkable: 
the crash, the dismemberment, the cancerous progression, the metamorphosis 
towards a state of weirdness, examined at length by the architect and 
then Director of the Bartlett, Marcos Cruz, in his book The Inhabitable Flesh 
of Architecture (2013). For his 2012 diploma project at the Bartlett, titled 
‘Simulating a Crashed Architecture’, Tom Smith simulated an animated world 
of twisted spaces constructed from four crash simulations, thus forming a 
‘technological ballet’ designed to choreograph its own violent destruction. 
As a ‘saturated orgy of fetishism’ (Smith’s description), it nonetheless holds a 
series of almost – but never quite – recognisable techno-gadgets and pieces 
of metallic armature that suggest a new architecture comes out of motion: 
a wish-dream that was already embedded in the Constructivist work of El 
Lissitzkyand the Vesnin brothers in the Russia of the 1920s; explored by the 
artist–designer and professor of Germany’s Bauhaus school of architecture, 
László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946); and implicit in much of the earlier work 
of the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. If only buildings could move? And 
for a while, in Archigram, we also pursued such a dream. It is as if the febrile 
nature of the object-in-movement must have a quality that breaks open the 
predictability and leaden logic of things static.
Marcos Cruz, ‘Hypodermis’/Cyborgian 
Interfaces (Study of Inlucent Materiality), 2007.
Part of a long and consistent search for an 
architecture that emanates from the cellular 
possibilities of edge, skin and surface discussed 
in Cruz’s book The Inhabitable Flesh of 
Architecture (2013). 
044 PETER COOK
Tom Smith, ‘Simulating a Crashed 
Architecture’, 2012.
By skilful representation, Smith manages two 
things: to capture action and dynamic – one of the 
reiterant dreams of 20th-century architecture that 
is still very much alive but elusive – and an array of 
components that are familiar, but not usually seen 
as fragmented.
opposite
László Moholy-Nagy, Kinetic-
Constructive System, 1928.
Moholy-Nagy pioneered a territory that could 
incorporate electrically powered gadgetry and 
lighting, together with such surfaces as perforated 
screening that could result in a radical move 
forwards for the way we could experience space.
045 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
At a certain point the 
juxtaposition of substances 
that imply that they are 
in a state of flux can be a 
reflection upon the idea of 
control, and we know from 
Diaz Alonso’s work that 
the relationship between 
wilfulness and systematic 
process is a form of intensive 
monitoring and editing 
(he admits to being a 
frustrated film-maker). Such 
a condition is traceable in 
the London-based architect 
Maria Knutsson-Hall’s 
project on ‘Architecture and 
Nature’ (2012). This biophilic 
and biomorphic design is 
inspired by the sloth, that slow-moving animal whose body seems to willingly 
act as a home for other animals, fungi and algae. In the project, the vegetated 
building becomes less and less controlled and nature will slowly infiltrate the 
built structure and take over its full tectonics. So the vocabulary of parts is in 
constant disintegration or metamorphosis. The integrity of the element: that 
mainstay of conventional architecture is at last on the run.
046 PETER COOK
Maria Knuttson-Hall, ‘Architecture and 
Nature’, 2012.
An investigation into landscape, insertion, 
drift and concealment, which is inspired by the 
insidious dynamic of the sloth.
047 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
CRAB, Section of ‘Tower of Droplets’, Taichung 
Tower, No.1 Taichung, Taiwan, 2010.
Inspired by the wish to demonstrate the 
potential of breeding and harvesting algae as 
an energy source, this first tower symbolically 
and in a fluid manner ‘drapes’ and ‘hangs’ the 
holding reservoirs.
VOCABULARY AS A FORCE IN ITSELF
To watch a language of form reinvent itself in front of you is a rare experience, 
and it happened to me in the designing of three towers for Taichung in Taiwan. 
The first, the ‘Tower of Droplets’ (2010), was followed by the ‘Tower of Algae’ 
(2011), and then by the ‘Tower of Living Energy’ (2012). Produced for a series of 
competitions, they are responses to a very particular type of cultural condition: 
where an ambitious city of the second rank is persuaded to make a major 
national statement and sets up a well-funded competition. Within CRAB (Cook 
Robotham Architectural Bureau), we found this hard to resist and very quickly 
created a primary motive for the project – that of the harvesting of energy and 
its demonstration, in addition to the city’s clear wish to have a ‘landmark’. 
The language we developed was that of a series of hanging vessels that would 
be filled with fuel produced by growing algae. In a country that is highly 
conscious of energy consumption, this could be both delightful and pertinent. 
Moreover, the vessels could have their own almost sexy charm. So the rest of 
the tower became, effectively, an armature into which offices, laboratories 
and processing could take place. Linguistically, there was a certain follow-on 
of forms: nodding in the direction of ‘liquidity’ and having curving, sweeping 
profiles. In a gentler way, this commonality of form emerging from a process 
could recall the mood of the Archigram period where a vocabulary emerged 
that seemed a very natural evocation of the spirit of the ideas. So now it was as 
if the motive and the mood led you in a childlike dream towards a wonderful 
and silky world with the syrupy fuel slithering down its trailing form.
When a second competition on the same site was announced, we remained 
inspired by the algae theme but decided to be more hard-headed about 
it and look in some detail at the technology involved. The resulting tower 
still had some curvaceous moments, but began to resemble a cluster of 
apparatus platforms, with a certain scale, intricacy and practicality to them. 
048 PETER COOK
CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau), 
‘Tower of Droplets’, Taichung Tower, No.1 
Taichung, Taiwan, 2010.
A night-time view of the tower.
opposite
CRAB, ‘Tower of Algae’, Taichung Tower No.2, 
Taichung, Taiwan, 2011.
A daytime view of the tower.
049 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
050 PETER COOK
CRAB, ‘Tower of Living Energy’, Taichung Tower 
No.3, Taichung, Taiwan, 2012.
A daytime view showing the surrounding park. 
In this version, wind and solar power harvesting 
is added to that of algae breeding plus further 
activities incorporated into the tower.
051 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
CRAB, ‘Tower of Algae’, Taichung Tower No.2, 
Taichung, Taiwan, 2011: section.
Continuing the theme of algae breeding as 
an adjunct to the role of the tower as a public 
resort, the algae apparatus is now more studied 
and precise, and a museum is incorporated into 
the structure.
052 PETER COOK
CRAB, ‘Tower of Living Energy’, Taichung Tower 
No.3, Taichung, Taiwan, 2012: section.
053 MOTIVE 2: STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
Compared with the first tower, this one exuded a certain masculinity or 
ruggedness and articulation between the clusters of activity.
A third competition then followed and we tactically shifted towards a 
combination of algae refining along with the demonstration of other 
forms of energy collection: from the sun and the wind. Formally there 
was a conscious decision to use a predominant element: a ‘blade’ that 
was sometimes a collector, often a cover, sometimes a wind-catcher and 
often a screen. The whole composition became a flurry of these blades, 
encompassing as rich a combination of functioning elements within as in 
either of the preceding towers.
On reflection, none of the three uses a conventional vocabulary, but they all 
possess such intrinsic contrasts of intention or interpretation that they are 
forceful enough to assert a language of the one that can never be that of the 
other. They almost seem to challenge the entire pursuit of new vocabulary per 
se, through an almost moralistic cry for the appropriate. ‘Set the approach to 
the theme and the language will throw up its components: whether familiar or 
unfamiliar,’ they cry. 
Yet I remain dissatisfied by the orthodoxy of such logic and still crave to break 
out. For surely, vocabulary is not just a handmaiden but also a force in itself?
CRAB, Wedding Chapel, ‘Tower of Living Energy’, 
Taichung Tower No.3, Taichung, Taiwan, 2012: 
detail view.
054 PETER COOK
MOTIVE 3
UNIVERSITY LIFE
AND ITS IRONIES
056 PETER COOK
For many architects, the testing point of their mandate and their beliefs 
has been the making of a university building. The condition has a more 
intense buzz than most high streets, and is populated by those who enjoy 
vigorous high testosterone, optimism,and oscillations of mood between 
morose negativism and energised positivism all in the same day – creating an 
atmosphere that makes academe almost a separate culture within culture. 
Add to this tradition of rituals that are recognised: the lecture, the 
examination, the tutorial, the subversive activities of frustrated academics, 
the private liaisons of people within a hyped-up atmosphere based upon the 
acknowledgement of influence – of personality as well as idea – that might 
seem excessive or obsessive in general-purpose urban life.
Then cast yourself – the architect – into the middle of all this. 
Interfere with it too much, and you may burst the bubble of its strange, arch, 
equilibrium. Leave it too well alone, and you fail to respect the extraordinary 
magic of a world in which ideas, sensitivities and the antennae of highly strung 
minds can combine with an alchemy wherein the particular attention to ritual, 
the deft offer of spatial opportunity, or the minute attention to nuance can 
really have a lasting effect. In older establishments you will be interfering with 
typologies that perhaps have their origin in religious institutions, or the world 
of the privileged. In newer places there will be the rhetoric of education for the 
masses or even as a statement of arrivisme.
In the face of such a challenge, it is worth noting that a very high proportion 
of university architects have spent much of their time teaching, so they should 
know about the subtleties that lie beyond the mere apportionment of space 
or mannerist games. Because of this, these buildings should be honoured by 
innovation, subtlety and wit.
previous spread
Denys Lasdun, dormitory ‘ziggurats’, University 
of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 1968: detail.
057 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
UNIVERSITY LIFE VIA THE BACK DOOR
Ironically, my own entry into this world was via the back door, or rather the 
freely swinging door of provincial English art school life in a seaside resort city: 
Bournemouth, with its genuinely benign community including an enormous 
number of old people kept alive by the sea air, and its mysterious surge of 
holidaymakers who created a ‘summer city’ to the winter town, all underscored 
by a curious (and hardly ever mentioned) world of seedy clubs, eccentrics, 
conmen, people who had made money rather shadily, hiding in strange 
converted apartments behind thickets of pine trees and rhododendron bushes. 
The 1950s art school contribution to the English Awakening of the 1960s was 
here cushioned as a form of finishing school for the daughters of the Dorset 
and Hampshire elite – overlaid by the usual collection of spotty, ambitious, 
wayward characters for whom the art school was a congenial escape from 
military service.
JW Lacey, Lansdowne Campus and clock tower, 
Bournemouth and Poole College, UK, 1914.
A heroic municipal building to house an art 
school, with appropriate large studios and ample 
north-facing glass. It is celebrated by robust 
Neoclassicism and a clock tower reminiscent of 
town-hall clock towers of the period.
058 PETER COOK
The main building of the Bournemouth and Poole College was purpose-built in 
1914, only five years after the completion of the second half of Charles Rennie 
Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art, without his genius but with certain shared 
devices: ample studio windows, some heroic rooms, clever clerestories and 
light wells, and robust corridors just waiting for trestles, frames, spillages 
of paint and the enduring smell of turpentine. Its relative pomposity and 
handsome clock tower could impress the city and thus protect its creative 
and wayward inmates from a disinterested world: part of that ‘city father’ 
psychology of the municipal, red-brick universities being large and heroic 
structures offering education as ‘value for money’. 
By the nature of Architecture studies in themselves as well as the art school 
atmosphere, the experiences of academe were softened. These were overlaid 
by my next move: to the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 
London, an institution that celebrated its ‘practitioner not academic’ origins 
and the anarchic nature of its successes. Housed in a series of elegant late-
18th-century Georgian houses, it eschewed the presence of an adequate 
lecture space and almost denied the existence of a back block that consisted of 
downright brick, glass and concrete rooms of little charm but good light.
Peter Cook, elemental analysis of Walter 
Gropius’s Bauhaus at Dessau, Germany, 2015.
This 1926 building is a classic ‘elemental’ 
interpretation of the components of the 
famous design school, wherein each of the 
main departments is expressed as a rectilinear 
solid, with windows giving clue to these 
particular activities.
Louis Kahn, Richards Medical Research 
Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania, 
Philadelphia, 1961.
In making such a clear and articulated separation 
between the ‘service’ towers and the ‘served’ 
laboratory floors, this building became a model 
for many subsequent buildings in which the 
increasingly important provision of mechanical 
servicing is formally acknowledged.
059 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
THE CAMPUS PHENOMENON
From a background of such impure experience I began, nonetheless, to be 
aware of the constant mention of schools and universities as the subject 
of seminal pieces of architecture: of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus (1926) at 
Dessau in Germany as a statement of Modernist elementalism as much as 
of an educational ideal, running parallel to instructions on how to dress and 
probably what to eat; or of the Hertfordshire schools programme of the 1950s 
(under the County Architect, CH Aslin) as a breakthrough in bringing light, 
air, logical construction, social equality and Modernism to a postwar society. 
A little later, Louis Kahn’s Richards Medical Research Laboratories (1961) in 
Philadelphia emerged as the heroic template for the 20th-century building 
that required free space plus intense servicing – neatly resolved as a series of 
towers and slabs that together made a quasi-megastructure which could act as 
a model for such icons as Richard Rogers’ Lloyd’s Building (1986) in London.
A counter-movement emerged, encouraged by the more inventive English 
architects and focused by the holding, in 1961, of a competition for Churchill 
College at Cambridge. It was characterised by an idea of ambience, almost 
of coerced escape from the teaching room into the free air; a celebration 
of simply ‘being around’, but less encompassed than by the quadrangle. 
There were several projects with meandering paths and routeways inspired, 
perhaps, by those walks in Oxford along the banks of the River Cherwell, or at 
Cambridge along the River Cam. 
Howell Killick Partridge & Amis, competition 
design for Churchill College, Cambridge, 
UK, 1959.
The English meandering plan interpreted by a 
partnership that developed a more Romantic 
and sculpturesque language than most of 
their contemporaries.
060 PETER COOK
In built form at the University of York, designed by Andrew Derbyshire and 
Stirrat Johnson-Marshall in the 1960s, a less romantic layout of such walkways 
concurred with the English climate by acquiring canopies but almost as 
casually passing in and out of the departmental buildings. Alison and Peter 
Smithson’s 1953 designs for the University of Sheffield also show a harsher 
version of the meander. By contrast, it was at the University of East Anglia in 
Norwich that a quality of high-powered diagrammatic determinism became 
allied to social humanism and was successfully able to ride over a delightful 
site, whereby Denys Lasdun’s dormitory blocks (1968), with their intelligently 
pivotal shared kitchens and ziggurat-like form, can be fed by the powerful 
incision of a semi-hidden service road at their backs. The inevitable walkways 
cling on to the top of this giant road-trench that somehow just avoids thegrimness of the overenthusiastic concrete structure living among the English 
damp. From then on, the site falls away as a giant, treed meadow with a lake at 
the lowest part.
If the campus phenomenon had so far to be viewed at arm’s length, I was rather 
lucky to experience it in reality first in 1968–9 at one of its best versions: UCLA in 
Los Angeles. As at Norwich, it is on a hillside, but infiltrated with large buildings 
and with the purpose-built Westwood Village at the lowest part. Moreover, the 
semi-desert site was immediately planted to such an intense and sophisticated 
level that it has become, effectively, Los Angeles’ botanic garden. Neo-
Romanesque core buildings have been joined by architecture of every kind, so 
long as it was all pretty solid. The Architecture and Planning Department (later 
to become Perloff Hall) was a kind of pavilion in which its three storeys were 
sunk well enough into the ground to maintain the ‘pavilion’ myth. 
The existence of architects and planners had come fairly late to this giant 
institution that had matured through the achievements of its scientists, 
medics and film-makers. Unlike the Bournemouth college’s provincial 
cheek or the Architectural Association’s urbane nonchalance, architecture 
opposite top
Denys Lasdun, dormitory ‘ziggurats’, University 
of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 1968.
A series of these ziggurat clusters of study-
bedrooms grouped around kitchens and linked 
at the rear by raised walkways, creating an 
undulating edge to the large piece of parkland 
that descends towards a lake. They remain one 
of the most humane and elegant pieces of 20th-
century university architecture.
Alison and Peter Smithson, competition design 
for University of Sheffield extension, Sheffield, 
UK, 1953.
A tougher example of the English meander, held 
in check by the ‘bowstring’ path.
061 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
students here were tolerated as a necessary oddity in a modest building. 
They were nonetheless able to enjoy constructing odd or experimental 
pieces in a courtyard that resembled that of some British club in India, or 
on the larger grassed area that was (in that particular American judgement 
of scale) too small to be a meadow and too large to be a quadrangle or 
lawn. The key ‘show-offs’ were English- and Austrian-made giant inflatables 
and prototypical robotic architecture which imported the true Europeans’ 
understanding of the creative vibe of Los Angeles: its art, technics, pop, 
temporariness and invention. It is important not to underestimate the 
potential of creative students from art, film or architecture faculties to affect 
their contemporaries while still in the hyped-
up atmosphere of the university. They can 
surely intrigue, titillate or even inspire the 
more bookish characters on campus. 
Ironically, alongside the beautiful trees and 
the commodious corridors, the decent hot 
dogs were sold in self-effacing and rather 
straightforward huts, even if the ‘Tail o’ the Pup’, 
that infamous kiosk in the shape of an actual hot 
dog, was only just down the hill at Westwood. 
By this distinction we were reminded that on 
campus we might eat, but only in a seemly 
manner. It followed that social life could be 
better expressed down in the village, in the 
noisy sorority houses, or in apartments in the 
dodgy backstreets of nearby Venice.
Milton Black, Tail o’ the Pup, Los Angeles, 
California, 1946.
The high moment of ironic, ‘who cares’, ‘Googie’ 
architecture, in the City of Dreams. Now 
(inevitably) removed.
062 PETER COOK
Only in 1992, for the two years while the Library building of UCLA was out of 
service, would Craig Hodgetts and Hsinming Fung be allowed to set up a large, 
temporary, decorated techno-tent of a building on the campus, so that for a 
moment, the intellectual and spiritual manifestation of invention was allowed 
to leap over the trees and profit from the ideas and creativity of Los Angeles. 
Only way down the hill, almost into the Village, would Wes Jones be allowed 
to wholeheartedly enjoy the dynamic of technology through the making 
of UCLA’s Chiller Plant building (1994) – for after all, such a machine and its 
architecture is not considered seemly in academe.
Through lecture tours and invitations to lead ‘workshops’ at various 
universities, I began to associate syndromes with spaces; the nervous energy, 
the frustration, the cynicism or the true enthusiasm and esprit de corps of one 
place over another were palpable. I realised, for instance, that the campus 
of the University of Queensland was such a charming park, containing 
some surprisingly interesting architecture, that its unknowingly privileged 
students could survive a period in which the surrounding city (Brisbane) 
would transform from being a rather hick – almost Wild West – outpost to 
being a city of some claims to both cultural sophistication and smart business 
deals. So the campus just sat there, enjoying its calm and its own pace of 
metamorphosis, as both a filter and a respite while these changes all went 
on outside. By contrast, in Blacksburg, Virginia, I observed the dangers of the 
hilltop university town: where gossip was completely internalised, buildings 
not needing to stand up to urban scrutiny (thus leading to certain notable 
architects dropping their worst buildings into it); where ideas and refreshment 
had to crawl two hours up from urbanised Virginia. That so many graduates of 
the Virginia Polytechnic Institute ended up in New York may have something 
to do with their expertise – but probably has more to do with the wish to 
finally breathe the stimulus of tarnished air. 
Hodgetts + Fung, UCLA Towell Library, 
University of California, Los Angeles, 1994.
A case of the temporary structure being more 
delightful and more connected with the spirit 
of Los Angeles than (and probably just as 
workable as) the permanent building that is 
undergoing refurbishment. 
063 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
Wes Jones Partners, UCLA Chiller Plant/
Cogeneration Facility, University of California, 
Los Angeles, 1994.
A dynamic yet elegant example of ‘machine 
architecture’, of which Jones is a key exponent. 
Bringing vigour to an otherwise sedate campus.
Venturi Scott Brown, Carol M Newman Library 
renovation and addition, Virginia Polytechnic 
Institute, Blacksburg, Virginia, 1971.
Normally intriguing and controversial architects 
playing it safe on a remote campus.
064 PETER COOK
THE STÄDELSCHULE KANTINE, FRANKFURT
Therefore my first sortie into building for students was quite loaded – 
especially for the institution that was my main employer at the time. Kasper 
König had been appointed as the Director of Frankfurt’s Städelschule 
in the mid-1980s and immediately brought a far more international and 
entrepreneurial approach to this small but heroic art academy. Inheriting a 
known architect who had hardly built, he dragged me along to meet the boss 
of the Deutsche Bank and within days we had the budget for the Städelschule’s 
Kantine. Since Christine Hawley and I had been teaching there on and off for 
six years, we knew most of its idiosyncrasies, one of which was the existence 
of two small courtyards that appeared to duplicate each other’s role – though 
only one really got any traffic through it. 
Appropriating the quiet one, we aimed to retain as much of its character 
as possible, including the small row of columns. Our luck was meeting with 
Klaus Bollinger: a young engineer who had set up practice in Frankfurt and 
Peter Cook and Christine Hawley, Städelschule 
Kantine, Frankfurt, Germany, 1995.
Conceived together with structural engineer Klaus 
Bollinger (Bollinger + Grohmann), the courtyard 
was already well known to the architects and the 
roof is a discreet addition: but not so discreet in 
the summer when it gets hot! Shown here with 
the roof open.
Peter Cook and Christine Hawley, Städelschule 
Kantine, Frankfurt, 1995.The courtyard in its more normal condition, with 
the roof closed.
065 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
with whom I was later to design the Graz Kunsthaus (2003; see Motive 6). 
His brilliance has latterly been developed through great projects with Coop 
Himmelb(l)au – especially at Munich (BMW world headquarters, 2007) and in 
Busan, South Korea (Busan Cinema Center, 2012) – and his mode of operation 
is to quietly monitor the conversation, and then to offer the most outrageous 
or creative suggestion, just as one is not expecting it. We were three equal 
designers acting together on this modest project: Christine, Klaus and myself 
reckoning that what would be appropriate for this place was a quiet, glass 
insertion, with straightforward galvanised steel components. But then, to 
make it all open up like a giant mouth: for the summer heat, or a momentary 
fug in the autumn.
Being a fellow professor, I braced myself for the inevitable grunts and groans 
of my colleagues; but none came (after we fixed a couple of leaks). What 
was stranger, though, was the attitude of artists to furniture and fittings. We 
had provided a servery and bar in the existing building at a half level below. 
We designed robust shelves and put in bar stools. We imagined late-night 
smoking, drinking and the existence of at least one jukebox or slot machine. 
We imagined well-designed metal furniture, in the manner of the glass and 
steel enclosure. None of this happened. Alcohol did appear, but in the form 
of the local apple wine – a rough and simple brew that came in unlabelled 
bottles. The school preferred to find odd bits and pieces of scruffy furniture, 
our carefully designed shelving remains three-quarters empty, the bar stools 
were dismissed and there are still no machines.
Peter Cook and Christine Hawley, Städelschule 
Kantine, Frankfurt, 1995.
The character of the old courtyard is retained.
066 PETER COOK
At the time of its construction, the prevailing mannerism of German art was 
still either rather dour and brutal (influenced largely by Joseph Beuys), or wild 
and ironic (Jörg Immendorff and Hermann Nitsch were fellow professors). 
If more recently the Städelschule has become more cosmopolitan and 
media conscious, it was at that time gruff and contemplative. So even in the 
experience of inserting this small structure into a very particular community, 
one was forced to observe the ‘sideways slip’ of the architects’ mind and that 
of the artist. Can it be that as architects, we still hanker after – if not order – a 
notion of comprehensiveness, whereas many artists are both closer to their 
chosen raw material and deeply suspicious of the idea of shared manners 
or aesthetics? In reviews and discussions I realised that it is their common 
attitude that architects should stick to making the enclosure and certainly not 
dabble in gadgetry or histrionics: which begs the question that if architecture 
is an art form (which I believe), this adds up to a state of self-consciousness 
in the making of architecture and leaves a number of cultural and even 
moralistic barriers between us.
CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau), 
Departments of Law and Central Administration, 
Vienna University of Economics and Business, 
2014: aerial view.
Deliberately avoiding the inhibition of the many 
grey or white buildings in a city that has many 
grey, cold winters and relating to the Prater 
gardens and with even a ‘nod’ in the direction of 
the famous Prater Luna Park.
067 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
CRAB, Departments of Law and Central 
Administration, Vienna University of Economics 
and Business, 2014: plan.
The smaller building houses the central 
administration for the whole university and the 
larger building hosts (at this typical floor level) 
many ‘tutorial’ rooms and researchers’ offices. 
From the competition stage to the final building, 
CRAB insisted on the provision of internal 
‘swellings’ of the circulation to create informal 
meeting spaces. Indicated in colour are the 
garden terraces that climb up and over the library 
(within which are the study capsules).
DEPARTMENTS OF LAW AND CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION, 
VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS 
Twenty years and a giant jump in scale absorbed many more experiences 
and accumulated even more of the anecdotal evidence that I prefer to act 
as the modifier of straightforward good sense or the ethos of the design of 
the obvious. There is nothing more irritating than a building in which one 
gets lost – especially one in which the users are fundamentally carrying out 
any of five basic activities: 1. talking to someone; 2. listening in a group while 
somebody talks; 3. finding a quiet place in which to read or cruise on the 
laptop; 4. needing the toilet or something out of a tap; or 5. moving from 
place to place. The second-rate architecture of nearly every provincial high 
school deals with this, but things become more tricky if the institution wants 
to make a ‘statement’. 
In the case of the Vienna University of Economics and Business, the statement 
was to be multiplied six times by the results of six competitions in 1993 won 
by six architects – Zaha Hadid (Library and Learning Centre), BUSarchitektur 
(Teaching Centre), NO.MAD Architects (Executive Academy), Hitoshi Abe 
(mixed-use facility and Student Centre), Carme Pinós (Spain Department) and 
my own Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau, known as CRAB (departmental 
buildings) – none of whom is known to be dull. The six buildings are in close 
proximity and were constructed at the same time.
068 PETER COOK
CRAB, Departments of Law and Central 
Administration, Vienna University of Economics 
and Business, 2014: internal space.
As built, a potential meeting place.
069 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
CRAB, Departments of Law and Central 
Administration, Vienna University of Economics 
and Business, 2014: sunshine corners cartoon.
Encouraging the light and sun into the building.
CRAB, Departments of Law and Central 
Administration, Vienna University of Economics 
and Business, 2014: view of sunshine corners.
The intention realised.
070 PETER COOK
CRAB, Departments of Law and Central 
Administration, Vienna University of Economics 
and Business, 2014: entrance corners.
Big window ‘smiles’ from the students’ 
common room on the left, and the bakery/
coffee-shop on the left give a cheerful 
welcome to the Law School. 
071 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
CRAB, Departments of Law and Central 
Administration, Vienna University of Economics 
and Business, 2014: library capsules.
Places of escape: deliberately lit from above.
072 PETER COOK
Joseph Maria Olbrich, Secession Building, 
Vienna, 1897.
Like Plečnik, Olbrich was an out-of-towner who 
had worked for the influential Viennese architect 
Otto Wagner. This building offered a bold symbol 
for the burgeoning ‘Secession’ art movement. 
Olbrich then proceeded to Darmstadt in the 
German state of Hesse, where he would complete 
a heroic ensemble of buildings for the artists’ 
colony in Mathildenhöhe. 
073 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
Gustav Klimt, The Tree of Life, 1909.
Characterising the strong link in Viennese art 
between painting, design and graphics, which in 
turn ‘melts’ into its architectural culture.
Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic chair, 
Freud Museum, London, c.1900.
Probably the best-known couch in the 
world, Freud’s chair has become iconic. Now 
part of the collection in London’s Freud 
Museum, it epitomises fin-de-siècle Vienna 
at its cultural prime.
Moreover, in Vienna one cannot just stand there without the cultural ghosts 
flying out of the trees of the Prater gardens. This is especially true for those 
of us who have wallowed in accounts of the accumulated ambition of its last 
200 or more years; who have read Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture 
(1980) by art historian CarlE Schorske; listened to Mahler or Schoenberg; 
drooled over the minutiae of Gustav Klimt’s paintings; been terrified and at 
the same time seduced by Egon Schiele’s figures. All of that while Adolf Loos 
(1870–1933) was pontificating and succeeding as an architectural miniaturist, 
and the city absorbed provincials in from 
the far reaches of the Austro-Hungarian 
Empire such as Jože Plečnik (1872–1957), 
passing through for his formative period 
before returning to Ljubljana, or Joseph Maria 
Olbrich (1867–1908), similarly gliding through 
the office of Otto Wagner (1841–1918) and 
then off to make his mark in the state of 
Hesse. If Vienna was indeed a hyped-up 
casket of ambition and taste that played the 
role of cultural hotbed before either Berlin 
or Paris, it also continued as a referential 
source for generations of architects, and it is 
hardly an exaggeration to suggest that any 
conversation with two or more Viennese 
turns into a reminder that this was the 
birthplace of psychoanalysis. 
074 PETER COOK
Jože Plečnik, Zacherlhaus, Wildpretmarkt 2–4, 
Vienna, 1905.
An elegant yet imaginative example of a Slovenian 
talent exercising his wit in the Austro-Hungarian 
capital before returning to Ljubljana where he 
would produce some controlled exotica.
075 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
Schorske reminds us that the creativity of Vienna stemmed from a constant 
interweaving between one territory and the next. The architects are almost 
painters; Arnold Schoenberg, the composer, paints. In my own time, the 
artist Walter Pichler (1936–2012) designed underground cities and minimalist 
outhouses, and Hans Hollein (1934–2014) made both physical as well as 
conceptual art while being a highly influential architect. The key figures 
seem to merge in what we loosely call ‘decorative art’ – a term that high 
artists and some architects put down as a second-rate activity. Yet through 
the crafted intricacy of so much work from Josef Hoffmann (1870–1956) 
through to Coop Himmelb(l)au there is an intricacy and delight in the 
manipulation of material, rather than the mere acceptance of its commonly 
known properties which then intertwines with those tricky concerns of taste 
and conscious urban sophistication. 
Add to this the challenge of making our largest building.
Fortunately my fellow designer at CRAB, Gavin Robotham, carries his 
talent through his brain and fingers and has not suffered my own layers of 
indulgence when leading groups of students from London or Frankfurt or 
Beijing and forcing them through the studio doorways of the weird, talented 
but suspicious Viennese. Gavin can move in on the case with a certain 
directness that all of this awareness of history serves to obfuscate. So in a way, 
the organisation of the building could be a straightforward processing of the 
five basic activities listed above.
As we refined the layout of the project, we were helped by some key features 
of Laura P Spinadel’s masterplan: the idea of a long central piazza that could 
run past four buildings on the north and two-and-a half on the south. These 
last were our Law Faculty and its sister building, the central administration 
block, with an implicit invitation to take advantage of the piazza with 
outcrops, balconies or whatever, and a further instruction to make at least two 
throughways between it and the Prater gardens to the south. 
Glass corners in an apothecary’s, 
Frankfurt, Germany.
The glazed rounded corner is a 
familiar ‘marker’ element in the 
German 1950s canon.
076 PETER COOK
Our key enthusiasm was for the building to do more than just provide the 
statutory lecture rooms and tutorial rooms (of which there were dozens). It was 
to take advantage of the potential buzz and the necessary to-ing and fro-ing of 
these, predominantly postgraduate, students. It was also to consciously break 
away from the predictability of the series of grey or white, square-sided blocks 
with the long, internal corridor that has seemed to be the norm for late 20th- 
(and early 21st-) century university buildings. Gavin began to snake around 
with his pencil and somehow the idea of the ‘sunshine corners’ or indentations 
into the line of the plan coincided with the intentions of an early cartoon that 
I made of the idea that these characters could enjoy all the indulgences (and 
possible debaucheries) of the Viennese life that I knew really existed in the 
1st, 4th, 6th and 7th districts of the city. The swelled-out spaces that we could 
contrive as a corollary to the outside indentations were allied to an inevitable 
‘sway’ or ‘wobble’ of the matter-of-fact circulation – which seems now to have 
become an inevitable CRAB response.
At the next stage, we pushed and pulled to take advantage of the inner piazza 
by terracing a garden deck over the Law Library. We made many sketches 
of ways in which the concentration upon the vagaries of the law could be 
temporarily alleviated by the sight of real life taking place above or alongside 
on the deck. In the end we settled for a series of rooflights that could be sat 
on and some study capsules that lived under them. We configured the library 
itself as a large space with a ‘bridge’ running east to west that carried the 
capsules. To etch more space out of the whole library, we created a couple of 
sunken areas: on the piazza side and, more significantly, on the Prater gardens 
side, so that the reader could gaze into the trees from low level – always a 
restful experience.
In carving our way through from the deck to the gardens, we made a form of 
crevice which encouraged a variation in the basic plan of each floor, so that 
some professor could enjoy the dream – of specialness. At this point one has 
to admit to the loving but also cynical observation of the Academic Animal. He 
077 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
or she is highly intelligent, with the enthusiasms and myopia of the doctorate 
achieved, arriving at a famous (or comfortable) institution and some OK 
students. What then? A form of layered amnesia which the odd conference 
speech, the odd refereed article, even the odd book does not quite satiate. 
There is the need to feel special – a point missed by most university buildings. 
So just as I received no complaints from my colleagues in Frankfurt, we 
received none at all from the users about our jolly, slightly kooky corner rooms 
and crevice-hugging rooms where, indeed, they could be special.
More recently we have been told several times that our building is the most 
popular of the six from the viewpoint of the inhabitants. It is also the most 
criticised by Austrian architects who (I think) find it far too jolly. In the same 
vein, the two tunnels that carve through each building and the meandering 
open path that also cuts through to the Prater act as a release to the length of 
the east–west configuration. There are quick exits from the lecture rooms and 
library, and there is external life and bustle brought right into the institution. 
Close inspection will also reveal an occasional series of small pockets of 
balcony that nod towards the (dastardly?) Viennese smoking tradition. 
My own favourite part is, however, the moment when you approach the gap 
between the two buildings and see a pair of curved glass rooms grinning at 
you. We knew from the first that we would have a ‘bakery’ as part of our project, 
which stimulated a very particular expressionist-anecdotal response in my 
mind. There were forty or more years of exposure to German and Austrian 
late Modernism (I had early on been given a stipend from the Architectural 
Association to look at the work of Rudolf Schwarz, Egon Eiermann, Domenikus 
Böhm and Paul Schneider-Esleben), a strange enthusiasm that stemmed from 
a completely untutored observation from the 1950s that Germany was at the 
time building much more interesting stuff than England. I had come to love 
those marvellously generous curved glass corners, the sight ofyummy cakes in 
the large plate-glass windows of the konditorei. So here was the opportunity, 
and it could be placed at the otherwise inconsequential ‘nose’ end of the 
CRAB, cartoon for Departments of Law and 
Central Administration, Vienna University of 
Economics and Business, 2014.
Asking the question: ‘Why can’t the university 
cater for the real life of the Viennese?’
078 PETER COOK
Administration building. But it needed a pairing in the Law building to achieve 
the welcoming mouth. What better than the common room: a place where 
breakout from procedure would be expected? Where the fun-and-games in the 
room could engage with the piazza outside? It could break out naughtily, at the 
corner of the big tunnel: thus the ensemble seemed almost to design itself.
Again, a coercion of overlaid memories, observations and anecdotes acting 
as a lining, or footnoting to the no-nonsense logic of placement. Was it only 
in my own mind that diet-conscious university students would have the same 
nostalgia for the 1950s bourgeois salivation over gooey cream cakes? (Pizzas 
and skinny latte seem a more likely order in the eventual life of this bakery, with 
a disappointingly ho-hum interior decoration that speaks more of a low-level 
American mall, than the heroics of 1950s Düsseldorf or Frankfurt.) Was it in our 
collective minds that the distance between ‘administration’ and ‘study’ should 
be metaphorically bridged by an architectural statement? Could we coerce, 
massage or just hint at the idea that it would be nice, maybe, to hang on in the 
building long after the end of classes? To hang around the swollen pockets 
within for a quiet gossip, flirt or animated discussion on ethics? The extremities 
of the cartoon, depicting the academic department shared space, with its 
suggestion of drunken bodies on the floor, assignations in corner rooms, empty 
wine bottles and cigarettes having been eradicated by legislation and good, 
clean thinking? Yet this university is there for the long haul, and who knows of 
later 21st-century reactions to all that? Our building is certainly ready.
So far I have written only about the positioning of things in relation to use and 
life. Yet as a teacher or commentator I am aware of a truth that is sometimes 
unpalatable to thinking architects: that to the public, the passer-by and to 
the cultural observer, it is the vision, the facade, the signalling elements that 
speak the loudest. So everybody asks us about the colour, the wooden slats, 
the rooflights – seeming to accept (or not notice) the undulations of plan and 
indentations of skin-to-carcass.
079 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
Here I reveal that moment of sheer cussedness that occurs in the making 
of an architecture that is not just prepared to sit down and be reasonable. 
I often quote ‘This’ll upset them’, the catchphrase that my Archigram 
collaborators and I threw around in the 1960s and 1970s about a feature or 
two of our projects. We never defined who the ‘them’ were, it needed not to 
be spelled out, but now, by way of explanation, I would say that it covered 
the boring mainstream colleagues, the ‘play-it-safe’ merchants, the polite, 
the uninteresting. If one reads of the battles between the Classicists and 
Romantics in 19th-century England, the Expressionists and Rationalists in 
early 20th-century Germany or the suppressed irritation of the (soon-to-be) 
Deconstructivists with the Post-Modernists in the 1970s, one recognises that 
a certain angst, or even hatred, can be extremely creative in energising the 
thrust of an idea – especially when manifest in visually rhetorical, figurative 
or referentially aesthetic terms. So it was here, amplified by the repeated 
experience (as an academic visitor) of that Viennese characteristic that they 
don’t talk about too much: the dreaded icy cold winter, the continually grey 
skies seen above the continually grey streets of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th 
districts that lie within the Gürtel ring road. 
Gavin and I come from the seaside – the jolly, quirky, damp, irreverent English 
seaside. So how about a bit of colour? After all, Otto Wagner himself was 
already there putting great coloured patternings onto the Majolikahaus 
(1898) in Vienna well over a hundred years ago. With colour we could bring 
sunshine, not only into the corners but into the coldest, greyest of days. Add 
to this the notion of reinforcing the flowing, undulating character of the plan 
form as it becomes three-dimensional, surely the striations of colour enable 
you to enjoy its wandering lyricism? The next move is to ally the colour 
with the rise of the building out of the ground: darker colouring at the base 
rising up to the lightest colouring against the sky, with the window lines 
CRAB, Departments of Law and Central 
Administration, Vienna University of Economics 
and Business, 2014: colour diagram.
Establishing the relationships: dark ‘earthiness’ 
at the base gradually lightening towards the 
sky. Each colour is sandwiching the window. The 
interior corridor carpet runs counter to this: dark 
in the lighter floors, light in the darker floors.
080 PETER COOK
081 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
deliberately ‘held’ by a colour, rather than creating a full ‘A–B’ relationship. 
At this point we became simultaneously interested in offering some sun 
protection and responding to the character of the woodland to the south. 
This tiny forest had been the hunting ground of the Habsburgs, down the 
street it had been turned into the playground of the common Viennese, and 
if the jollity of our building could give a couple of ‘nods’ in the direction of 
both aspects of the Prater, surely it could bring a whiff of the outside life into 
the campus? We like some of our neighbour architects, but apart from the 
rather exotic Argentinian, Laura P Spinadel, who burst out in corten steel 
clothing, they remain mostly white, or occasionally black. So we started to 
grow whiskers – or rather big, chunky fixed timber louvres on the face of 
the striped building. The wood enters the campus. The light is broken up 
into local patches. The finicky Viennese find this weird and rough, I hear. The 
people in the building admitted to being apprehensive when they moved in, 
but now profess themselves quite cheered up by it all. 
In this sense, we were flying deliberately in the face of good manners and 
the more arch aspects of academe and giving it a well-intentioned kick in the 
pants. ‘C’mon guys,’ we were saying. ‘Come out and play.’ It was, after all, a 
rather surprised Paris that found that its feared interloper, Richard Rogers and 
Renzo Piano’s Centre Pompidou (1977), could get some of its inhabitants to 
come off their cultural high horse and suddenly become aware of their city 
from the rooftops (both physically and metaphorically). Similarly, of course, the 
Austrian city of Graz in its relationship with the ‘friendly alien’ – the Kunsthaus. 
The Vienna University of Economics and Business is not for kiddies, it is the 
training ground for operators, business people, potential smart lawyers and 
those who have already decided to move into the tough world of negotiation 
and survival. They don’t need a ‘school’-like school. They need to be 
stimulated, intrigued, treated as the adults that they are and reminded of their 
history, remembering that Austria – with few natural resources – has survived 
on its wits, its conversation and its lifestyle.
CRAB, Departments of Law and Central 
Administration, Vienna University of Economics 
and Business, 2014: view from central court.
The ‘grain’ and atmosphere of the sheltered decks, 
where you can chat or rest outside the building.
082 PETER COOK
ABEDIAN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BOND UNIVERSITY, 
GOLD COAST, QUEENSLAND
In a very different climate, I was enjoying a rooftop drink after giving the 
annual Nielson Design Lecture at the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane 
in 2010, when asmall group of guys, after the usual niceties, told me that they 
were about to build a new school of architecture – to which my innocent but 
straightforward response was: ‘Oh, I’d love to do a school of architecture.’ There 
were four days in which to file our credentials, just a few weeks to make the 
competition drawings, then a return to Brisbane to present the scheme, and 
three days of nail-biting as we awaited the jury’s deliberations – on the second 
day of which we were called back and told that, if we made it cheaper, we had 
the project.
The fact that, between us, Gavin and I represented 60-plus years of teaching 
is an easy quote, but it is more useful to ruminate upon Gavin’s experience 
as a student at four schools of architecture (Brighton; the Bartlett, University 
College London; SCI-Arc, Los Angeles; and Harvard), and my accumulated 
sorties into such disparate examples of universities as huts (Portsmouth, 
Houston, Winnipeg – all waiting for new premises), grand old institutions (the 
Cooper Union, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the Vienna Kunstakademie, 
Madrid Polytechnic, Moscow Architectural Institute), hole-in-the-corner 
operations that could become something special (early SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, 
Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) in Barcelona, Kyoto 
Seika) or places that felt themselves underdogs, but were really rather good 
(Pratt Institute, Kansas City, Kaiserslautern). 
S Soloviev, Moscow Architectural Institute 
(MARCHI), 1892.
A quintessentially ‘establishment’ building, 
MARCHI is housed in one of the oldest stone 
buildings in Moscow designed by an academician. 
It nonetheless (though briefly) hosted some of 
the most original and heroic experimentations 
by the Russian avant-garde as the First Stroganov 
State Art Workshops (1918), before becoming the 
Moscow Architectural Institute (from 1933).
083 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
Gary Paige Studio, SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, 
California, 2011.
A discreet but effective conversion of an 
extremely long railway servicing building 
has acted as the successful backdrop of this 
enduringly avant-garde school of architecture.
084 PETER COOK
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, 
Bond University, Gold Coast, Queensland, 
Australia, 2014: plan.
Three strips running east–west: the northern 
strip with small and specialist rooms and local 
sunshading; the middle strip, which is a street 
with a variety of ‘scoops’ that host non-curriculum 
activities or special small events; and the southern 
strip with two floors of studios that climb slowly 
up the hill and have a large, airy roof overhang.
085 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
The anecdotal evidence that we bounced back and forth at each other was 
not just a chain of entertaining stories, but a review of that curious mixture 
of cause and effect and the observations of ambition, frustration and tedium 
overlaid by the occasional – and inspiring – moments when someone had 
simply said: ‘This place is shit, but we can do something here.’ Those same 
paranoias suffered by academics everywhere are exacerbated by the very 
position that the discipline of architecture holds within universities: treated 
as not quite a learned subject, but recognised as being certainly not the 
territory of artisans.
Perhaps our recourse to the formula that the studio is the key is a twofold 
response: the ambiguity of all the activities that might go on in a studio is a 
useful background to creating, effectively, a portmanteau territory; almost 
anything can go on there and can be mixed together there and can be 
reinterpreted as a legitimate activity. Perhaps it is a subconscious response 
to the academics who control universities that we have a known typology 
(admittedly borrowed from the world of artists): ‘so get off our backs’. 
Nonetheless one has a fear that already there are some architectural academics 
who are increasingly creeping into the system for whom the ‘studio’ is a 
lingering threat: the last thing that they enjoy is free fall. In the Abedian School 
the studios are the stage, the other rooms the backstage. This whole issue of 
the degree to which the shell of the building actually inhibits or encourages 
becomes a salutary lesson to the designer who believes (and, in a sense, has to 
believe) that the environment, its shape, convenience or logic is all-important.
Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia.
The fastest-growing city in Australia, Gold Coast 
has superb beaches, burgeoning high-rises and a 
lagoon-filled hinterland.
opposite bottom
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: exterior on hill.
A competition-winning project that takes account 
of the hot and sometimes wet climate of southern 
Queensland, its location at the top of the campus 
and the long exposure of the authors to several 
schools of architecture.
086 PETER COOK
In my longest period at a school of consistent creativity – the Bartlett between 
1990 and 2006 – we made it happen (within an august and straightforward 
institution) housed in a horrible, even thoughtless, building. Yet maybe 
the lack of respect for the building was a benefit: so a giant hole in a wall, 
miniature scrapheaps in cupboard-sized studios, corridors full of tat, or Frank 
Gehry (no less) once giving a jury in front of a constantly opening and shutting 
front door were the circumstances – but what did it matter so long as things 
happened? Somehow benefiting from that trait of ingenuity that underscores 
the English talent that was so manifest during the Second World War, in the 
‘Spitfire / Barnes Wallis / high tech with a bit of wire’ tradition. Something of 
which we are a little embarrassed, but that we can offer to all those correctly 
educated kids who come to be ‘finished’ by us.
However, if our familiarity with the whole process, the particular field of 
study, the extraordinary myriad of examples and anecdotes and responses of 
students to situations was very beneficial to the making of the Abedian School 
of Architecture at Bond University, it had to be nuanced towards the fact 
that Gold Coast, the city surrounding it, is new and loose, large and laid back. 
The campus itself having been created in order to coerce a piece of endless 
suburbia interlaced with lagoons into having a more upmarket edge than its 
neighbours, and as Australia’s first private university, it had to establish a way 
of life distinctive from the comfortable life around it. Coercing student life to 
be edgy and exploratory can be a cultural dilemma in this place. Hence there 
was a definite feeling that the building should be more celebratory than it 
would need to be in a dense city full of special buildings with special rooms. At 
the same time, the physical climate of southern Queensland is generally balmy, 
with occasional periods of heavy rain, but strong sunlight; and the world’s best 
surfing beach is only 10 minutes away. Undoubtedly the business of luring 
people into the building and keeping them there well into the evening would 
be a challenge to their lifestyle. It would need to be open and welcoming, yet 
also to be memorable and a serious enrichment to the campus. 
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: section.
Featuring air supply details, the clustering of 
facilities around the street and a detail view (to 
the right) of the north facade.
087 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: schematic axonometric.
A cutaway view of the main elements.
088 PETER COOK
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: street with late sunlight.
The key element and barometer of light and life.
089 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
We gave it a street – adistinctive interior space, with a clear structure that 
could develop into a special series of moments within that interior space. A 
simple system of open studios was located on one side of the street that could 
serve as palettes upon which almost any creative activity could take place. 
Finally, one other series of spaces was ranged along the other side of the 
street: a co-ordinated set of rooms or pockets in which the more proscriptive 
activities – organising, research, administration, ablutions and staircases – 
could be grouped. Was it arrogance that made us feel that this would be, must 
be a very special space? Therefore not a teaching shed (which some of our 
competitors had advocated), nor just another set of rooms along a corridor 
with a fancy lobby.
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: street.
Again, the street is the key element and barometer 
of light.
090 PETER COOK
As we drew plans I drew cartoons – derived from architecture school life, some 
ironic, some rhetorical, some unable to resist a pedagogical slant – where, for 
instance, I made fun of the tedious or over-zealous young faculty member or 
the need for colleges to ‘show off’ to visitors. In a sense I was pointing out that 
our building would be mostly open and exposing the ironies of the daily life in 
such places: a loving appraisal, rather than a purely critical one. 
Peter Cook, cartoon suggesting 24-hour activity 
in CRAB’s Abedian School of Architecture, 2010.
Peter Cook, cartoon suggesting cultural 
internationalism in CRAB’s Abedian School of 
Architecture, 2010.
Peter Cook, cartoon of a typical ‘jury’ situation 
in CRAB’s Abedian School of Architecture, 2010.
091 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
Peter Cook, cartoon depicting ‘ulterior motives’ 
in CRAB’s Abedian School of Architecture, 2010.
Peter Cook, cartoon showing CRAB’s Abedian 
School of Architecture as a campus-wide 
asset, 2010.
Peter Cook, cartoon illustrating academe is a 
cat-and-mouse scene for CRAB’s Abedian School 
of Architecture, 2010.
092 PETER COOK
There remained a central wish to be fulfilled, parallel to the development of 
the ‘swellings’ in the plan of the Vienna building: the making of particular 
places where people could congregate or do something special or just hang 
out and have a gossip or an intense discussion. I believe it was Gavin who, with 
some deft twists of the pencil, devised the ‘scoops’. In a Gothic church these 
might be seen as giant niches, but since they emerged as the key structure of 
the place, they were also conceptually twisted or ‘furled’ columns. They would 
run along one side of the street, defining the increments by which the trays 
of studios would gently climb the hill, and their tentacles would waft over the 
top of the street space. Moreover, each one would be subtly different from the 
next. From that moment, we had the whole aesthetic of the building. From 
that moment, we knew that this whole place could be unique. 
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: scoop diagram.
Rationalising variety of intention with geometry, 
casting technology and cost.
opposite
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: scoop view.
A special meeting place for informal situations, a 
marker and primary structural element.
093 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
094 PETER COOK
We had both been introduced a few times into the day-to-day functioning 
of the little department that had started some three years before and had 
operated out of huts and borrowed rooms; but now we watched bemused, 
while the students got used to the idea of a ‘specialness’ and of the 
architecture school as a hothouse of ideas, which sits oddly within an open-
air society. In our wildest imaginings its creative atmosphere could be an 
admixture of the art-focused Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Andy 
Warhol’s Factory in New York and London’s Bartlett–Architectural Association 
axis that might somehow live among the scoops, even if its physical reality 
would still be more down-to-earth. It was to be interpreted as an elegant but 
robustly tailored carcass of in-situ concrete or tough plywood, with insertions 
that would come from the same vocabulary; and in this context, our use of 
colour would be far more discreet than in Vienna.
The many cartoons of architecture school life were made alongside the first 
design drawings and made reference to the likely ambience as well as the 
typical human predicaments being acted out. The couple of people looking 
down from above at a studio in action was taken from the memory of the 
corridor in Perloff Hall at UCLA, where you can observe a review going on, but 
don’t interfere with it. The confrontation of the faculty member with a student 
who is clearly more familiar with the beach than the school is an illustration 
of the bridge and gallery system as well as the cat-and-mouse syndrome. The 
use of the street as a social space that can be used by the whole university is 
revealed as an intention stemming from the earliest stage of designing. 
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: north side.
The particular requirements of a myriad of special 
rooms result in a scattering of windows. The 
northern sun beats in, so the ‘eyebrows’, with the 
addition of a freestyle colour render, combine to 
create, effectively, an ‘artwork’.
095 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
In the process the experience of Queensland, the idea of embracing an 
atmosphere of open air, open studios, with a manipulation of light, so that 
its quality within the building would be quite noticeably different from 
the predictability of that created by a normal corridor-and-rooms, was our 
statement. With a design and detailing team that had cut its teeth on the 
Vienna building, we ended up with a curious barn: where the light does 
wonderful things as it is filtered; where the corners of the studios and the cosy 
rooms on the north are revealed; where the welcoming ‘nose’ that juts out to 
the east, sniffing the air of the university at the same time, asserts its jaunty 
personality. You can’t have a dreary building if it pokes out its nose, surely.
To what extent the Bond building forced us to widen our vocabulary 
remains an interesting question. In this chapter I have dwelt upon the 
waves of influence that academe casts over the architect’s work, yet here, 
if anywhere, I feel that we have come closest to communicating our love of 
both games: design and teaching. It is very detailed, in the sense that almost 
every corner tells a story.
CRAB, Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: the building’s ‘nose’.
The Head of School can command all he/she sees.
096 PETER COOK
ARTS UNIVERSITY BOURNEMOUTH: 
DRAWING ON THE STUDIO TRADITION
The first building I have designed for England is now going on site. Poignantly, 
it is a drawing studio for the same Bournemouth art school where I made my 
first studies. Completely transformed as an institution, so that it now embraces 
drama, film, architectural model-making as well as architecture, costume 
design plus all the traditional art 
disciplines, its recent successes 
and ambition have catapulted it 
forward to become a fully fledged 
arts university. As with Kasper König 
in Frankfurt, it is fascinating to 
watch Stuart Bartholomew, another 
talented and highly entrepreneurial 
Director, in action. His out-of-the-
blue invitation to make a ‘drawing 
studio’ came with the entreaty to 
make it unique and identifiable: 
symbolically, ‘the place where I 
learnt to draw’ and curiously simple 
to design. Here we are definitely in 
the studio tradition. No need for 
ambiguities: bring in light, give them 
space,a toilet and make it white.
CRAB, Drawing Studio, Arts University 
Bournemouth, UK, 2015: rendering of exterior.
The dedicated studio for drawing can be used 
by students from every department of the 
university. The blue object nestles into a corner 
of the campus.
CRAB, Drawing Studio, Arts University 
Bournemouth, UK, 2015: diagram.
Constructed from steel panels, prefabricated in 
a Dutch–German shipyard and transported, then 
re-erected on site.
097 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
CRAB, Drawing Studio, Arts University 
Bournemouth, UK, 2015: rendering of interior.
The stark white interior contrasts with the strong 
blue exterior.
CRAB, Drawing Studio, Arts University 
Bournemouth, UK, 2015: construction diagram.
098 PETER COOK
Gustave Strauven, Maison Saint-Cyr, 11 Square 
Ambiorix, Brussels, 1903.
The circular ‘studio’ windows become a 
key feature of high-bourgeois Art Nouveau 
architecture.
099 MOTIVE 3: UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
A simple and more-or-less square plan, but then a developed series of ideas 
about light. In the 19th century the bourgeoisie grasped the large studio 
window to the bosom of the first-floor salon. Therefore, in Antwerp, Brussels, 
Paris and even occasionally London, the cultural significance of the large 
window, and the delightful detail that it often attracted, could not escape my 
mind. Surely there had to be a predominance of this element. But then, in a 
large room, its effect would diminish towards the rear; so I introduced a second 
– a clerestory window, but knowing that the light quality would be different, so 
being content to bounce just sufficient back off the rear wall as reinforcement 
light. Then, I could not resist pulling in a much more discreet, but hopefully 
intriguing source of light that would trickle under the legs of students sitting 
on the bench at the side – an almost hidden source and finally unable to resist 
a fourth source: for with a glass main door, the curve of the porte-cochère 
would bring in a progression of graded light.
The carcass should be simple. Contemplating first timber, then zinc sheeting, 
the idea of an all-steel ‘animal’ became irresistible. Another blue building, 
but totally white within. A landed ship, maybe. What I observe of today’s 
Bournemouth students is that they are a chirpy, lively lot, not particularly local 
and brought together on a campus that was the expression of 1970s modesty 
under the trees: far from today’s ambitions. As an intensely replenished campus 
grows up, our building has a role as a naughty little catalyst. As the large chunks 
of steel arrive from the Netherlands and are welded into a total, curvaceous 
monocoque object, the message to the students is surely: ‘Give it a try.’
Yet perhaps even this is a calculated statement. Throughout this book an 
underlying theme is of architecture coming out of real experiences, not from 
approved procedures. So living among students for so long gives a real push to 
this designer’s response.
Frederick Wheeler, St Paul’s Studios, Talgarth 
Road, Baron’s Court, London, 1891.
A row of pre-Art Nouveau studios in London 
celebrating the great studio windows.
100 PETER COOK
MOTIVE 4
TO AGREEABLE
FROM ORDINARY 
102 PETER COOK
As a seaside person, the beach seems a useful barometer of freedom in the 
Western world. In Regency Brighton, it originated as the fetishist – and then 
fashionable – taking of the ‘cure’ and stealthily developed into a ‘day at 
the seaside’ and a place where Londoners could also indulge in an elegant 
Regency architecture. Though now in a minor decline in the north of Europe, 
the beach is certainly alive and well elsewhere.
The beach could almost be a new definition: that of the city at the extreme of 
hedonistic enjoyment. It supports many of the wiles of an urban flâneur – the 
beautiful-bodied on the Riviera following a carefully choreographed passage 
between the other bodies laid out on carefully chosen towels. Returning from 
this dream, we can observe that both beach and public park are still able to 
avoid many of the ‘locked’ relationships that bedevil industrialised culture, 
founded as they are upon escape and by definition an alternative of every kind, 
even with combinations of scale that would be frowned upon in a city street. 
Similarly the idea of wandering around among the trees became a desirable 
alternative to sitting in the confinement of a room: already by the mid-17th 
century the rich had their gardens, trees and landscaped parks, but the 
emerging bourgeoisie also aspired to some of these pleasures. 
So we can contemplate refinement overlaid with escapism, we can consider 
the advantages of creating an urban institution for fun, or consciously 
manipulating a day-to-day building brief towards the maximum enjoyment 
of its function. Do we need to make a full escape or can we incorporate an 
affordable whiff of the exotic? 
Surprisingly, New York’s Coney Island resort has survived. Despite the 
corniness of many of its offerings and their lack of sophistication in a world of 
electronics, travel, instant gratification and the infinite variety of turn-on, some 
of us go there because it is what it is: slightly weird, rather tacky, or, in a word, 
quaint. Which also happens to so many much-visited medieval Suffolk villages 
previous spread
Peter Cook, Salvador Pérez Arroyo and 
Eva Hurtado, Pinto, near Madrid, 2003: 
axonometric detail.
103 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
or ancient dungeons. Academics can rake over this escapist culture and its 
amusing history, designers can revel in some of its absurdities or strategists 
start to erect parallel scenarios that are not necessarily dependent upon 
separation of ‘escape’ and ‘the different’ by location, but suggest that we can 
devise an enjoyable version of the ordinary.
In parallel, 19th- and 20th-century architects became really excited about 
movement and mechanics, heroically responding to the inspiration of 
the machine. If the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger (1892–1955) could 
successfully transfer the sound and excitement of the Pacific 231 locomotive, 
or in Russia the architect Alexander Vesnin (1883–1959) could bring giant rolls 
of printing paper into the exhibition gallery, this mechanical heroism became 
even more excitable when celebrated by the tiers of escalators that confronted 
viewers of Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927).
The giant train sheds of the 19th century and manifestation of discovered 
techniques and materials of the 20th century generated an almost schoolboy 
delight with which the so-called ‘High-Tech‘ architects of the 1970s 
rediscovered Viollet-le-Duc, Gustave Eiffel, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and 
Jean Prouvé while enjoying aeroplanes and engines of all kinds, and gave an 
enormous, collective ‘kick’ to imaginative architecture. I have to admit a strong 
element of this in Archigram work, with my Plug-in City (first drawn in 1964) 
given life by the inclusion of hovercraft, the inflatable roof, the travelator, the 
escalator and service tubes as well as the car-production connotations of its 
capsule elements.
The beach at Bournemouth, UK.
Close observation of a crowded beach can reveal 
many strategic patterns at work: territoriality, 
voyeurism, microclimate, flâneurism or flirtation.
104 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Plug-in City, 1964.
Conceived as a demonstration that expendable 
and exchangeable buildings such as ‘capsule’ 
homes plugged into a large supporting structure 
could be exciting and very responsive to 
changing needs.
Jean Prouvé, Maison Coque at the Salon des Arts 
Ménagers (Exhibition of Domestic Arts), Grand 
Palais, Paris, 1951.
Prouvé’s considerable understanding of metal 
construction and ingenuity brought forward the 
real possibility of an industrialised, componented 
architecture of some subtlety. 
105 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
DELIGHTFUL FUNCTIONALISM AND STRUCTURED ESCAPE
A heady extensionof the idea of function towards delight does perhaps 
obscure two other parallel, but less obvious extensions of the ordinary. In the 
first of these, an architectural solution simply takes every criterion or feature of 
a project as far as it can go in terms of expression, or technique, or geometry, 
or juxtaposition of unlike-to-unlike, or even 
quaintness. The second, which is more 
difficult (and therefore more intriguing), 
involves concentration upon a single 
feature or operation of the building which 
is developed with such originality and verve 
that the relative normality of the rest is 
challenged and, perhaps, raised to the level 
of willing (if self-effacing) collaborator.
So I find myself both tempted and irritated 
by the challenge of the ‘black box’, or ‘all is 
not what it seems’, which can just end up in 
clever-clever obfuscation or suggesting that 
much visual communication is somehow 
too mundane. Thus I will always wish to 
seek moments of identifiable physical 
challenge, both in my own work and that 
of others. In my ‘Super-Houston’ research 
project (2000; see Motive 8), each of the 
clusters of dart-like buildings, doubling as 
billboards, had a different configuration and 
different heights or colour palettes, serving 
as symbolic ‘villages’ where the anonymity 
of a zone of houses under the trees would 
Clorindo Testa, Bank of London and South 
America, San Nicolás, Buenos Aires, 1966.
A virtuoso demonstration of light control that 
optically brings the surrounding streets ‘into’ 
the room, creates a highly original set of lays 
of enclosure, and hangs the whole series of 
levels and platforms from above – all of which is 
impeccably detailed.
106 PETER COOK
Ludwig Leo, Umlauftank, Technical University 
of Berlin, 1974.
Leo was one of the most direct and fearless 
architects of 20th-century Berlin. This 
hydraulics laboratory exposes its functioning 
parts through a code of stark form and colour, 
effectively ‘built Constructivism’.
momentarily find identity. It was in a sense a reference to how in history the 
great pediment or church tower would stop people in their tracks and prepare 
them for whatever might follow. I was surely casting back to some favourite 
inspirations: first, Ludwig Leo’s wonderful Umlauftank (1974) in Berlin that has 
been a quizzical test-piece for forty years – what is to be made of a giant pink 
pipe wound round under a blue metal building with windows that is poised up 
over the pipe on long green legs? (It’s to do with hydraulic testing, by the way.) 
Or to the layers of invention that lie within Clorindo Testa’s Bank of London and 
South America in Buenos Aires (1966), which combines structural high jinks 
with a celebration of air-conditioning technology, together with a command 
over space, light and illusion that competes with the best of the Baroque – and 
looks totally original into the bargain, culminating in a giant concrete ‘eyelid’ 
that has the audacity to optically haul the three surrounding buildings into 
its internal ‘game’. Must not the banking transaction (continually stressed in 
Argentina’s volatile economy) be celebrated?
My Towards Comfo-Veg installation in 2012 at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles enabled me 
to realise a combination of thoughts that had been buzzing around for years: 
could the comfort (of the beach, perhaps) be combined with the soothingness 
of vegetation (as in a park), underscored by available electronic systems – seen 
or unseen? My drawing of a Comfo-Veg Club had emerged in 2008, and now 
it could be turned into a formation. The veg turned itself into a hybrid that we 
still intend to develop further. Nonetheless hordes of real people enjoyed an 
installation that was concerned with merely comfort and ambient noise. Also, 
for the first time, I was able to plot the fabricated item back into the original 
proposition, in its third edition as a drawing – paying a certain homage to 
the 20th-century Danish designer Verner Panton, whose interior furniture 
combinations always seemed to have their basis in the idea of comfort.
107 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
Comfort and escape in nature.
Raising the question, can architecture ever reach 
such levels of comfortable bliss?
Verner Panton, Hasenrain private apartment, 
Basel, Switzerland, 1972.
Like Panton’s later apartments, a place for 
experimentation where he could test the 
practicability and effect of his designs, at the 
same time serving as a kind of showroom for 
potential clients.
108 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Comfo-Veg Club, first 
drawing, 2008.
A comfortable, vegetated club (with audio-
visual gadgetry).
Peter Cook, ‘Comfo-Veg’ installation, Los 
Angeles, California, 2012.
Developing the idea of comfort and a 
‘growth’ formation reminiscent of natural, 
vegetable growth.
109 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
Peter Cook, Comfo-Veg Club, second 
drawing, 2012.
A rethink of the original club modified by the 
experience of making the real installation.
110 PETER COOK
STRIPS AND STATIONS
A much earlier exercise in combining the idea of ‘escape-garden’ with current 
entertainment technology and gadgetry in order to make an information 
city had two origins and two locations. Dating from 1986, it started off as 
a mere vertical garden with a series of small pavilions or ‘stopping points’, 
in the manner of the tea houses, bridges and viewing points in a Japanese 
garden, and culminated in a discreet hotel, with steel armatures and cloaking 
vegetation draping down into the River Main in Frankfurt. Later in the same 
year it acquired a series of outriders that helped me to conveniently ‘borrow’ 
the project for use in the design competition for Kawasaki Information 
City, near Tokyo. In both versions, it was an opportunity to rediscover 
the megastructure after more than ten years’ neglect, but with a totally 
different clothing from that of the Plug-in City. A conceptual and physical 
meshing of the wayward and mysterious aspects of living plants, together 
with the heroics and sheer dimensionality of the carrying structure, could 
lead to a hybrid in which the spectator/climber/explorer would encounter 
sequences of sound and locally available videos and exhibits with, inevitably, 
techniques that were combinations of real and unreal, software and hardware, 
experiential and suggestive.
At one end, the structure descends and spreads to form an approximation 
of an arena or meeting place, and here is deliberately posited a rather 
loosely defined enclosure – implying that a mere auditorium would be 
too predictable, but suggesting a ‘woodland glade’ within the steel-and-
vegetable world. Though on a larger scale, the project anticipates the later 
Veg House (1996 and 2001; see Motive 5), which is able to explore further 
layers of vocabulary including lacework and many types of interweaving. In a 
busy city, might one not escape upwards into a small forest with mysterious 
places within it for amusement or contemplation?
Peter Cook, Frankfurt Westhafen/Real 
City, Germany, 1986: long elevation of 
vertical museum.
Influenced by visits to Kyoto’s gardens 
and their discreet but studied insertions 
of pavilions and resting places, here 
‘verticalised’ and creating a park in the sky.
111 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
Peter Cook, design competition entry for 
Kawasaki Information City, near Tokyo, 
1986: section.
In a sense, a return to the megastructure, but 
this time vegetated, with planting sustained 
by hydroponics as well as mass substance.
Ginkaku-ji Temple Gardens, Kyoto, Japan.
Typical Kyoto arrangement of a garden that 
combines the placement of symbolic objects or 
plantations with an innate sense of atmosphere 
and highly sophisticated understanding of the 
procedure of ‘stop–look–move–stop’.
112 PETER COOK
CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau), 
Music Houses, Taipei (from west), 2009.
A competition project interpreted as two 
processes oftransformation, the western end 
multicoloured and the eastern end monochrome, 
countered by the western end’s planar and the 
eastern end’s voluptuous character.
A later recreational strip stemmed from a rather more self-conscious attitude 
to recreation than we might have in the West. New York’s Brooklyn, London’s 
Dalston or Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg creep up over time as ‘hip’ or ‘not hip’ 
strips; but in Taipei, as demonstrated by a 2009 design competition in which 
we participated, there was the notion that a ‘music strip’ 
could immediately be created over a quarter-kilometre 
length with ‘music houses’ to sustain it. Searching hard 
among the typologies of the West for an equivalent, I 
had to be reassured that such an identity does exist: is 
it a club? Usually. Is it a restaurant? Often. Is it for pop 
music? Generally. Could it have other music? Maybe. Do 
people in Taipei know what a music house is? Of course. 
All this serves to suggest that the Western architect is 
only comfortable with the old divisions – ‘concert hall’, 
‘restaurant’ etc – and forgets that far more music is now 
heard in an MP3 compression via an earphone than in 
any other way. The aim of the Music Houses is therefore 
to manifest much of the artificiality of that experience 
into space, with perhaps the odd drink and chatter to 
help it along.
Street life in Harajuku, Tokyo.
The scrambled combination of sophistication, 
absurdity, high spirits and advanced technology 
makes Tokyo a sustaining inspiration for the author.
113 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
CRAB, Music Houses, Taipei (from east), 2009.
The eastern end also reveals the increased 
proportion of water garden as contrasted with the 
more ‘urban’ surfaces of the western end.
114 PETER COOK
CRAB, competition design for remodelled 
New Street Station, Birmingham, UK, 2008: 
concept models.
A typical CRAB studio way of working and 
sculpting, comparing the alternative light 
conditions of the various arrangements.
115 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
So what kind of strip might this add up to? How can a series of quite 
identifiable small buildings each have an unmissable presence, but carry with 
it an obligation to an overriding urban idea? The word ‘metamorphosis’ was 
used around the time of Archigram to deal with the idea of physical change. 
But here I experimented with the ideas of iconic inversion as you move 
along the strip. So at the end nearer downtown there is a tower to house all 
the agents, producers and packagers in the business: tall, crisp, blue (quite 
consciously in the tradition of the Dutch De Stijl movement of the late 1910s 
and 1920s). The Music Houses are in bright colours too, but as you move 
along, rising onto a meandering walkway, several things start to happen: the 
buildings gradually loosen up in form, the garden below becomes softer with 
a watercourse, and the rabid colour becomes less and less. By the end of the 
strip the Music Houses have become loose-limbed pavilions, their entrails 
dangling in the water, and they have become a metallic monochrome. At 
this end of the site there is a hill with many trees, so what we have done is to 
accentuate the diminution of the city, to underscore the issue of escape, to 
consciously ‘melt’ the city.
On reflection I wonder whether there was always a certain English position 
being played out? Our (often dangerous) predilection for the Picturesque 
intermixed with a preference for cities that are not hard but have charm, 
softness, trees, wayward buildings. Certainly Taipei has few parks and doesn’t 
seem to know what to do with those it has – surely in need of a latter-day 
Future Systems, Selfridges, Birmingham, 
UK, 2003.
Bringing controlled exotica to the otherwise 
cautious downtown, an inspiring potential 
neighbour for the CRAB project for the 
remodelled New Street Station.
116 PETER COOK
Frederick Law Olmsted (famed for laying out New York’s Central Park and 
others in the 19th century), to celebrate the romance of recreation. Or perhaps 
the challenge is for us to really dig inside the recent history of multimedia, 
mixed reality–unreality and the performance-inspired world? A difficult one for 
architects, whatever they say.
Another challenge – to simply tart up a tiresome old piece of machinery – 
was raised by the wish of the British railway authority to present Birmingham 
New Street station as a fresh, new icon. They wanted this to be done without 
fundamentally overhauling its complex system of tracks and platforms on 
which, it is claimed, the largest number of people in Europe change trains. A 
design competition for the remodelling was held in 2008. As an aside, near 
the station is a masterpiece designed by Jan Kaplicky of Future Systems: the 
Birmingham Selfridges department store (2003). As friends and, I suppose, 
rivals for attention since Jan arrived in London in the 1960s, Colin Fournier 
and I had deliberately chosen to make our first presentation in London of 
the completed Graz Kunsthaus (2003) as a ‘double bill’ with Jan and his 
building. For me, the sense that we had all been treated as wacky techno-
eccentrics deserved a celebration of our simultaneous delivery of delightful, 
workable animals.
For the station competition we decided to celebrate light, experimenting 
with various configurations of cone, tube, shaft and scoop. Simultaneously 
we examined the streets around and thought of ways in which our carcass 
could ‘signal’ back to Birmingham. So, towards Jan’s building (with its facade 
of aluminium disks on a blue background) a blue signal; towards Stephenson 
Street (mostly terracotta and red brick) a red signal; and towards Hill Street 
(which gets more sun) a yellow signal – with a cute manipulation of a spectrum 
of colour change as you move around the outside of the station. Our notion 
was that the locals would consciously – or unconsciously – identify with ‘their’ 
colour route. Surely something to cheer up that likeable, messy city. The 
competition jury went for a monochrome, of course. 
CRAB, competition design for remodelled 
New Street Station, Birmingham, UK, 2008: 
overall view.
A competition to ‘wrap’ the decaying New 
Street Station interpreted as a chance to bring 
colour as well as coherent form to the centre 
of the city.
117 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
REINVIGORATING SUBURBIA
A possible trap is that we still make such a demarcation between ‘work’ and 
‘play’. In the comfortable (supposedly despicable) old bourgeois world – the 
lounge, the bar, the coffee shop, the bowling green, the cricket pavilion, 
the racecourse, the club – excuses could be made that you needed to eat 
or exercise; and where better to do business? At another level, there is the 
tragedy of the commuter syndrome. As more people live in bigger cities, the 
identifiable ‘place’ recedes as a reality. Still in 2003, enjoying the rare exercise 
of a masterplan (together with our Spanish friends Salvador Pérez Arroyo and 
Eva Hurtado), I relished the idea of seducing the young (or mentally young) 
inhabitants of Pinto, just south of Madrid, back onto the street. The problem 
is that Pinto is about 25 minutes from the centre of the Spanish capital. The 
clubs beckon. The supermarkets suffice. The rest is a small dusty town square 
enjoyed by a few old-timers. But let’s invent a small artificial hill, not only to 
hide the car parking but to contain the gym, the dance club, the health spa, a 
couple of swimming pools cascading down. Wind a boardwalk around it. Set 
up a cycle track that (safely) weaves around it. Extend the boardwalk under 
some of the buildings, and encourage kiosks and temporary market stalls 
onto the boardwalk. Set out a raunchy red clubhouse into the Golf-Club park 
alongside. Encourage the kids as they get off the train to believe that Pinto is 
some kind of ‘scene’, cosset the flâneurs, cheer on the skateboard show-offs. 
Bring back the art of lingering. Everyonea member of the bourgeoisie? Is such 
an aim a form of romanticism or nostalgia for a world that had never quite 
happened, but could happen?
Peter Cook, Salvador Pérez Arroyo and Eva 
Hurtado, Pinto, near Madrid, 2003: model.
The ‘acropolis’ concentrates main commercial 
buildings, hotel and the red Golf Club onto 
an artificial hill that is ringed by a ‘boardwalk’ 
upon which kiosks sit, under the legs of the 
larger buildings.
118 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Salvador Pérez Arroyo and Eva 
Hurtado, Pinto, near Madrid, 2003: axonometric.
Roofs are used for recreation and gardens trickle 
down the hill. Flâneurs enjoy the boardwalk.
119 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
Peter Cook, Salvador Pérez Arroyo and Eva 
Hurtado, Pinto, near Madrid, 2003: overall plan.
Invited by the mayor of a small satellite town to 
Madrid, the team rotated a series of strips of social 
housing, clusters of villas and a virtual ‘acropolis’ 
around the core of a large golf course.
Street life and advanced kiosk, Elizabeth 
Street, Brisbane.
As befits a fast-changing and confident city, 
a ‘kiosk’ that is in effect a highly facilitated 
small building.
120 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Salvador Pérez Arroyo and Eva 
Hurtado, Pinto, near Madrid, 2003: diagram.
In a hot, dry place, the ‘acropolis’ area has to 
provide breeze and shading.
121 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
A while later, in 2010, the actual commission to design public housing in the 
newly created Madrid suburb of Vallecas enabled us at CRAB (Cook Robotham 
Architectural Bureau) to continue the dialogue between a block of apartments 
and the idea of active street life gathering underneath it. Another feature 
borrowed from Pinto was the rooftop sports place. Nourished as a tight-
packed grouping of four flats around a large, white, serrated light well and 
three or four flats edging onto a staircase in turn, the physiognomy aimed to 
take advantage of diagonal views, so that living rooms in particular avoided 
having a single aspect.
The scheme as designed was bright blue, with practice courts and a 
running track on the roof, and jaunty, coloured, directional sunshades and 
individualistic kiosks sheltering below. The dire financial state of Spain (as well 
as the authorities’ squeamishness about rooftop activities) caused most of the 
colour to be lost, the kiosks to be rejected and the sunshades to be shed. What 
we actually have is a commodious piece of social housing within the over-
scaled grid of dusty highways. I have no doubt that the kids get straight on 
the metro for the 20-minute ride into town. Yet surely it must be implied that a 
single structure – and all that it carries on its back – is a prototype for a better 
city that poor economics and a reactionary municipality can easily resist.
above
Peter Cook/CRAB and Salvador Pérez 
Arroyo, Vallecas housing, Madrid, 2013: 
ground-floor plan.
Bringing back the community into the site, 
with places to buy things, congregate or just 
sit among the plants.
top
 Peter Cook/CRAB and Salvador Pérez Arroyo, 
Vallecas housing, Madrid, 2013: typical 
apartments floor plan.
Tightly planned apartments that nonetheless 
offer diagonal views for the inhabitants.
122 PETER COOK
Peter Cook/CRAB and Salvador Pérez Arroyo, 
Vallecas housing, Madrid, 2013.
The basic modelling and layout survived the 
stringent cost-cutting during the Spanish 
economic crisis.
Peter Cook/CRAB and Salvador Pérez Arroyo, 
Vallecas housing, Madrid, 2013: elevation.
Closer to the original inspiration derived from the 
Pinto project, the roof has sports facilities, the 
windows have lively shutters and the ground has 
active and idiosyncratic kiosks. 
123 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
PLAYFUL MASTERPLANNING
There are echoes of Taipei, Pinto and Birmingham in another of CRAB’s ‘public’ 
projects: a ship terminal built in 2010 for the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, 
where the primary activity is the smooth movement of people and packages. 
In essence this leads to a series of large elements and linkages (often diagonal). 
Keen to invoke some of the charm of passenger ships themselves and their 
thrusting decks and lounges, we also found a place for incorporating a garden 
at ground level; in the end the conglomeration became a ‘weave’ of elements. 
Maybe the project was deliberately flying in the face of the typical ‘solid 
monster’ that would just sit alongside the quay; searching for a model that 
might be a mixture of identities or parts loosely held around space; taking off 
from the tradition of ‘decks’ and flying them out into the sky. All, of course, 
with a conscious palette of colour that beds itself around a ‘marine green’ and 
then striates into yellow and blue.
Perhaps eccentric to many of our other CRAB schemes is an entry 
for a 2013 competition for a series of departments for the Aalto 
University in Helsinki. For once, monochrome. For once, very 
conscious of site, trees and inherited calmness, but desperate to 
add some animation for the person who, on a cold day, might want 
to glance through the window. So remembering the Pinto cycleway 
and remembering those strange troughs in Kuala Lumpur where 
hordes of workers on low-spec motorcycles pour into town, and 
knowing of the student preference for bikes – even in a slippery 
climate – we created a lacework of cycle troughs around the 
buildings, coloured red. There would always be movement. There 
would always be one rising and falling sliver of colour. Especially 
in November (‘Mud’ month in Finland) it might bring a smile. In a 
sense all of these projects are attempting to bring in a sense of play 
towards the ordinary situation; questioning, maybe, the traditional 
separation of ‘work-place’ and ‘play-place’.
CRAB, competition design for Aalto 
University, Helsinki, 2013.
The cycleways would bring constant touches 
of life and movement to a calm, cool, tree-
infested scene.
A typical bike lane.
The bike lane will increasingly become part of 
urbanists’ necessary typologies; yet designers 
have not so far thought much about their 
physical presence.
124 PETER COOK
INSPIRATION IN UNEXPECTED PLACES
In 2006, Gavin Robotham and I decided that our corner of the British Pavilion 
at the Venice Biennale should talk about London – but not heroic London or 
hectic London, but a London that was just, at that moment, awakening to its 
potential. The hosting of the 2012 Olympics had not been decided upon, so the 
east of London was still wavering. Gavin comes from the marshlands of Norfolk 
and I am originally a provincial who is fascinated by non-definable territories, 
so we toured around looking for patches of land or edges of streets into which 
we could posit a new type of working-recreating city. We were instinctively 
looking back to a time when 
small backyard operations 
could enable individual talents 
to do useful things; yet also 
looking forward to a time 
(actually already with us) when 
people can be operational, 
creative and in worldwide 
communication while enjoying 
the garden, the roof terrace, the 
conservatory or some hybrid 
studio-manufactory. Imagine a 
3D printer in every apartment 
and any available horizontal 
surface growing vegetables or 
sprouting trees – and you get 
somewhere near the idea.
We wove around and picked in 
and out among some quaint 
edge conditions of a part of 
CRAB, East London Revisited, 2006.
Produced for the British Pavilion at the Venice 
Biennale, this drawing summarises its authors’ 
fascination with mixed-use elements, allotments, 
insertions, parasite buildings and the breakdown 
of hard, proscribed activity zone.
Jill Winch, Garden Studio, 
Letchworth, Hertfordshire.
A living prototype for the East London 
project’s world.
125 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
London that had not really been bothered about. We looked at some forlorn 
high streets and frowsy patches of ‘brownfield’ – and then started drawing. We 
sketched(or sometimes almost doodled) suggestions for allotments with one-
person, one-storey dwellings tucked into the ground among the vegetables. 
We tucked odd little studio eyries up among the high-rise blocks. We strung 
out some dwellings (or were they workshops too?) along the hedges. Gavin 
was very fond of the scoop-shaped mud formations that are found in East 
Anglian estuaries and these started to generate the land formations. Of course 
there were swathes of trees and trickles of vegetation, bunches of natural 
growth mixed into bunches of building.
How much of this gets across to the essentially cosmopolitan audience at a 
Biennale is never clear; but it acts as an incentive and continues the necessary 
function of research or muscle-flexing that preceded by a year or more a 
period in which we then produced three quite large buildings – where such 
wayward speculation is not on the agenda.
For the 2012 Sustainable Cities competition, we returned to East London and 
let the big Biennale drawing trigger a view into the future that was, for us, 
more downbeat than usual. We put the visualisation in the hands of Lorène 
Faure and simply leaned over her computer each day with suggestions. 
In this way the discretion and inconsistencies of the Biennale drawing 
became a background for a scenario; where society would have shrivelled, 
de-industrialised, resources would be dwindling and the sea creeping ever 
upwards. A few weird technologies might have survived, in which airborne 
kites might harvest rain and some unpolluted vegetation. Otherwise, a third 
generation of megastructure would be constricted with primitive tools and 
mostly made from salvaged wood and rusted steel, reminiscent of a hollowed-
out tree trunk and with the platforms of do-it-yourself dwellings clinging on 
for safety – in a sense, a return to the medieval device of houses sheltering 
within castle walls during a siege.
Early 20th-century postcard of Invalid’s Walk 
(Pine Walk), Bournemouth. 
In many ways the inspiration for the boardwalk 
and vegetated schemes of Cook and CRAB. 
(Postcard produced and printed by TJ Powell, 
Commercial Road, Bournemouth, c.1903–5).
126 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Pine City (1), 2014.
Concurrent with the building of the Arts 
University Bournemouth Drawing Studio 
(see Motive 3), return visits to Bournemouth 
stimulated a consideration of building among 
the pine trees.
127 MOTIVE 4: FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
As with the original East London project, it acted as both a statement and 
a portmanteau for devices and juxtapositions and, from a graphic point 
of view, demonstrated the usefulness of mixing scribbles into computer-
driven imagery.
Yet prompted by a return to Bournemouth, by way of the Drawing Studio 
we recently designed for its Arts University (2015; see Motive 3), I reawoke a 
nostalgia for the atmosphere of the pine trees and the pokey old arcades with 
the bric-a-brac of collective memory that now seems to reside in bland, brick 
apartment blocks that replace the bourgeois villas. Pine City (2014) has all the 
old bravado: a statement of frustration that the two towns of Bournemouth 
and Poole refuse to do the sensible thing and join up. It shows a continuous 
interest in the idea of a ‘waffle’ of ground, parking and infrastructure with a 
free-flowing park on its top surface and, inevitably, some muscle-flexing in the 
form of alternative tower or creep-up formations. The mood has returned to 
that of a ‘come on guys’ approach, which sorties outside London, Tokyo or Los 
Angeles always seems to goad me into.
In most of this, I feel the need for us to bring back the cheerfulness and 
romanticism of beaches and parks into the tasks of town planning, house 
building and office plotting. We need to take strength from the joy of 
inventions and devices and take on board, as does Andrew Walker with his 
architectural hack The Acid House (2014), the fruits of the digital world. 
The ordinary can metamorphose into the better.
opposite
Peter Cook, Pine City (2), 2014.
Attempting a combination of relatively high-
density housing while responding to the local 
ambience of large gardens, sea views and 
genteel tranquillity.
Andrew E Walker, The Acid House, 
London, 2014.
An acoustically interactive architectural 
‘hack’ which, through spatial feedback 
loops, enables occupants to compose 
and recondition their own sensory 
environments. An adaptive and deployable 
installation, it parasitically attaches to 
the site, amplifying the latent acoustic 
signatures of the surrounding spaces. The 
participants can explore and test new 
auditory–spatial relationships.
128 PETER COOK
MOTIVE 5
THE ENGLISH PATH
AND THE ENGLISH
NARRATIVE
130 PETER COOK
The 20th century saw the rise of a so-called International Style that was 
advocated by many leading Modernists, and it now can be said that much 
of our commercial and industrial architecture is ‘international’ – in that there 
are ubiquitous profiles, features or details that even defy climatic conditions. 
Yet it remains a characteristic of ‘thinking’ architecture that it involves a 
whole set of references and experiences on the part of the designer that are 
the circumstance of his or her location or culture. English and French Gothic 
cathedrals have idiosyncrasies that immediately distinguish the one from 
the other. The Norwegian use of wood is subtly different from the Swedish. 
But take such things through the distorting mirror of individual personality 
in a period of cultural emancipation and you have such figures as the famed 
architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) extolling the freedom of the Midwest 
and, in later life, the Far West of the USA with a rangy architecture that is 
almost impossible to transpose. Or think of the characteristic of 20th-century 
Madrid architects who have a great talent for internalising their architecture: 
great rooms with solid walls. Or Australian architecture that enjoys its 
verandahs and awnings and often uses tin roofs that are not far from those 
used on the sheep-stations of the Outback. Danish architects have a talent for 
modest groupings of houses, in warm red brick and reminiscent of the quiet 
Danish farms (perhaps challenged these days by the work of the Copenhagen-
based Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) practice which reacts away from such quiet 
cosiness). Architects around Los Angeles respond to the seismically loaded 
mountains with extraordinary wit that is perhaps as much to do with the ‘city 
of dreams’ in its other creative worlds. What are the secret references, as well as 
the circumstantial, and what do we choose to remember? 
If London has been the typical backdrop of most of my working life – both 
creative and academic – it has constantly been challenged by a mental map 
of an almost remembered land in which ideas for making a place fold in and 
out with real places. Add this to conversations with those around you and 
references or examples will be bounced around between almost any location 
previous spread
Peter Cook, group of six Arcadia ‘lifestyles’, an 
inhabitant of Arcadia ‘C’, 1978: detail.
131 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
or any (frequently misinterpreted) culture that might be used to reinforce a 
notion, or a train of thought. ‘It’s like when you dive down underground in 
freezing Montreal … or scurry into the mall that they’ve dug under Norwich 
Castle’ … and there you are, chatting away, invoking a scrambled set of 
references that revolve around the idea of digging into the ground in order 
to reassure everybody that it is a viable move or, better still, concocting 
another concept altogether. After a while these references take on a power in 
themselves, especially if they were actually experienced – that you were really, 
truly cold in Montreal and that you knew Norwich Castle rather well before 
and after they made the shopping mall. So it becomes clear that more and 
more internationaltravel has subconsciously influenced and developed my 
architectural vocabulary – especially its most visible aspects. 
Alongside and, over time, cutting across this kaleidoscope, I have come to 
recognise that some fundamental associations of ideas are somehow the 
product of a view of the world that had developed before all these travels. 
Perhaps they even become stronger as a steadying action against the danger 
of uncontrollable eclecticism, mass referencing and a heady and over-
cosmopolitan proliferation of values.
Peter Cook, Arcadia City, 1977: map.
An imaginary town with faint overtones of 
childhood in provincial England.
132 PETER COOK
RETURNING TO ARCADIA
Even in the 1970s the programme of my Arcadia City project was becoming 
affected by travel, so that, of the six ‘typical’ inhabitant groups, only two were 
consciously ‘English’, and the characterisation of all of them made constant 
reference to the psychological/societal context. Each of the six architectural 
scenarios was linked to a collage showing the typical inhabitants of the district. 
Yet simultaneously playing into the atmosphere and psychology of this project 
were some characteristically ‘English’ memories that could only have come from 
those moments in my past when the mood of my surroundings was restful, 
agreeable and special – combining a scenery that could constantly be recalled 
with a mixture of the pictorially complete and the nostalgically intense. Often 
it stemmed from a combination of walks in remembered towns or suburbs, 
traversing and exploring the public park or meandering around the garden.
Before embarking on the whole Arcadia City, I set out to define this 
remembered state in a single drawing that deliberately catalogued the key 
memories, but was grounded in the repeat, four times, of the Via Appia project 
described earlier in this volume (see Motive 2). 
In the Arcadia ‘A’ setting, the four villas are now fronted by a hedge that faces 
onto the street, with windows that obviously depict the continuation of the 
villa within an urban setting. It is behind the villas, however, that memory is 
invoked. A communal garden has the features of a park and an orchard, it is 
more romantic at one end and more open or bland at the other, and it contains 
trees. One or two of them are clearly inhabitable, and the whole ensemble 
is contained within a wall. Its propositions are in some ways childlike: the 
inhabited tree, the grotto, the lawn upon which one can play, or dream-like, 
the child can run among the trees of the orchard, or wander along an almost 
certainly calm and safe suburban street. Yet simultaneously the drawing 
is exploring architectural possibilities prompted by the romantic-to-calm 
programme or explorations of melting, folding, softening, diminishing and a 
suggestion of the survival of a ‘high-tech’ world too at the crest of the villas. 
133 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
Peter Cook, Arcadia ‘A’, 1976.
A generic project (in part derived from the Via 
Appia house of Cook and Hawley – see Motive 2) 
whereby a transition occurs within the ‘dwelling’ 
structures from defined to loose and the 
common garden behind contains trees that are 
(maybe) houses too.
Peter Cook, Arcadia ‘B’, 1977.
The quintessentially English quarter of the 
town: villas hide behind walls; cricket is played 
on the lawns.
134 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Arcadia ‘C’, 1977.
Containing a more hedonistic lifestyle within 
and an advertising screen as the street facade. 
One assumes that the undulating walls of the 
apartments are state-of-the-art.
Peter Cook, Arcadia ‘D’, 1977.
Straightforward lifestyle exists within a gridded 
set of courtyards, with the slightly wayward entry 
paths as the only diversion.
135 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
Subsequent projects would continue to explore these themes, often with 
similar mannerisms, and thus the whole drawing would continue as a constant 
reference for a long time. Not least among these was the Arcadia City itself, 
even at its extreme point when the long street with its seemingly hostile 
metal facades – leavened only by some more romantic morsels creeping out 
at the top – was ascribed to ‘New York types’. It features a tough, neurotic, 
uncompromising and edgy scenario, with the two girls in an uncomfortable 
triangle vis-à-vis the guy in the story, and the cynical ‘seen it all before’ face 
of the window cleaner. But follow the street up the hill and the quantity of 
steel sheet diminishes until the romantic morsels have effectively become the 
architecture. So all is well with the world: a quiet, soft suburbia is allowed to 
take over. The central theme of ‘liveable lofts’ was current in New York at that 
time and several friends lived in them, but they remained fascinating – yet alien. 
Across the street from the ‘lofts’ is another, even more urban, even more hybrid 
scenario. After all, the physiognomy of the building itself is hidden behind a 
series of giant advertising hoardings, and even when there is an incursion into 
the district, the hoardings continue. Only from the other side do we discover 
that the building is formed of horizontal striations of glass and the inhabitants 
are very modern, very urban, very hedonistic. Another drawing enters the 
apartment and reveals the fact that the party walls are translucent glass, the 
relatively small apartment has two bathrooms and the mannerism of the 
place is tuned towards the particular psychology of these people. Yet again, 
then, the ‘skin’ and the ‘body’ of the building are variously used as symbols of 
‘openness’ and ‘closedness’ or of transparency or translucency and as symbols 
of alternative worlds. 
Peter Cook, Arcadia ‘Lofts’, 1978.
Tough, sheet-steel walls fronting up 
apartments that are similar to ‘lofts’, but with 
some more romantic apartments just popping 
out on the skyline.
136 PETER COOK
It is in the next district that a self-conscious commentary upon ‘Englishness’ 
seems to demand a less radical architecture. So the high stone wall that hides 
most of the collegiate-like world of this safe and indulgent district allows only 
some thin (and, in this context, rather alarming) slivers of glasshouses to reach 
out. In the accompanying collage, the people within display several traits of 
anglicised bourgeois behaviour: the wine fetishism, the lack of ‘style’, the dog, the 
tea, the smugness of the kids. Moreover, some of the villas hide into the ground.
Of course there is a social scenario; how could there 
not be in 1970s Britain? So the family in the square-
gridded district are essentially far more proletarian 
and sensibly attired for the weather, with the correct 
number of children (two) and the symbolically 
national (sensible) car – the Mini. They are quite 
ready to live in a hygienic, disciplined system that 
nonetheless has a slightly quirky access route, 
offering just sufficient deviousness or particularity to 
enliven the scene.
In every way they contrast with the inhabitants of 
the peninsula. These are exposed in a heroic series 
of Christmas-pudding-shaped towers, revealed to be 
less solid than the pudding, since they are each cut 
into four by small paths. Indeed the whole peninsula 
Peter Cook, Arcadia ‘Mesh Marsh and 
Trickling Towers’, 1978.
Each tower is a cluster of four segments. The 
ground below is a matrix of water channels, 
hydroponic harvesting areas and trellises 
with vegetation.
137 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
is an almost École des Beaux-Arts examination of formality against informality. 
As you progress down from the neck of the land to the tip, the gardens 
progress from neat, almost French discipline towards naughty and finally 
rough-rocked indiscipline as you reach the estuary waters. Yet simultaneously, 
there is a counter-progression that operates for the buildings themselves 
as they start as crumbly and bubbly (above the neatnessbelow) and end as 
sleek and total (above the rocks). This notion of two counter-progressions, I 
used again in the Taipei Music Houses (2009; see Motive 4) – with a colour-
to-no-colour progression running counter to a straight-to-fluid progression. 
Then later in the Vienna Law Faculty (2014; see Motive 3) the dark-to-light 
progression upwards of the exterior is pitched counter to the light-to-dark 
progression of the interior carpets. But to get the whole picture we must look 
again at the collage: this time of an old couple of, perhaps, Viennese Jewish 
refugees, with an innate sense of style, many memories, elegant furniture and 
a definite need for high ceilings.
The plan form of the peninsula towers is used again on the final district – also 
out along the estuary, but now fringed by a strange, ambiguous landscape of 
semi-controlled marshland. Hydroponic husbandry, bulrushes, gently lapping 
water, small, marina-like pontoons or causeways linking taller, more ethereal, 
striped towers create its world. Facially, the inhabitants in the collage are not 
entirely English, are maybe students, and certainly look to be romantics and 
dreamers: fishing, contemplating, reading poetry. The towers are not exactly ivory 
in tone, but there is more than a hint of escapism out there among the marshes.
Therefore the usefulness of a broad, ‘portmanteau’ project is that of bouncing 
one proposition off against another. It also encourages the development of 
nuance – an underrated objective in design. It can thus be both discursive and 
experimental and at the same time have the dreamy quality of the reverie.
opposite
Peter Cook, ‘Sleeklucent’ apartment, 1978.
A typical apartment within Arcadia ‘C’, with the 
hedonistic party-going couple needing two 
bathrooms. Additional natural light is transmitted 
through the party walls.
Peter Cook, Arcadia ‘Peninsula 
Apartments’, 1979.
Towards the tip of the peninsula the clusters 
of four apartment-segments become 
formally simpler, while on the ground, the 
progression towards the end becomes more 
exotic and dramatic.
138 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, group of six ‘lifestyles’, the 
inhabitants of Arcadia ‘B’, 1978.
Peter Cook, group of six ‘lifestyles’, the 
inhabitants of Arcadia ‘C’, 1978.
Peter Cook, group of six Arcadia ‘lifestyles’, the 
inhabitants of the peninsula, 1978.
139 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
Peter Cook, group of six Arcadia ‘lifestyles’, the 
inhabitants of the ‘Lofts’, 1978.
Peter Cook, group of six Arcadia ‘lifestyles’, the 
inhabitants of the ‘Trickling Towers’, 1978.
Peter Cook, group of six Arcadia ‘lifestyles’, an 
inhabitant of Arcadia ‘C’, 1978.
140 PETER COOK
THE PASTORAL
Much stems from the fact that I have only for short periods slept without a 
nearby tree or two outside my window. Such a condition suggests both a 
reassurance and a reminder that my preferred state is one where the enclosure 
is surely cosseted by the softness and mystery of the ‘garden’. Moreover, such 
a garden is the immediate part of a preferred context: of gently rolling land, 
with a constant intermixing of the constructed, invented, hybridised, folded-in 
artefact into a vegetated world that has long been manipulated by humans, 
but cannot of course escape the natural laws and systems of its growth and 
sustenance. Couple this with a distaste and discomfort (bordering on the 
psychotic) of barren territories such as deserts or sparsely populated open 
country as well as extremes such as mountains, cliffs or unmitigated grid-
towns with cliffs of tall buildings. Add in an unreasonable fear of total, dusty, 
chaos (such as you find in, say, Cairo) and you have limits of tolerance that 
surely ally with limits of vocabulary, since I am always aware of the experiential 
aspect of a design. 
The manipulation of the English countryside by sophisticated meddling with 
nature has led to that territory that lies between room-making and gardening. 
In the years around 1740 at Rousham House near Oxford, for instance, 
the architect and landscape designer William Kent established a series of 
enclosures that use hedges, bowers, ponds, walks and the occasional heroic 
set-piece that can be architectural or as delicate as pitching a lace-like wooden 
shelter in a special juxtaposition with a garden seat. Intriguingly, the best of 
these gardens involve water as the additional or referencing element – as 
befits a damp island with a myriad of streams and rivers. If Rousham responds 
to the meandering of the River Cherwell in some of its sets, we can also indulge 
in the extended formula whereby a larger patch of water is the reference 
for a totally pictorial ensemble, as at Stourhead in Wiltshire. If instigated by 
Colen Campbell in the 1720s, it sustained its picturesque intentions through 
William Kent, Rousham Gardens, 
Oxfordshire, 1741. 
A watercourse is manipulated via a series of 
exotic, almost hidden waterfalls within a series of 
exquisite pieces of theatrical gardening. 
141 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
a series of architects and gardeners who surely subscribed to the notion 
of manipulated vegetation and the deft – if theatrical – insertion of follies, 
pavilions and bridges, with most of all a pictorial agenda for the choice of trees 
and their disposition.
Yet even in more modest villages and indeed a few city edges and suburbs 
there is the instinct to set up a gently intertwined relation between the 
softness of the flow of land and the scale of the ‘local’ that can absorb the 
event of a grand moment: the tall church in the village, the large block in 
among the trees or the railway viaduct set into a valley. In listening to music 
I can find clues: what is it that Frederick Delius, Arnold Bax, Ralph Vaughan 
Williams or Michael Tippett share? Surely it is that disarming lyricism written 
over a certain tonality that seduces you by its comfort – and then suddenly 
twists or bursts into a questioning sequence that will nonetheless be resolved 
back into the general mode before the piece is over. With this in mind, there is 
however a nagging reference (also taken from my own predilections), wherein 
the music of Jean Sibelius sets up a level of mystery laid upon inventiveness 
that, even if it lies well beyond his alcoholism and the misty lakes among the 
trees of southern Finland, haunts the English. In parallel I find myself reaching 
out to an intangible territory of water, undergrowth, forests and mist – itself 
reinterpreted as ambiguity.
Henry Hoare, Palladian Bridge, Stourhead, 
Wiltshire, 1762 (gardens by Colen Campbell, 
William Benson and Henry Flitcroft).
On a much larger scale than Rousham and 
evoking a strong, almost painterly consideration 
of choice of trees and placement of architectural 
elements together. 
142 PETER COOK
143 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
opposite top
Peter Cook, Veg House, Stage 1, 1996.
A sheltered triangular space with some armatures 
that are ready to receive growth.
above
Peter Cook, Veg House, Stage 3, 1996.
An acceleration of the vegetation process plus 
the introduction of hybrid elements such as 
‘hi-fi bushes’, etc.
opposite bottom
Peter Cook, Veg House, Stage 2, 1996.
Vegetation begins to creep in; some house 
components change format.
VEG HOUSE
With this in mind, I found myself moving beyond the marshlands of the 
Arcadia City and involved in a metamorphic sequence named Veg House. Set 
in six stages conceived in 1996 and 2001, it takes a simple cleft in a hill and 
places a triangular canopy over it. At the apex is the location of the power plant 
and services. In the first stage, there is a relaxed layout, with the enclosure 
clearly articulated and a few pieces of shrubbery allowed to enter it. Already, 
though, by the second stage, the shrubs have taken advantage of some useful 
armatures and even the kitchen has become involved in vegetation. The basic 
elementshave moved around somewhat and the power pack is now smaller 
and more efficient.
With the third stage there is an escalation in the number of artefacts and 
growths. Some meander across the underside of the canopy, as the vinery 
starts to develop. Some elements wander around as part of a system of audio 
devices. Some are hybrids between furniture and enclosure or furniture and 
vegetation. The power pack is updated and shrinking further. By the time of 
the fourth stage, the filigree nature of many of the growths is replacing the 
chunky hedges and the language is increasingly that of nuance, ambiguity 
and the hybrid. 
144 PETER COOK
opposite bottom
Peter Cook, Veg House, Stage 6, 2001.
The final stage wherein the exotica seem to 
have taken over.
opposite top
Peter Cook, Veg House, Stage 5, 2001.
Further thoughts developed nearly five years after 
the first Veg House series suggest a more exotic 
future with even more strange hybrids.
Not since the days of Archigram in the 1960s and 1970s had I felt the need 
to write key words into the drawing, setting the atmosphere or ‘tone’ of the 
place. ‘Slope and fold’ and ‘weave’ are there to suggest the motion of the 
development: a placid and imperceptible motion, but a motion nonetheless. 
Almost insidious but certainly Romantic – hence the mention also of the 
word ‘glade’.
My fascination with searching out territory that lies beyond the familiar is 
by now on the line. With the fifth stage (drawn four years later than the first 
four), I deliberately let go of most of the rules and constraints. The hybrids 
and enclosures are not even replacements – though again, the clues lie in the 
conditioners: ‘wet’, ‘friendly’, ‘intense’, ‘hidden’. These, however, hardly prepare 
us for the sixth stage. This last is perhaps an exercise in exotica – though 
the territories are stated. The language is floral rather than vegetational and 
the project must, by necessity, stop there. In a sense it has got ‘out of hand’; 
a necessary stage, nonetheless. It would be too comforting to rest in the 
apparent gentility of stages one or two.
Peter Cook, Veg House, Stage 4, 1996.
A continuation of the process with texts evoking 
the atmospheric and ‘romantic’ nature of this 
stage of metamorphosis.
145 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
146 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Veg Village, 1997.
A series of ‘veg houses’ intertwine along with a 
marshland-inspired overlay of vegetation and 
built solid, drifting plantation, hydroponics, paths 
and watercourses. 
At this point I utilised the Veg House as a trigger (or reference) for investigating 
the marshland once again. A conglomerate of Veg Houses with a deliberately 
mixed set of geometries are taken through three stages of metamorphosis 
in which the boundaries of ‘built structure’ and, indeed, their definitions 
are interwoven. The ambiguity of what is enclosure or what is plantation is 
augmented by the suggestion that much of that which is growing is also 
feeding: that the vegetation is edible vegetation, fruit-bearing to an extent 
that the vines of the Veg House seem rather incidental. Necessary to this 
is therefore the interweaving of many watercourses, but instinctively such 
watercourses implode to hint, rather strongly, that the whole territory is 
a crypto-marshland. Once again, the edge of the tolerable, the almost 
unthinkable is being toyed with.
However, the fundamental attraction to the softly intertwining has to be 
read against memories of tree-lined walkways in the Hertfordshire town of 
Letchworth (my home at the age of 12 to 13), of Bournemouth on England’s 
South Coast (my home from the age of 15 to 21) and many perambulations 
along the boulevards of Frankfurt, Tel Aviv – and any other city that has 
tree-lined paths. In the case of Bournemouth, the notion of the ‘healthy 
stroll’ was circumstantially linked to a topography that features small, steep 
valleys cutting through the cliffs, along minute watercourses, vegetated by 
the planting of pine trees in the 19th century and massaged into becoming 
picturesque walks. The linearly planned Central Pleasure Gardens of 
Bournemouth are a longer version of the same, where (and here is a clue) 
various formal devices such as water towers and set-piece enclosures are 
inserted among the vegetation. The idea of meandering at a gentle pace along 
a line that is not straight and direct sets up a condition of reverie rather than 
purposefulness, and suits the English psychology well. 
147 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
Later, influenced by Alison and Peter Smithson’s discussion of ‘greenways’ and 
the notion of pedestrian routes that act in a ‘tartan grid’ relationship with a 
main orthogonal street pattern, they seemed a logical and attractive addition 
to any urban vocabulary. Yet there was something else that was triggered 
by my interest in the Smithsons: namely, a predilection for paths, decks and 
routes that meandered – admittedly as a series of short linear runs between 
points, but meandered nonetheless. That this became the preferred geometry 
of such linking systems favoured by their generation – including by Jack Lynn 
and Ivor Smith at Park Hill in Sheffield (1961), by Howell Killick Partridge & Amis 
in several projects, and by James Stirling and James Gowan on occasion – 
influenced us younger English architects. The meanders could, if applied to 
a piece of linear city, encourage the association with the branches of a tree. 
It could be thought of together with the narrative structure of much English 
writing, in which there is no direct line towards or polemic, but rather a series 
of meandering moves forward with innumerable asides for incidents, subplots 
or even non sequiturs. Boredom or romance? It was hard to tell.
Central Pleasure Gardens, Bournemouth, 1860.
A small stream that gives its name to the town is 
a meticulous progression from play pools at the 
seaward end, to municipal gardening outside the 
town hall, gentle meadowland with good trees 
(here) and then a wilderness a mile further inland.
148 PETER COOK
THE ENGLISH ART OF IMPLIED OBSERVATION
Yet there is undoubtedly a link between all of this and a conscious irritation 
with ‘obviousness’, ‘full-frontality’ or the direct answer. In the best English 
critical writing the matter in hand is taken up: pushed, pulled and frequently 
diverted; not necessarily dissected in the French manner, but kneaded into 
a set of implied observations (again spattered with asides) which have to be 
interpreted by the reader or listener. Immensely involving for those who are 
English, puzzling and irritating for those who are not.
It is fascinating, therefore, to see the Romantic tradition of the wayward move 
forward at the hands of much younger, but quintessentially English architects: 
Laura Allen and Mark Smout, who make an almost perverse alliance between 
mechanistic invention and decay in order to track a ‘Retreating Village’ 
(Happisburgh, Norfolk, 2005). Its pieces of houses and armatures depend upon 
an ever-responding system of winches, pulleys, rails and counterweights that 
mimic techniques for hauling boats up the shore. Crazy and observational 
at the same time, with – as it happens – a Smithsons-like attraction towards 
the gawky near-diagonal, it is simultaneously nostalgic, melancholic and yet 
energetic. Ready to become an inspiration to yet younger architects with 
enough talent to depart from the current and puritan mood of considering 
only what is absolutely necessary.
Gavin Robotham also comes from Norfolk and is a close friend of Allen and 
Smout. Yet his Norfolk is that of the Broads: that curious set of man-made 
lakes that are flooded clay pits in a flat territory that is already marshland. 
Together we were invited to make a project for the Venice Biennale of 2006 
(see Motive 4) and instinctively wanted to comment upon London, but with 
the deliberate intention of discovering somenew urban typologies: some to 
do with housing; several to do with that almost lost territory, the backyard 
workshop; and one or two looking at the role of the parasitic element. 
Mark Smout and Laura Allen, Retreating Village, 
Happisburgh, Norfolk, 2005.
The encroachment of the sea is taken as 
the trigger for a sophisticated act of near-
choreography of constructed parts.
149 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
Indeed, the whole project – ranging over a five-by-five-mile square – was 
itself a parasitic system, for nowhere was there more than a block or two of 
building being proposed.
If marshland was for me an intellectual concept, it was for Gavin his inherited 
playground; but either way it served as an underlying reference for thinking 
about this territory adjoining the marshy Lea Valley. True, there were dreary 
streets to infiltrate and run-down high streets to reinvigorate. There must 
be dwellings provided and event-spaces created. Yet the marshland analogy 
suggested that growing things should be a major feature.
As we started to implant new or extra 
structures along the high streets, we began 
to dangle vegetation over them as much 
as we inserted studios or eyries – especially 
from the higher buildings. Little insertions 
that were work sheds, small factories, studios 
or offices crept along every crevice. Once 
again the vegetation suggested a conscious 
approach towards edible plantation. Inspired 
by some vertical wall-frames of vineyards 
that I had seen at Bad Kreuznach in Germany, 
these began to infiltrate the more urbanised 
territory alongside a series of reassessed 
‘orchards’ in which dwellings could be tucked 
in among the ordered rows of trees.
Gavin drew inspiration from the leaf-like pads 
of sand that occur in East Anglian estuaries 
at low tide, setting out a landscape of gently 
curving edges with unexpected interruptions 
Marshes on the Norfolk Broads.
Ambiguously half-land, half-water within this 
set of lakes created from peat works in the 
14th century.
Marshes on Foulness Island (near 
Southend), Essex.
A more solid example of half-land, half-water. 
150 PETER COOK
151 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
of built form. His ability to draw infested territories of space that seemed 
to suggest enclosure and activity, but never reminiscent of any dwelling or 
workplace that you had ever seen, lent a special winsomeness to the scheme. 
That our drawing styles differ and our figure-forms are inevitably traceable 
seemed to complement the general proposition. In any case it served us well 
as a source of referencing later work, as had Arcadia in its time.
In the end, I crave an opportunity to put this Romanticism to use – even 
subconsciously to take a small piece of England into another, albeit friendly 
country. The opportunity seemed to present itself to Gavin and me in 2009 in 
the form of a project to convert an intact villa in the centre of Madrid: opposite 
the main library, with the tantalising option of building onto a flank wall of 
the adjoining building. It could become a boutique-scaled department store. 
Moreover the villa could be retained, but held in an entirely vegetated dish, 
with the extension wing forming a three-sided bush. Inevitably a watercourse 
would be generated along the rim of the villa, and three glass bridges would 
leap across between the two main structures. The garden and the city brought 
together. Waterfalls at salient points creating a sound-signature for each 
bridge, that completed the reverie. Since it coincided with the crash in the 
Spanish economy, this version did not happen: yet the ambition to intertwine 
the building into the garden or the garden into the building survives from the 
moment of ‘Arcadia A’, via the other meanderings to the present day.
opposite
CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau), 
Madrid villa, 2009: axonometric.
A 19th-century villa is flanked by a vegetated 
‘casket’ (partly occupied) and separated from it 
by a watercourse that gently drops via a small 
waterfall, crossed by bridges, creating a miniature 
shopping centre.
Patrick Blanc, vertical garden of CaixaForum 
(architects Herzog & de Meuron), Madrid, 2007.
Blanc is the leading exponent of vegetated walls 
that, as here, display almost a tectonic range of 
plant types and surfaces. 
152 PETER COOK
Kirsty Sarah Williams, Ivrea Natural History 
Museum, Unit 17, Bartlett School of 
Architecture, University College London (UCL), 
London, 2014.
Suggesting a self-making architecture, powered 
by the melting waters of the Alps.
153 MOTIVE 5: THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
One can take a certain delight in the existence, in hot and dusty Madrid, of 
the French botanist Patrick Blanc’s intensely (and beautifully maintained) 
vegetated walls. At the same time, the effect of natural growth, whether 
‘landscaped’ or more insidiously creeping into the whole substance of a piece 
of architecture, is clearly inspiring young architects, such as Adam Casey 
and Kirsty Sarah Williams, both former students at the Bartlett School of 
Architecture, University College London.
The heady combination of delight, love, cynicism and nostalgia will 
undoubtedly make Bartlett student Nick Elias’s 2014 project for ‘PoohTown’ 
puzzling for those from more pragmatic architectural cultures. If the English 
way of storytelling is often riddled with asides, subplots, detailed description 
of minor characters, reveries upon a particular moment or scene, it is not 
much given to rhetoric. The English are wary of polemic, yet much of the 20th 
century in architecture was shouted 
from the rooftops. Modernism, 
Rationalism and Minimalism all 
have a clear ring about them. 
They are insistent, exclusive of 
those who stop in their tracks or 
dream – and are particularly hard 
on those who break ranks. Self-
conscious Regionalism can be a 
bore sometimes, but there is a 
wonderful mandate for byways of 
culture that are far more to do with 
observation and experience – and 
inevitably place – and that together 
are far more sophisticated than 
the standard fashionable views of 
architectural critics.
Adam Casey, Digital Reconstruction of 
Forgotten Landscapes, Invisible Landscape, Unit 
22, Bartlett School of Architecture, University 
College London (UCL), London, 2013.
Crossing the hitherto sacred lines of the real, 
the imagined, the digitally summonable and 
(perhaps) the solid to vegetational.
Nick Elias, PoohTown Bottles Embarking, Unit 
10, Bartlett School of Architecture, University 
College London (UCL), London, 2014.
A vision of a ‘happy town’ deliberately located at 
Slough – an English town near London, noted for 
its boringness.
154 PETER COOK
MOTIVE 6
NEW PLACES
AND STRANGE
BEDFELLOWS
156 PETER COOK
The challenge lies here: does one stay constantly in a state of reverie, with 
thoughts dwelling on things that are familiar, local or nostalgic? Or does one 
live in a parallel state of exhaustion of ideas followed by diversion, distraction 
or displacement activity? Secretly craving the existence of a happy state of 
well-ordered society buoyed up with pleasant, delightful distractions, or 
living in the bubble of the England of a selectively remembered early 1970s? 
Yet there is no doubt that when designing or even when observing, there is 
a certain unspoken referencing that lies just between amnesia and laziness 
which often wishes that the alien and the contradictory would just lie down, 
go away and be reasonable.
Coming up to London as a provincial youth of 21, I already faced a world of 
so many unknowns that my ability to detail-out a small building paled in 
the face of it all. Added to this was the effect of an avid reader’s fascination 
with all these exotic forms and 
almost unpronounceable names: 
attraction to hinted-at worlds 
and a delight that they brought 
to the narrow (though festering) 
atmosphere of late 1950s England.First, I discovered the Brazilian 
landscape architect Roberto 
Burle Marx’s swirling patches 
of vegetation wrapping around 
exotic, brightly coloured solids. 
Then I came across Oscar 
Niemeyer, Carlos Raúl Villanueva, 
Ricardo Porro and Juan O’Gorman 
who somehow all conspired to 
suggest that out there in Latin 
Roberto Burle Marx, Ministry of Health and 
Education roof garden, Rio de Janeiro, 1938.
Typical Burle Marx patterning that brings the 
whole ground – both planted and harder-surface 
– together as a single composition and held by his 
characteristically lyrical lines. 
previous spread
Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, Kunsthaus Graz, 
Austria, 2003: cutaway diagram detail.
157 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Oscar Niemeyer, Church of St Francis of Assisi, 
Pampulha, Brazil, 1943.
Decades ahead of its time, the simplicity of the 
shell concrete profile focused and held by an 
unequivocal, tiled concentration of imagery.
Gunnar Asplund, Paradise restaurant, 
Stockholm Exhibition, 1930.
Delicious lightness and delicacy as well as 
transparency, the author’s continual inspiration 
over six decades.
158 PETER COOK
Juan O’Gorman, Central Library of the National 
Autonomous University of Mexico, Coyoacán, 
Mexico City, 1950.
The building composition may be regular 
Modernist stuff, but the total mural becomes – 
actually – the architecture.
159 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
America lay the real, exciting ‘Modern’. These new discoveries leapfrogged 
the fascination that I already had felt for Gunnar Asplund and the white 
concrete Swedes: especially the Asplund of the Paradise restaurant at the 1930 
Stockholm Exhibition, where the sailing canvas canopies that swirled around 
a magically light-seeming structure had suggested that the solid, plodding 
reasonableness of English architecture was not where it was at.
But if Asplund could be magical, these South Americans (for I had not yet 
learned to discriminate between Central and South America) existed on the 
back of exotic sounds, did they not? Those English coffee bars of the 1950s 
were relishing the samba, the Mexican straw hat and the odd guitar that 
somehow merged into visions of a fearless white concrete architecture sitting 
there behind palm trees. 
You may note that in these Modernist ravings, I have made no mention of Le 
Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe or Frank Lloyd Wright. After all, as a 16-year-old I 
had read Le Corbusier’s When the Cathedrals Were White (first published in 
French in 1937), and as a 20-year-old had made a student design for a Miesian 
school and been simultaneously amused by tales of Wright’s private life lived 
under his ‘Usonian’ drifting eaves. You simply could not escape these three 
who dominated – almost smothered – the discussion of architecture. So it was 
natural for the ambitious or the creatively curious to look beyond. 
The Magnet bar and club, Liverpool, UK.
Quintessentially from that weird English 
period, the 1950s.
160 PETER COOK
161 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Furthermore, Le Corbusier was so clearly part of that mood in British art circles 
of the time, where the Parisian cultural scene was still held in awe. Take a look 
at the MARS Group’s brave exhibition of English Modern architecture in 1938, 
or delve into the origins of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts with the 
close personal networking of its founders linking in to Picasso and Braque: it 
was all just a little too acquiescent. Then there was the correctness and almost 
formulaic dominance of Mies, who appealed to those clean, mathematical 
types, who also admired American productionism – for after all, Mies was 
there, inspiring Eero Saarinen and Thomas Dolliver Church in the rational and 
repetitive language of their General Motors Technical Center of 1949. And 
Wright seemed somehow to be part of the world of preachers, Western movies, 
brick and dark wood, a mixture of weird lifestyle and down-home arrogance. 
Ultimately, I would come to see many of their works, being bored and 
disappointed by some but returning again and again to others – often 
dragging students behind me, thus doing my duty towards their genius, as had 
my own teachers. Yet such heroic work can never quite satiate the restlessness 
of the ambitious, the searcher for less obvious inspiration. Or is it simply that 
these guys were overexposed, rendered tedious by insistence and repetition? 
With a little money from the Architectural Association I went to the Brussels 
Expo of 1958 and stood inside Le Corbusier’s Philips Pavilion, cold, puzzled and 
even irritated by the Xenakis music, feeling it to be an extension of all those 
French art films: all so self-consciously avant-garde, pleased with itself and not 
quite architectural enough. At the same time I knew that the Atomium, 
designed for the event by the Belgian engineer André Waterkeyn, was 
intellectually lightweight but likeable in a popular, corny kind of way. Even so 
the general atmosphere of the other pavilions, edging their ways towards a 
developed Modernism – such as Sverre Fehn’s Norwegian Pavilion – did whet 
my general enthusiasm. If Belgium was too similar to England, Germany seemed 
just different enough to be comfortably observable and therefore challenging, 
in the surprising forms of Rudolf Schwarz’s churches that I looked at next. 
Sverre Fehn, Norwegian Pavilion, Brussels 
Expo, 1958. 
At once referential towards Norwegian wood 
and announcing Fehn’s typical sensitive 
handling of light.
opposite
Mural depicting the needs of leisure, MARS 
Group Exhibition, New Burlington Galleries, 
London, 1938.
England tiptoeing into the Modern – with a 
characteristic sweetness and hint of the Romantic.
162 PETER COOK
EXPERIENCING AMERICA
Years later, my eventual introduction to a really new culture – that of the 
United States – in 1968 was softened and at the same time energised by the 
enthusiasm of a neighbour: Reyner Banham. He became a close friend, who 
showed his Super 8 films during his and his wife’s Friday night soirées, with 
loose asides that became, inevitably, the book Los Angeles: The Architecture 
of Four Ecologies (1971). Of course this was overlaid by the accumulated 
enthusiasm for things American among most of my fellow members of the 
Archigram group, with Warren Chalk and Ron Herron regularly buying their ‘Ivy 
League’ suits from Austin’s in Shaftesbury Avenue, David Greene immersed in 
issues of the Evergreen Review, and the impact of the ‘New American Painting’ 
show at the Tate Gallery in 1959 – which included (among others) Willem de 
Kooning, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and my personal 
favourite, Clyfford Still – underscored by my own exposure to American movies 
since the age of four. To our generation, this mattered far more than Paris; 
and through the alchemy of Archigram – with our combination of postwar 
technological fascination, our admiration of Buckminster Fuller (who one 
day came to tea with us), and the traffic of American heroes (Charles and Ray 
Eames, Richard Meier, Buckminster Fuller, Craig Ellwood) passing through the 
Banhams’ apartment – Americana welled up as an imperative. This more or 
less coincided with a childlike attachment to robots, which often featured in 
Archigram conversations. Surely Archigram was 40 per cent American Dream, 
30 per cent Meccano and 30 per cent sheer weirdness.
The reality, arriving at UCLA and on the Los Angeles ground, was further 
reinforced by its clear role as a desired destination for Europeans. If the English 
writers of scripts, the Viennese composers of soundtracks and the German 
directors of the movies came there for a chance to shine, so had many more to 
build their dreams on the Hollywood Hills. Moreover I was flanked on one side 
by Ron Herron, who had arrived a year before, and on the other by Arata Isozaki, 
Martin Stern, Jr, Ships Coffee Shop, Wilshire 
Boulevard, Westwood,Los Angeles, 1958 
(demolished 1984).
Full-on ‘Googie’ style – at that time the West Coast 
just ‘did it’.
163 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
and together we assiduously worked our way every second day of three months 
through the buildings suggested by David Gebhart’s Guide to Architecture in 
Los Angeles and Southern California (1967), meeting Mr and Mrs Lovell as they 
crept around their damp-smelling but famous beach house in Newport (1926, 
by Rudolf Schindler) or paying homage to Konrad Wachsmann at the helm of 
his universal joint model, which he demonstrated to Ron Herron and me in his 
room at the University of Southern California in 1968.
This more than anything, was the essential ‘postgraduate’ experience (while 
actually being on the faculty). The special mixture of friends, informed and 
enthusiastic build-up, extraordinary combination of people and – not to be 
underestimated – the cheekiness that you have as somebody young but 
extensively published and discussed at the time. Every door opened, as we 
collectively felt that we were there with colleagues in some Great Tradition of 
architectural experiment. Ironic – yet probably germane – was the fact that 
my drawing of an ‘Instant City: Located in an English Field’ (1969) was made 
while sitting in Westwood Village, Los Angeles, and some of the Instant City’s 
components might well have been purloined down on Venice Beach, but the 
idea remained inspired by a very English combination of make-do-and-mend 
attitude and the travelling circus.
Vintage tinplate robots on display at HOMI, 
home international show, Milan, Italy, 20 
January 2014.
The 1950s and 1960s robots were funny, silly and 
comfortable harbingers of the future.
164 PETER COOK
Itsuko Hasegawa, Shonandai Culture Centre, 
Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan, 1990.
An exotic composition, bursting with ideas and 
an irrepressible originality, waiting now for a later 
generation to comprehend its brilliance.
165 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Once the idea had set in that Los Angeles was but the playpen of 
generations of nutty Europeans and then the playpen of crazy guys from 
other parts of the USA (just check out the birthplaces of Eric Owen Moss, 
Thom Mayne, Neil Denari and the Canadian, Frank Gehry), it fed back, almost 
insidiously, into the work. It was an incentive to work intensively, rather than 
a challenge. We all took some of ourselves with us and, through building 
or teaching or conversation, left something of ourselves there, in LA. Since 
then hardly any piece of design has trickled out without some Angeleno 
conversation in there, somewhere.
A TASTE OF JAPAN
Exposure to Japan followed in 1978, with Arata Isozaki as the host – so 
creating, in a sense, a ‘bridge’ from Los Angeles. Its architecture of flimsiness 
fitted well with the Archigram background of expendability. There was also 
immediate empathy with the Japanese fascination with robots, gadgets 
and toys overlaying their culture of calm, elegance, contemplation and 
honour, and in our shared experience of a damp island, with narrow roads 
and a studied tradition of wayward departure from the culture of the nearby 
mainland, as well as the shared English or Japanese humour of cruelty, 
silliness and inventiveness. Even now, Isozaki and I still talk about it – coursing 
over the paradoxes of chaos infiltrated by order, or the architecture of the 
discreet insertion. Yet the observer of an honoured culture can also be a 
magpie, appropriating tricks of the trade. I noted the skill of the Japanese in 
joining things together, their ingenuity with tiny pieces of wood or folded 
aluminium or moving parts and, most tellingly, the layering of skins, screens 
or translucent layers. 
Peter Cook, Instant City, 1969: elevation.
Referring to England, but drawn in Los Angeles 
and (maybe) subconsciously egged on by the 
naughty stuff down the street in LA.
166 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Christine Hawley and Ron 
Herron, Hamburg Land-Pier, Hamburg, 
Germany, 1986.
The English meandering line meets the 
delicate megastructure or ‘string of beads’ 
compositional ploy?
167 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
That a language of contemplation and symbolism played such a major role 
in the design of Kyoto’s palace and temple gardens, and that versions of 
such a language underscored so many Japanese procedures, was the actual 
revelation that stopped me in my tracks. Projects such as the Frankfurt 
Westhafen vertical museum or its clone, the Kawasaki Information City 
(both 1986; see Motive 4), could not have existed without borrowing – or 
reinterpreting – a Japanese sense of placing, then distancing, and then 
proceeding between a conscious combination of discreet and focused objects.
BACK IN EUROPE
The Arcadia City (1977; see Motive 5) had needed an imagined river estuary in 
order to embed its various enclaves, but by 1986 in a project made together 
with Ron Herron and Christine Hawley for Hamburg was able to respond to 
the estuary of the Elbe river and the Elbe park (formed by the old ramparts) 
and created an armature that could welcome a ‘land-pier’. This was an idea 
that Ron and I had concocted way back in 1970 for the Bournemouth Steps 
project but was now inspired as well by the activity and even the physiognomy 
of Hamburg as a port with wharves and shipbuilding docks, so that a raised 
walkway off which various recreational pavilions could be strung rides the land 
and become part of a three-dimensional riverside and eventually a form of 
‘beached ship’ in itself.
Eugenius Birch, Eastbourne pier, Eastbourne, 
East Sussex, UK, 1872 (partially destroyed).
A traditional pier that is inspiration for the 
Hamburg Land-Pier.
168 PETER COOK
Perhaps it is the German cities that have been most fruitful in stimulating my 
taste for ‘localised megastructure’ as an approach. For already in 1979 Christine 
and I had made a project for the southern part of downtown Stuttgart in which 
a steep valley could stimulate the insertion of an inhabited viaduct. Later, 
fleshing out my residence in Frankfurt as Professor of Architecture, there was 
a whole series of large-scale insertions: the Westhafen as vertical museum; 
the interstitial area between Frankfurt and Offenbach as an open site itching 
to become – in my terminology – a ‘Real City’ (1986); or the tiny island in the 
River Main that slips under the Alte Brücke in central Frankfurt as a continually 
recommended site for heroic student projects. Or the western end of West 
Berlin’s grand street – the Kurfürstendamm – which became a rhetorical 
invitation to place a weird chunk of development that was conceptually about 
Americana but interpretationally about the idea of parasite architecture and 
creeping bio-vegetation.
Could I, would I, have been as radical (or cavalier) with an English city? 
Somehow I fought shy of making hypothetical insertions into London or 
Bristol or Norwich, and it has taken another three decades for me to return to 
Bournemouth with a similarly tough attitude towards urban insertion. Was 
there a very particular quality of the German city that appealed? Was it to 
do with a culture that was just sufficiently different from my own to intrigue, 
but not so different as to scare or puzzle or challenge my instincts? Was it too 
about the fascination that Germany had held since that 1958 first visit, that the 
role of architecture and urbanism carried with it certain imperatives – difficult 
to express in an English context? Was it the product of my own reading of 
the heroics of German architecture of the 1920s and 1930s, or the stimulus 
of lectures about urbanism by Arthur Korn at the Architectural Association 
– a man who had, after all, chaired work on the MARS Plan for London and 
brought Berlin thinking directly over to us?
Peter Cook, Frankfurt Westhafen/Real City, 
Germany, 1986: villas district.
The large-scale ‘villas’ are in effect carcasses forthe insertion of almost any type of apartment 
architecture, thus giving the district a coherence. 
Backyard industry and integral parkland are the 
other main components.
169 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Another parallel conversation came from the Netherlands and its mixture with 
the English ‘meandering path’, as there emerged the idea of the linear city – 
or ‘urban fingers’, as I had described them in the sixth issue of the Archigram 
pamphlet (1965). The trajectory of a strong or highly identifiable carrier-idea 
seemed to demand a certain amount of rhetoric, and subconsciously I could 
almost hear myself incant the kind of headlines or phrases that might have 
come from a mainland-European manifesto: ‘the Line’, ‘the Force-Field’, ‘the 
Core’ … ‘The Tower’ would come later.
Yet certain concepts seem to be rendered fragile or even ridiculous when 
applied to the wrong type of context, so imagine my amazement and despair 
when I arrived in a beach town near Salvador de Bahia in 1987 to give a lecture 
in what was conspicuously a rip-off of my Plug-in City structure (1964; see 
Motive 4). On the other hand, imitation of my 1963 Montreal Tower project 
that was assumed by observers of the tower designed by Kiyonori Kikutake for 
the 1970 Expo in Osaka worries me far less by way of a curious logic, in which 
my esteem for Kikutake’s work both before and after the tower – especially 
during the Metabolist period – gives implicit exchange of ideas a certain 
170 PETER COOK
Kiyonori Kikutake, Expo Tower, Expo ’70, 
Osaka, Japan, 1970.
Tighter and more consistent than the author’s 
Montreal Tower project of 1963 (with which 
it has often been compared), but equally 
fascinated by triangulation.
171 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
legitimacy and respect. He was an ally, and allies should swap ideas. So after a 
while one builds up a complex mixture of inspirations, flashbacks, association 
of ideas with places, strange and inconsistent assumptions of aptness or 
non-aptness that are the product of endless exposure to architecture in 
many places, architectural conversations in many cities and visits to buildings 
accompanied by their authors.
At a certain point you build up a rule-of-thumb value system. You become 
a fan of some, a crony of others and (as historian Adrian Forty put it in a 
conversation I had with him in 2000) an architectural trainspotter. 
Returning to Hamburg again for a 
1986 workshop session of a ‘hot’ 
team consisting of Christine Hawley, 
CJ Lim, Gavin Robotham and myself, 
there was this time a simple and 
proscribed site and brief, and by now 
a sense of the toughness overlaid by 
a sense of the Romantic in some of 
the best Hamburg buildings such as 
the Chilehaus (1924, by Fritz Höger). A 
cliff rose above and behind our dart-
shaped site. This little office block 
became a tight vessel that faced 
the busy estuary. The rear was a solid, back to back with the solid cliff, and the 
nose was very pointed – two eccentric conditions. The egg-shaped auditorium 
we dubbed the ‘beaver’, and the top part of the widest end the ‘fried egg’, 
since that is what they looked like. Gavin and I concocted the solid elevation 
as a carefully sculpted, almost riven mass and to this day regard it as our most 
satisfying elevational form: an urban object that could directly bounce off the 
determinants of the site; a red object for a red-pink city.
Peter Cook, Christine Hawley, Gavin Robotham 
and CJ Lim, offices in Hamburg, Germany, 1995: 
rear elevation.
The river-facing front that hangs off from the 
solid wall behind.
Peter Cook, Christine Hawley, Gavin Robotham 
and CJ Lim, offices in Hamburg, Germany, 1995: 
model view.
The first elevation to be designed by Peter Cook 
and Gavin Robotham together, the solid backdrop 
facing a solid cliff.
172 PETER COOK
It was the third of a quick run of three competitions in which its predecessor, 
the museum of Roman antiquities for Bad Deutsch-Altenburg in Lower Austria 
(1996), was actually a winner. The Austrian site was by contrast fragmented, 
spooky, implicit – in fact the site of the Roman encampment of Carnuntum. 
The competition required designs for four elements that each had to respond 
quite differently to that combination of information, atmospherics and nuance 
that the manipulation of relics suggests. The first element, the extension of the 
existing museum, was reduced by us to the status of an inhabited steel screen 
that quickly snaked out into space and deposited a series of small glass pavilions 
in the garden, each containing relics. The coexistent presence of rocks seemed 
to encourage the idea of fragmentation. Up the hill was to be a small building 
for the display of a large model of Carnuntum. This was announced by another 
steel screen marking a sunken room. Further on we placed the third element, the 
open-air theatre, which was animated by a movable steel screen that formed the 
backdrop to the stage. Finally, at the top of the hill we placed the steel screen flat 
on the ground as the deck of a belvedere.
Various strands or armatures of these buildings were aligned towards each 
other so that there was a ricochet or recognition of the one to the other, and 
the idea was to animate the whole thing at night by a series of laser beams 
that would link the four items – together with two more on the site: the church 
and the Turkish burial mound. After some years of procrastination the project 
died, but it remains as a salutary exercise in restrained vocabulary tweaked and 
tuned to mark space rather than fill it, in a project responding to ghosts and 
entrails rather than the more usual, more practical city conditions.
opposite
 Peter Cook and Christine Hawley, open-air 
theatre model for Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, 
Austria, 1996.
The theatre uses the standard set of components 
– large steel panel, armatures and small elements 
– and is aligned with the other five focus points: 
the church; the Turkish burial ground; the 
belvedere; the Carnuntum model pavilion; and 
the extended museum. 
Peter Cook and Christine Hawley, exhibition 
pavilion model for Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, 
Austria, 1996.
Similar references to the theatre.
173 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
174 PETER COOK
Peter Cook and Christine Hawley, site plan for 
Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, Austria, 1996.
Establishing four new objects – museum, open-air 
theatre, exhibition pavilion and belvedere – 
together with the pre-existing church and Turkish 
burial mound to create a matrix of six objects, the 
‘ley lines’ between them directing the geometry 
of small elements.
175 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Such a fragmented exercise was a preparation for the experience of the Open 
City of Ritoque in Chile, which I visited in 2012. Conceived by an alliance of 
academics from the Catholic University of Valparaíso in 1967 to serve as a 
full-scale open-air laboratory for thought and work, it is a place that had long 
intrigued me. A similarly large tract of land to that at Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, 
a similarly scattered series of quite self-conscious structures, but there the 
resemblance ends. Instead of our tactic of common elements called upon 
to make reciprocal moves, the Open City calls upon a variety of individuals 
– designers, architects, painters, philosophers and poets – to each make 
their own insertion and, by inhabiting it, make a series of personal worlds. 
There were some mutually held instincts, a link to an architecture school and 
rolling sand dunes. Such apparently benign anarchy – as well as the random 
aesthetics – should inspire, but in the end they served to remind me that 
perhaps a physical or organisational reference should always be somewhere 
there. Were Plug-in City or Instant City structureless? Of course not. There may 
not be a need to travel or imbibe a locality in order to reach that conclusion, 
but the reiterative ‘soundings’that can be applied to a wide variety of places 
sometimes drive home the obvious – an obvious that you would not have 
trusted without such testing.
The Open City, Ritoque, Chile.
Since the 1960s a series of experimental structures 
set in a dune-like coastal area near Valparaíso.
176 PETER COOK
AUSTRIA AND THE KUNSTHAUS GRAZ
Once more in Austria, Colin Fournier and I faced the competition for the 
Kunsthaus in Graz in the year 2000 with multiple challenges of which we 
could hardly claim innocence, for the city had been a fascinating hotbed 
of a special architecture made by near-contemporaries. They sometimes 
allowed themselves to be referred to as the ‘Grazer Schule’ and centred on 
Günther Domenig, Volker Giencke, Klaus Kada and 
Szyszkowitz + Kowalski. When Domenig became 
a Professor in 1980 he quickly and symbolically 
brought in Cedric Price, Raimund Abraham and 
myself as well as Coop Himmelb(l)au, who in that year 
created the Blazing Wing, their apocryphal flaming 
courtyard in the Technical University of Graz with its 
accompanying slogan ‘architecture must burn’. 
From this point onwards, Graz sprouted a continuous 
series of strange, inventive, often original buildings 
that were disproportionally vibrant for a small city, 
so it became one of my regular targets for crocodiles 
of London or Frankfurt students that I brought to 
Austria. On the surface a bourgeois regional centre, 
full of jewellery shops and polite cafés, in fact it 
harbours nearly 50,000 students and a General 
Motors vehicle plant, and it is the home of the 
Steirischer Herbst – a cussedly avant-garde cultural 
programme that sets up an annual series of events 
which suitably irritate Vienna – as well as of one 
of the first music academies to countenance jazz 
in Europe: in other words, a ‘second city’ with the 
chutzpah that such places often possess.
Günther Domenig and Eilfried Huth, 
multipurpose hall at Eggenberg Convent, 
Graz, Austria, 1977: aerial view.
Extraordinarily fluent and complete, certainly 
an inspiration.
Image not available in this digital edition.
177 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
The site was already familiar: a seedy bar had always been open far later 
than the rest at the rear of the Eisernes Haus – a curious prefabricated iron 
building that we had to retain as part of the Austrian heritage (only to discover 
that it had been shipped down from Sheffield; so much for the indigenous!). 
Moreover, it was on the ‘wrong’ side of the river in what must have been a 
small Baroque bridgehead before the railway pulled a major part of the city 
onto that side of the River Mur.
The project was driven by the fact that Colin and I had cherished memories of 
our very enjoyable spell some thirty years before as we honed the ‘Features: 
Monte Carlo’ project, a competition for the design of a leisure centre that we 
had won in 1969. Now as professors together at the Bartlett, we had recourse 
to a brilliant group of students who were not only highly computer literate 
but totally ‘up’ for some exploratory design. The blob-like form of the main 
body was never a stated intention, but more a direct product of the decision 
taken one day to make some simple moves (after a month of more tentative 
diagrams). We established the ‘pin’ of the diagonal travelator route from the 
street corner and the ‘skin’ of the filled-out shape of the site. The Eisernes Haus 
was a necessary inherited flank towards the shopping street, and elsewhere we 
adopted the (perhaps Modernist) tactic of allowing a quasi-ground to continue 
through, under the ‘body’ of the building that was suspended well above.
We were so very aware of the Grazer Schule work and its idiosyncrasies, since 
we were good friends with most of the proponents; and since we were highly 
conscious of the significance of this site as a marker on the west side of the 
Hauptbrücke, the main bridge across the river at the heart of the city, we were 
deliberately aiming to make a simple statement that did not imitate them. The 
Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, Kunsthaus 
Graz, Austria, 2003.
Shown in context at twilight, the new 
structure sits comfortably with the grain 
and diversity of Graz, the ‘needle’ element 
aligning to the river, the 920 pixels of light 
communicating with the city.
178 PETER COOK
Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, Kunsthaus Graz, 
Austria, 2003: ground-floor plan.
The exhibition areas are above, encompassed 
by the large potato-like shape. At ground 
level, a series of ‘pods’ deal with fire-tight 
compartmenting. To the left is the zone of the 
reconstructed Eisernes Haus (Iron House).
Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, Kunsthaus Graz, 
Austria, 2003: interior.
Here illustrating the travelators that inform the 
interior and create a constant dynamic. 
179 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
marketplace to the east and the castle hill that hovers over it are held away 
from the river, with the narrow Murgasse as a valve, holding back the view 
until it reaches the corner of the bridge. Moreover, this bridge is so wide that 
in the summer it hosts café tables and has the feel of being a piazza rather 
than just a crossing. Clearly here was an opportunity to make a statement 
towards the bridge on the west, though the grain of the site is definitely 
running north–south.
A useful eccentricity stemmed from the need to retain a small group of 
Baroque houses with shops on the south-west corner, so there could be no 
temptation to develop the site as an even block. Our scribble simply ‘dumped’ 
a shape that filled up the residual space (allowing for a fire-break on the west). 
The diagonal of the ‘pin’ then seems suitably casual within an ambiguous 
shape – however deliberate its actual trajectory might be. Similarly, the 
‘needle’ – that long, cantilevered element that clings to the riverside flank of 
the body – also appears to be casual, but has always been a compositional 
necessity. There was indeed a moment when the City paymasters, having 
discovered that it could not be the main restaurant because of fire regulations, 
suggested its removal. Yet for Colin and me this was unthinkable: it was 
needed, we knew, not for a specific purpose, but for its aesthetic pay-off, 
perhaps for once exposing an honest flank. For despite being children of a 
period in which it went without saying that every part of every building should 
always have a reason for its existence related to function, there was also a 
recognition among architects of features that were mannerist preferences – 
conveniently ‘covered’ by a statement of their functioning role.
Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, Kunsthaus Graz, 
Austria, 2003: typical riverside view.
The voluptuous exhibition areas ‘mastered’ by 
the ‘needle’ superstructure – a very popular 
sightseeing venue.
180 PETER COOK
Having come so far, with a virtual ‘animal’ on our hands, we proceeded to 
plant daylight nozzles onto the bulbous body, bringing in a quantity of north 
light, but spawning one nozzle that was deliberately wayward – the ‘naughty 
nozzle’ that has the aim of acting as a focus for the continual stream of people 
who queue to look out … at the castle, with which, surely, they were already 
familiar. It was always our assumption that to merely provide flat floors of 
controlled exhibition space was not enough. The building has a secret world 
inside the bulbous beast, but then sends out a series of gestures towards 
the city: not only to the castle, but to the River Mur itself, and that sliver of 
the Alps that rides its eastern flank becomes a focus to which the needle 
responds. Far from being useless, it has ironically become the most successful 
room in the building for sightseeing, private events, assignations, resting 
after a perambulation of an art show or simply drinking in the view and the 
unexpected quality of a city of no little charm.
The other, and most notable response is that of the 920 pixels of light thatride 
the eastern skin of the building. In the few years since, there have undoubtedly 
been many electrical, digital and circuitry refinements in the thousands of 
display walls around the world; yet our monochrome rings (simply bathroom 
fittings) are able to be programmed to show a movie, create an art sequence 
or be related to a sensor system in the city, in the tradition of Toyo Ito’s Tower 
of Winds (1986) in Yokohama, to which they pay homage. The nonchalance of 
such a matrix as part of an undulating surface recalls a whole series of ideas 
that we had for the skin at the conceptual stages: that the nozzles might turn 
or expand; that the skin itself would be a series of ‘melting’ conditions, from 
solid through translucent to transparent (we were allowed to do one); that 
there would be a whole series of floating or skimming manifestations gliding 
across the surface. These all drifted away in the face of a very tight budget and 
a nervous Graz that needed to open the building while its role as European 
City of Culture still ran in 2003. 
Peter Cook and Colin Fournier, Kunsthaus Graz, 
Austria, 2003: cutaway diagram.
Very much enabled by the engineers, Bollinger 
+ Grohmann, it is not a ‘high-tech’ building, but 
its upper part is rationally based upon simple 
structural principles and high-grade insulation. 
181 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
182 PETER COOK
Of course this imperative was also its saviour. It was a ‘do or die’ situation 
where a building disliked on publication by 70 per cent of local citizens was 
approved of by 70 per cent in the same newspaper once it was up and running. 
Suddenly its originality and (though I hate the term) ‘iconic’ value became an 
asset. Yet in historical terms it remains a crafted object – though impossible 
to achieve without the state of play of computerisation at the time. Moreover, 
it is unlikely that it would have been as simple and elegant (and economical) 
without the extreme talent of Klaus Bollinger – the same engineer as I had 
worked with on the ‘roof-mouth’ at Frankfurt’s Städelschule (see Motive 3). Our 
22 fat columns at the competition stage were reduced by him to 11 slender 
columns and a rationale that discreetly uses reinforced concrete up to second-
floor level before moving into steel. The main body of the building is created 
by a series of large steel triangles, heavily insulated, then sheathed in steel 
plate (which is the true skin) and then draped with acrylic sheets held a few 
centimetres away from the steel, the circular pixel-lights being sandwiched 
between. 
I find myself repeatedly explaining that this is by no means a ‘high-tech’ 
building: there was not the budget, not the intention, not the expertise of 
research and development that would be required. It is more an amalgam 
of invented parts, foraged materials (some found in old railway yards in the 
former German Democratic Republic), labour and craftsmen who could come 
over in a van from the former Eastern Bloc countries – just look at the map – 
plus the very special tradition of the valley where iron has been smelted for 
centuries at Bruck an der Mur. Add to this a wood crafting tradition and an 
enormous and innovative Technical University, and you get something akin 
to the situation that is found around Stuttgart: where innovative building is 
backed up by layers of accumulated knowledge.
So here are a series of paradoxes: for in no way were we ‘local’ (a fact that 
was frequently pointed out to us); yet, with enormous respect for Günther 
Volker Giencke, glasshouses for the Institute 
of Botany, University of Graz, Austria, 1995.
Further proof of the rich ideas coming out of 
the Graz architects, the author’s favourite ‘foot’ 
of a building.
183 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Domenig’s Catholic Educational Academy (1968) or Volker Giencke’s 
glasshouses at the Institute of Botany (1995) – fellow Graz buildings of great 
originality that both predate the Kunsthaus by many years – we made a 
building that in its circumstantial easy-fix techniques owes much to our 
observations of Japanese work, and especially that of Itsuko Hasegawa or 
Toyo Ito, who use simple bolted-together elements. Similarly the work of 
the Graz-trained, Vienna-based architect Helmut Richter had shown us the 
ways in which to aim for an elegant but reduced detail that doesn’t depend 
on a myriad of tricksy components. The final paradox is surely the role of the 
exhibition room and its tradition in a country that rather enjoys those leftovers 
of the Habsburg Empire which are found in the politesse and behaviour at 
an Austrian exhibition preview. Hence a certain cussed pleasure in placing a 
common-or-garden travelator as the key to the building: no more or no less 
appropriate than in its usual role as a means of access in a down-to-earth 
airport or rail station.
184 PETER COOK
THE FASCINATION OF FOREIGNNESS
Exposed to architecture that takes an existing milieu but is not restricted by it, 
one constantly searches for clues; for at what point do you ooze up the spirit 
and materiality of a place and then, suddenly, twist it into something more 
than circumspection? It is impossible to visit Lina Bo Bardi’s SESC Pompéia 
(1986) in São Paulo without admiring both the understanding of resource 
and locality of the old converted factory building as well as the daring, 
almost cavalier moves made in the sports tower. Similarly the daring of her 
185 MOTIVE 6: NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
Lina Bo Bardi, SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, 
Brazil, 1986.
Tough, fearless, fun, original, weird – but 
actually logical, the circulation virtually 
‘attacks’ the stack of sports rooms in the 
square block.
Museum of Art (1968) in the same city: a fat table with an open market under 
its skirt. Or the extraordinary originality of Clorindo Testa’s Bank of London 
and South America (1966; see Motive 4) in Buenos Aires, which brings the 
language of architecture forward from the most inventive Gothic or Baroque 
manipulations of surface and light – yet with a tough, totally unexpected 
mid-20th-century vocabulary that still understands exactly how to fit into a 
19th-century banking district.
My enjoyment of a certain zany collage-like roughness is whetted by exposure 
to Asian cities, but then has to work hard to get inside the subtleties that make 
Kyoto’s downtown so totally different from Taipei’s. Of course it is to do with 
time, but also to do with sensibility. If the former tempts me to follow up clues 
of the atmospherics and ghosts of power and civilisation, the latter exposes 
the creative amnesia of a rapid, get-rich-quick urbanisation, less appealing 
but still an intellectual challenge. All of which prompts the Western architect 
who is hoping to tempt Asian clients and usefully inform Asian students to 
think rather harder than usual – and probably still get it all wrong. It is so much 
less comfortable than Germany or Austria. There is not the steady, measured 
contemplation of light conditions, site conditions or techniques whereby the 
Nordic countries are merely a more careful, more considered extension of 
our own milieu. There is not the well-documented blandness of the typical 
American suburb or condominium.
At the moment of writing, I am facing the prospect of inserting bits and 
pieces into the burgeoning hive of activity that is the new India – desperately 
avoiding the condescension of earlier generations of British designers – and 
possibly tackling a challenge in the hitherto mysterious scenery of urban 
Manila in the Philippines. It is not enough to retreat into primitivism, yet the 
support system of the Mur Valley or even Bournemouth is certainly not there.
How to turn fascination into know-how? Just how?
186 PETER COOK
MOTIVE 7
CAN WE LEARN
FROM SILLINESS?
188 PETER COOK
Architectural discussion does not have to depend upon the assessment of 
full-scale built objects, nor be taken into therealms of symbolism. Nor does it 
have to be linked to political rhetoric, or become a diatribe on morals. Then 
things get quite tricky in the discussion of what might be considered rational 
or irrational, especially in academic circles. Yet, for so long surrounded by 
architectural academics, I have become progressively sadder as more and more 
of them seem to be able to enjoy themselves without mentioning architecture 
at all and not seeming to notice much about the world around them either. So 
fewer and fewer bright young architects seem willing to base their views upon 
life as it is lived, places that are meandered through, or what they just saw that 
day. Just as the art of raconteurship has been lost and the freedom of the 
unguarded statement is highly suspect (my God, you might be incorrect!), 
there seems to be a tremendous fear of the trivial or the potentially irrelevant. 
Even more suspect is the enjoyment of the silly; yet, if we look up at the 
sculpted figures atop the cathedral pinnacles, what do we see but the 
stonemasons having a laugh as they cartoon each other in stone? For in 
the two cultures that I admire the most – the English and the Japanese – 
the ancient and orderly ‘front’ is very healthily supported by a completely 
irreverent ‘back’. 
This sits uncomfortably with a mood of relevance, seriousness and propriety 
– for at this time we are in a period of unspoken piety when it comes to 
things that we see and do. Culture can maybe represent itself in clothing, 
staged performance, spoken language, acknowledged art and – only with 
much tearing of hair – through architecture. As designers we are pressured 
to legitimise the bits and pieces that we try to manipulate: they too have 
increasingly to conform to ‘standards’, measures of efficiency and defined 
purpose. I have always found this irritating; but on a question of motive, 
observation and procedure I would make a case for the role of those little 
moments of our surroundings that not only tell us about ourselves, but add to 
our repertoire, if we have the will.
previous spread
Peter Cook, Jungle City, 2008: detail.
189 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
I am walking down the Third Street Promenade shopping mall in Santa Monica, 
California at 7 am (my favourite spot in America, even if I was actually out there 
to buy a very English newspaper). But, hey! There’s a man with a toy animal on 
his head. So how am I to react? – since I am even suspicious of a man in a funny 
hat, or a shop that doesn’t seem to be selling either fruit or toys, or a hole in 
the wall that sometimes has a shutter open but is mostly shut – except after 
3 pm if it’s not raining … and didn’t I see a bloke in there singing? So I rapidly 
email my friend Marjan Colletti, who was the last person I saw with toy animals 
on his head – which had led, by a myriad of stages, to a brilliant PhD thesis 
years after the animals had left the head. We remain so ‘stuffy’ about what is 
a legitimate artefact or icon, and though we subscribe to the idea of lateral 
thinking we cling to a rather narrow set of physical references in the playing 
out of the laterality.
Man with toy animal on head, Santa Monica, 
California, 2008.
Never be surprised; he has his own referencing 
system, maybe?
190 PETER COOK
191 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
KIOSKS: AN INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON OF FUN
I have my own name for the man in our local Chinese restaurant: ‘the duckist’. 
Indeed he is a specialist. His space sits between the main restaurant and the 
street, a world where he attends to the finer aspects of barbecue sauce as it 
soaks into the duck – always just the right amount. When he’s not busy he 
sometimes sits in this semi-opaque enclosure, which is as much to do with the 
street as with the restaurant, reading the Cantonese equivalent of the Daily 
Mirror. It isn’t really a room, but is more in that special category of tantalisation, 
along with the chocolate shop with the endlessly running chocolate or the nail 
bar, perhaps – creating a special category of presence that is precious in a way 
that the main restaurant room is not. The tradition of the Chinese ‘shop-house’ 
has plenty to offer us and supports that part of my thinking that still delights 
in that notion of ‘it can happen anywhere’ which I shared with my Archigram 
collaborators in the 1960s and 1970s.
I liked ‘Mr Coffee – He’s So Frothy’ and I’ve not seen him lately, though there 
is a similar contraption around the same part of London with another name. 
(Perhaps his coffee wasn’t that frothy after all?) It reminds me of Mike Webb’s 
Cushicle (1964) – an imagined inflatable contraption allowing a person to 
carry an entire environment on their back – in that it is mechanised, special, 
mobile, folds up and gives delight. In the photograph it sits cheekily in front 
of a ‘legitimate’ coffee-serving establishment that sits – of course – in a 
legitimate building.
opposite top
‘The duckist’, Green Cottage restaurant, 
Swiss Cottage, London.
A dedicated territory for the barbecued duck 
process that is neither ‘street’ nor ’restaurant’ 
but a special category relating to both.
opposite bottom
Mr Coffee – He’s So Frothy, 
Exmouth Market, London.
In Archigram times we discussed 
the mobile, expandable, serviced 
vehicle-structure; the coffee bike and 
parasol are just that.
above
Hot dogs, drinks and pretzels, Tribeca, 
New York.
Small, hard, tough, very New York.
192 PETER COOK
Compare this with the hot-dog and cold-drink seller in New York and his much 
meaner, tighter, tougher little vehicle – you don’t mess with him, there’s little 
room for negotiation and of course the weather is more definitive than in 
London. Yet I have a certain excitement in the careless dynamic of the fold-up-
go-away device – an inspiration clinging to me since Archigram days.
So now we can move on and into the world of the kiosk: a term derived 
from the Ottoman Empire in the 13th century and still thriving around the 
globe. The efficiency of ‘Mr Coffee’ or the New York box that depend upon a 
controlled attitude to stuff and things doesn’t apply everywhere, in spite of 
the best intentions. The standard kiosk in the Macedonian city of Skopje is a 
cast-iron frame with perhaps a backward glance towards Hector Guimard’s Art 
Nouveau creations for the Paris Métro in the years around 1900, but here the 
realities of shading, holding, securing and general entrepreneurship take over, 
needing extra elements to make it work. It is only the old Modernist in me that 
wants the kit to be complete and all-providing, whereas in a good piece of 
open-ended, ‘let’s see what happens’ design, the add-ons are a legitimate part 
of the idea. The mannerism of the main frame is nonetheless the more quaint 
when you realise that most of Skopje was constructed after the devastating 
1963 earthquake, and is dimly Modernist. Or is that just the point: the designer 
was clutching at some old, remembered characteristics that could recall a 
(possibly) higgledy-piggledy pre-earthquake atmosphere?
When CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau) devised some kiosks 
for the London Borough of Westminster in 2010, we were all too conscious 
of the issue of adding on and flipping out. This dominated our approach, 
and conceptually our kiosks were inspired by parallel motives of flexibility 
and surprise. On this project the lead designer within CRAB was Benjamin 
Farnsworth who has a wry mind, a talent for anecdote and draws exotic 
cartoons. We had to admit that London, for its size, is very poor in kiosks and 
that those little crevices along Oxford Street could easily take something 
better than a smart box with bolts at the corners. 
Typical kiosk, Macedonia Square, 
Skopje, Macedonia.
A nod in the direction of Art Nouveau 
and the lost world before Modernist 
rebuilding of the earthquake-smitten city.
193 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
CRAB, kiosks for the Borough of Westminster,London, 2010.
Fold-out components enable a wide variety of 
products to be displayed. 
194 PETER COOK
Hot-dog stand, Malmö, Sweden.
Serviceable, sensible, Swedish – and just 
a little dull.
195 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
We were keen to show that a pair of ‘pockets’ could be fashioned in such a way 
that when they were shut, the object itself would remain intriguing – or even 
provocative – and when they were open they would surprise the passer-by by 
the range of items that they could carry.
After all, a kiosk has only a few moments of your attention, it cannot develop 
a sequence of experiences, it is a small stage upon which the delightful must 
play. If the total object is intriguing, that is a definite plus. If the object makes 
a wry reference to the atmosphere of the city in which it finds itself, that is 
a sophisticated move; if it merely fits in well with the place, that is maybe a 
civilised move, but less knowing. If some kiosks hardly care, concentrating only 
upon the trademark or the basic necessity of display, their relevance does not 
disappear completely, for now we have to look more closely at the detail.
A hot-dog kiosk is a familiar sight in northern Europe, and it is a fact that the 
Copenhagen version is just minutely different from one in Malmö, a mere 25 
kilometres away over the bridge. As is the sausage.
Kiosk, Kongens Nytorv, Copenhagen.
From the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, a 
period of elegance.
196 PETER COOK
Back in the Balkans, there is a definite rhetoric built into the forms of the 
kiosks. If the Kosovans were living with memories, the good citizens of Pristina, 
only one hour away, seemed in a hurry to devise their own standard kiosks: 
new, glossy, plasticky, ‘modern’. They wanted to leave memories behind (and 
perhaps never had as strong a city culture in the first place). The one in the 
photograph shown here is in the best condition of the half dozen I saw; in 
other words, they collapse, despite the dear wish of Kosovans to avoid their 
own collapse: they were too much in a hurry. 
So different from Bremen, where street food purveyor Mr Kiefert and his 
city expect – and can afford – a full-on, well-constructed, efficiently glazed 
structure wherein his no doubt full-flavoured, consistent, calculatedly tasty 
hot dogs can flourish. Bremen is after all a sensible town, except when it went 
a bit crazy in Böttcherstrasse with all that Expressionist brick flimflam: but of 
course sensible hot-dog eaters probably wouldn’t go down there? No, but we 
can ponder for some time upon the subtleties and nuances between this one 
and the hot-dog kiosk alongside Kärntnerstrasse in the centre of Vienna. The 
basic style is the same, but in raunchy old Vienna the equally robust structure 
is schmaltzed up in coloured neon, heated food is mouth-wateringly displayed 
and there are pizzas as well.
Typical kiosk, pedestrian mall, Pristina, Kosovo.
Wanting to be stylish, but flimsily constructed.
197 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
Martin Kiefert hot-dog kiosk, Philosophenweg, 
Bremen, Germany.
Solidly constructed and well appointed, as befits a 
serious North German city.
Hot-dog kiosk, Kärntnerstrasse, Vienna.
Big and a bit glamorous, with neon lights and a 
wide selection of food.
198 PETER COOK
Pop-up shop, Shenkin Street, Tel Aviv.
A small box with no claim to any style or 
architectural merit, but full of life. 
199 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
Far away in Tel Aviv, whether in good times or bad, the classically Modernist 
semicircular enclosure is enjoyed to the full by an enthusiastic fruit-seller 
whose ‘best pressed orange juice’ in town is reflected in the delight and 
enjoyment that he exudes – along with a continuous queue of punters who 
can take a second away from their laptops. The generic form came from 
Germany and the Modernist reinterpretation of the boulevard: thus the 
Frankfurt kiosk (though curiously less cheerful than its Tel Avivi counterpart) 
is essentially the same. There are 470 kiosks in Tel Aviv and if we really want to 
sense the spirit of a culture, the kiosk, that unworthy, unserious facilitator and 
giver of delight, is there to give us innumerable cultural or sociological clues. 
In the North, maybe, the good citizens of Copenhagen are much further from 
the orange groves that are in Israel, so instead they have a giant parody of an 
orange to keep them salivating.
In Queen Street, Brisbane, it tells us of a big, well-provided society and an 
aspiration that OUR kiosks can be … how can we put it? As big as houses? … 
and sell just about everything, whereas in late 19th-century Copenhagen, 
the business of selling was of course a delight, deserving of a certain 
elegance and style, but still circumspect and defined and probably selling 
only one commodity.
Orange kiosk, Copenhagen.
In the tradition of the ‘Tail o’ the Pup’ hot-dog 
stand in Los Angeles (see Motive 3) – so an orange 
is an orange.
200 PETER COOK
WHAT CAN ARCHITECTURE LEARN FROM KIOSKS?
Of course, I have myself fallen into a certain trap, since in a roundabout way 
I find myself discussing mannerism, style and range and becoming excited 
by the potential that these little items have for action. Can this be turned to 
advantage?
In 2008, in the CRAB studio, we seized upon a tiny footbridge competition 
in Skopje (which at that time I had not visited). The task was to connect a 
shopping centre with the rest of downtown, across the river. We couldn’t just 
leave it at that, and seized the opportunity for enlivenment with a kiosk – on 
Gavin Robotham’s suggestion, a moving kiosk; and on my response, a kiosk 
with a bar on top. In the end they built a neoclassical but ordinary footbridge. 
Yet this remains one of our favourite projects: still quoted at nearly every 
lecture and still up for grabs.
Returning to the subject but on a tight budget, in 2014 we made a kiosk as one 
of a series of such installations in Taipei. Here, in the middle of a boulevard, the 
interpretation attempts to go beyond the straightforward ‘selling’ task and 
deals with the business of music exchange. People bring records and listen to 
them. There can be a DJ. There can be headphone-listening or loudspeaker-
listening. The structure had to be simple, so it fell into the tradition of the small 
beach hut: brightly painted, jokey and in the end reminiscent, perhaps, of a 
Punch-and-Judy booth. On the one hand the kiosk as stage, or alternatively, 
the kiosk as Pandora’s Box?
CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau), 
competition design for a bridge in Skopje, 
Macedonia, 2008.
Night-time elevation and section of our design 
for a slowly moving kiosk, with a bar on top that 
opens at night. 
201 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
CRAB, kiosk for Taipei, Taiwan, 2014.
Built prototype that is for exchanging records and 
listening to music.
CRAB, kiosk for Taipei, Taiwan, 2014: drawing of 
panel system.
Simply constructed from flat plywood panels.
202 PETER COOK
203 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
Does the stand-alone structure have more freedom of expression or is our 
attention more easily drawn to such things? What happens when the same 
throwaway fun is brought into the bosom of a solid building? There is a strong 
tendency, in the Anglo-Saxon culture, to separate off the design of shops, 
restaurants or other conscious insertions, which is sad but hard to dislodge. 
But what of doorways and balconies?
To the intense irritation of the designers of the buildings, the inhabitants 
do have a tendency to come out on them in good weather, to dump their 
belongings on them, to put all manner of untidy and inconsequential items 
on them and even to sit there in their underpants. CRAB’s winter gardens 
for an apartment block on the Lützowplatz in Berlin (1989) seem to have 
developed as showcases for the people within – and why not? The terraces we 
designed for the Departments of Lawand Central Administration at the Vienna 
University of Economics and Business (2014; see Motive 3) are just waiting for 
(and wanting) the students to live their life as uninhibitedly as possible on 
them. We deliberately put kiosks under the skirts of the housing we designed 
for the Madrid suburb of Vallecas (2013; see Motive 4), though nobody has 
taken possession of them so far. The best balconies I have seen are at Raines 
Court (2003), a housing scheme by AHMM (Allford Hall Monaghan Morris) 
in Hackney, London, where they become, effectively, room-size and life is 
encouraged to be lived on them.
I look with awe and glee at the less inhibited attitude to ‘spillage’ that can be 
seen in Asian cities: less inhibited and, at least in Japan, still enjoying a certain 
sense of, if not ‘style’ exactly, then clarity of purpose. The visitor, rummager, 
sales-hustler or whoever is around seems to naturally need to be there. In Tel 
Aviv, those clever passages of space between the villas conceived – by the 
Scottish town planners and German-trained architects – to bring cross-winds 
through the city, have often been inhabited by the flotsam and jetsam of 
selling, storing, gossiping. Yet, because of the discipline of their occurrence, 
the city remains cohesive. 
AHMM (Allford Hall Monaghan Morris), Raines 
Court, London, 2003.
The best balconies, offering a real extension of the 
living space.
204 PETER COOK
Such crevices and doorways, too, remain an unexplored territory for the really 
imaginative designer – which is why arcades are often more fascinating than 
the shops within them: they invite a breakdown between street and ‘room’. 
Again, we need to look into the ‘stiffness’ of our typology-based world.
Occasionally, asked to make a drawing, I break out into pure knee-jerk 
observation. Hence my Jungle City (2008), where the phrase ‘the city is a 
jungle’ prompted a zany and probably unbuildable jelly-trifle of a scheme. 
Somewhere there lurks a conversation about the potential of a building to seal 
itself off from an undesirable world outside. Yet the instincts that guide (if that 
is the right word) the drawing are the same ones that find the tiny and trivial so 
inspiring. Sometimes ‘architecture’ takes itself too seriously.
In the same mood, I have many times sat looking back from a hotel room on 
Main Street in Santa Monica, California to a rival hotel, some four blocks inland, 
wondering why – in this delightful ambience – a hotel has to look grey, grim 
and pompous? At a certain point I could do this no longer and made a drawing 
of a fruity, veg-y, all-hanging-out hotel pile which I dubbed the Mound Hotel 
(2008). Conceptually it jumped scales back to the freedom of the kiosk-seller, 
the rubbish-piler, the family on the beach, just once again suggesting that the 
extreme west-of-the-west deserves to be celebrated and enjoyed. Perhaps 
there the guests might feel inclined to come out onto a balcony, partly 
screened by bushes, and have fun in the sun.
There have been occasional moments in recent architectural history when 
a jokey vocabulary has existed within architectural circles, as with the 1980s 
group Memphis that surrounded Ettore Sottsass and created a series of 
artefacts that were deliberately highly coloured and toy-like and rather more 
original than the Post-Modern work at full scale. Similar instincts for a toy-like 
breakout still persist, as in the work of Catrina Stewart, but so far are yet to lead 
to a major stream of ‘naughty’ architecture.
205 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
Peter Cook, Jungle City, 2008.
A very quick drawing (for Wallpaper magazine) 
that suggests that ‘it is a jungle out there’, but that 
you could live in a weird, wonderful, spiky glass 
world – in safety.
206 PETER COOK
207 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
right
Catrina Stewart, The London City 
Farmhouse, 2011.
What happens if buildings are made out of toys?
opposite
Peter Cook, Santa Monica Mound Hotel, 2008.
Looking inland at a chunky, grey hotel in this 
favourite Californian city was too much one 
morning, so the drawing was a cry from the heart: 
why not vegetation, colour, fun … after all it is 
Santa Monica, by the ocean!
208 PETER COOK
Javier Ruiz, Spatial Sprezzatura – Architecture 
of Gradients and Transitions, Unit 20, Bartlett 
School of Architecture, University College 
London, 2014.
With the new technologies, the next architecture 
can be an architecture of dreams. 
209 MOTIVE 7: CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
So maybe some trains of thought: what if Mr Frothy could join up with Mr 
Juicy and Herr Frankfurter and some ramshackle (or, if you prefer, very cleverly 
detailed) umbrella structures and act casual or differently in the winter, or 
hive off? What if the duckist became a model for specialist activity nestling in 
between street and shop?
What if we deliberately made more random edges to our buildings? For 
now we are in an interesting situation where the most exploratory young 
architects, such as former Bartlett School of Architecture student Javier Ruiz 
with his Spatial Sprezzatura (2014), consider the extremities of science and art, 
melting and morphing from one condition to another. In Ruiz’s words, it is an 
‘architecture of gradients and transitions, with a highly volatile fabric creating 
a highly variable and ambiguous in-transition space’. What if we bring together 
play and science, and recognise that our technology has reached a position of 
near-alchemy?
My hope is that these things don’t get legislated out, or coerced by a moral 
or straight-laced or litigious atmosphere and go the way of the long lunch, 
the rambling story, the lack of interest in why that guy in Santa Monica was 
wearing a large soft toy on his head at 7 o’clock in the morning.
210 PETER COOK
MOTIVE 8
THE CITY – 
THEN THE TOWN
212 PETER COOK
There is something about the city: the word itself immediately conjures up the 
idea of civilisation, intensity, exchange – and an implication of status. We make 
so many references to it, and now more than half of the world’s population is 
drawn to cities, even if, for an elite or bewildered few there is still a realisable 
dream of escaping them. Some of us, however, feel irrevocably bound up 
with the ‘buzz’ of variety and surprise, the theatre of sudden confrontation or 
indulgence at a level that is still not provided by the Internet. 
It inspired my early work as well as a series of endeavours paralleling my 
Archigram period that were ‘city’ statements: Kenzo Tange’s plans for Tokyo 
Bay (1960), Constant Niewenhuys’s proposals for the anti-capitalist city of New 
Babylon (1959–74) or Paolo Soleri’s experimental town of Arcosanti which 
began construction in Arizona in 1970. Even the ‘anti-city’ has to use that word: 
hence the paradox of the Instant City projects that Ron Herron and I created in 
1969–70 or the rhetoric of Archizoom’s No-Stop City (1970).
More complex – but in the end central to the evolution of later design ideas 
that have become wrapped up in observation, response and supported 
(sometimes) by anecdotes – is a deep enjoyment of the town. My provincial 
boyhood was spent in a succession of places with between 50,000 and 300,000 
souls. This means that there was always a definable centre and identifiable 
suburbs, a single railway station and a historical river crossing with, usually, 
a more decrepit area at the eastern side of the centre – where the prevailing 
west–east winds would dump the smells. As a kid arriving in a new town, I 
had quickly to figure out the local variation of the formula: there were usually 
large villas on a wide road, often on the southern or western side of town, 
always surrounded by trees and some large schools or hospitals among the 
trees. Undoubtedly these memories were in my head when devising the ‘Real 
City’ project for the Frankfurt–Offenbach border in the 1980s (see Motive 6). 
Would this have been an English ora German dream? Or some strange, rather 
nostalgic mixture of the two?
opposite
Kenzo Tange, Tokyo Bay Project, 1960.
A number of members of what would become 
the Metabolist group were on the team that 
made this heroic project for extending the city 
into the water. 
previous spread
Peter Cook, Layer City, 1981: detail.
213 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
214 PETER COOK
215 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
The heroic projects of others may well have been a signal of despair that 
already the quality and intensity of industrialised cities was thinning out. 
The endless suburbia of American cities with their loss of identity may well 
have inspired the counter-notion of the city structure, in many cases with 
vertiginous perspectives reminiscent of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s 18th-
century etchings, overlaid upon a good-quality city; Yona Friedman’s ‘Ville 
Spatiale’ visions of 1959 are one example. An alternative was to pursue the 
attractions of the ‘linear city’ that could finger its way into raw countryside 
but at the same time retain an intensity. Within the coterie of Team 10 – a 
loose band of architects and other influencers of urbanism from our teachers’ 
generation – the linear city prospered. Even Kisho Kurokawa was invited to 
present to Team 10 in 1962 and 1966, so the lines of communication were 
already crossing over between Europe and Japan. We all became attracted by 
it, and Moshe Safdie’s model housing complex Habitat 67 (1967) in Montreal 
emerged as the first built manifestation of the infilled megastructure.
Thus my Plug-in City (first drawn in 1964; see Motive 4) has antecedents, and 
was already germinating as an idea in 1962 when David Greene and I made 
some raw drawings for an exhibition in Nottingham called ‘Nottingham 
Craneways’. In the following year the project for an Expo tower for Montreal 
found itself using a diagonalised repeat structure at its base; and around 
that time, my old Bournemouth teacher Ronald Sims was chatting about 
‘engineering structures as carriers’. Out came the cocktail sticks and the 
Nottingham project started to find some ‘body’. Rough plan drawings 
suggested that it could proliferate and change direction if it wished; the 
hovercraft became its satellite on a prepared path and the mass acquired 
inflatable weather coverings and, most notably, incorporated the ‘capsule’ 
discussion which Warren Chalk and Ron Herron (as well as Kisho Kurokawa) 
were pursuing. Yet central to it were the lines of activity: the craneways at the 
apex of the linear hill formations and the diagonal support structure actually 
containing the elevators and service-ways. It had to be operational; there had 
opposite top
Constant Nieuwenhuys, Spatiovore – concert 
hall for electronic music, New Babylon, 1959.
A member of CoBrA and of the Situationist 
International movement, Constant Nieuwenhuys 
was later ejected from the latter group for being 
too aesthetic!
opposite bottom
Paolo Soleri, BABEL IIB Arcology, 1969. 
A ‘hyperstructure’ over 1 kilometre high and 
2 kilometres in diameter at the base with a 
population of 520,000 (From the book Arcology: 
The City in the Image of Man by Paolo Soleri - 
original publication by MIT in 1970). Italian-born 
Soleri was a potter as well as an architect who 
went on to establish Arcosanti, a small piece of 
prototype city in Phoenix, Arizona, which housed 
the Cosanti educational foundation.
Yona Friedman, ‘Paris Spatial’, 1959.
A megastructure proposed by Friedman to 
sit above the city of Paris and thus inhabiting 
available three-dimensional space while leaving 
existing Paris to continue beneath. 
216 PETER COOK
to be a full kit of support so that the exchangeability of the dwelling capsules 
did not interfere with daily life. As the project evolved, it took on board a series 
of deviations: piazzas, amphitheatres, outcropping towers. As it developed 
further it incorporated guided vehicle tracks that Michael Webb and others 
were investigating at Hornsey College of Art. Underlying these mechanistic 
aspects there lay a definite wish to move away from the dull pragmatism of 
system-built housing that we were working on in our day jobs.
As the Archigram pamphlet became known, its fifth issue (1965) was able 
to expose the interchange that was now going on between ourselves and 
Friedman, Hans Hollein and, before long, the Florentine groups. So it was 
time to move on. Having bred a lively monster, what would happen if we 
dissolved it? Yet still honouring the spirit of the city, asking the question: 
what is the essence of the city? Surely a series of experiences that could be 
taken, full on, from place to place, bring something of that ‘buzz’ to even the 
most unlikely location?
Interest in the Archigram group led to a constant run of presentations that 
involved audio-visual equipment, largely devised by Dennis Crompton. Out 
of these came the Ideas Circus (1968) – an idealised vision that started to talk 
about learning systems, which became a parallel motivator for the Instant City 
and the proposition to tour condensed packages of the best of the London 
museums, concerts, simulations of city life – effectively a travelling circus of the 
urbane. Perhaps, even, it was a paean of joy that celebrated the arrival of the 
provincial kid to the city and the wish to send some of that enthusiasm back 
out there? So the architectural mannerisms of Instant City are simultaneously 
celebratory and practical (except perhaps the dimensional optimism of the 
floating balloons holding the rain canopy).
Peter Cook and David Greene, Nottingham 
Craneways, 1962.
Establishing a language of replaceable houses 
or shops ‘fed’ from craneways, effectively the 
prototype for Plug-in City.
217 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
Peter Cook, Plug-in City, 1965: long section.
The most developed phase of a project that was 
worked on over three years (between ‘day jobs’ at 
Taylor Woodrow Construction and teaching at the 
Architectural Association). 
Page from Archigram 5, 1965.
This, the ‘Metropolis’ issue of the Archigram 
pamphlet, drew together many experimental 
pieces of urbanism and acted, in a way, as a 
signalling between progressive international allies.
218 PETER COOK
Karl Ehn, Karl-Marx-Hof, Vienna, 1930.
A large-scale imprint of powerful architecture 
making a political as well as an urban statement.
219 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
Michel de Klerk, Het Schip social housing, 
Amsterdam, 1920.
Still one of the most original and iconic social 
housing schemes in Europe, Het Schip, meaning 
‘The Ship’, is a monument to the Dutch craft of 
building in brick.
ASSIMILATING REFERENCES
Already, in parallel, I had amassed a growing experience of referential models. 
I scrutinised Los Angeles: not just for the ticky-tacky and the so-called ‘Googie’ 
architecture, but for the best collection of classic 20th-century houses that can 
be found anywhere, plus the extraordinary phenomenon of the Hollywood 
Hills – thousands of people in imaginative villas hidden among the trees. With 
this overlaid by a growing enjoyment of the Scandinavian cities where the 
tradition of boat-building had coalesced together with the heroics and the 
solidity of Jugendstil from the years around 1900, I began to have a resource 
that might, quite soon, become the basis of a city vocabulary. I admired the 
way in which the geometrical shifts of the canal system in the Swedish city 
of Gothenburg were identified by a subtle range of turret ‘markers’. I paid 
homage to the Het Schip housing (1920) in Amsterdam by Michel de Klerk, 
and to the internal parts of Rotterdam’s Spangen housing (1919 by Michiel 
Brinkman), Oslo’s ‘Funkis’ Functionalist housing schemes from the 1920s and 
1930s, Ralph Erskine’s 1970s-built Byker Wall residential block in Newcastle, and 
reputedly the world’s longest housing block, Vienna’s Karl-Marx-Hof (1930 by 
Karl Ehn); but at the same timeoverlaid memories of living in the English town 
of Letchworth as a kid of 12 to 13 – a total admixture in which the pursuit of the 
purely Modern seemed restrictive.
The simple division of typologies – house, block, office, factory – that was (and 
still is) supported both by the Socialist Modernists and by the ‘get rich quick’ 
developers seemed both inadequate and lacking in subtlety or imagination. 
Future probes into the idea of ‘city’ or ‘town’ would surely have to melt them.
220 PETER COOK
Simultaneously, an image of the city reaching and enjoying the water’s edge 
coincided with a long stay in Oslo during 1981. In the first Layer City drawing, 
the towers jutted out from the land as outriders but inspired a series of linear 
systems that allied themselves to a series of roughly parallel inlets. In fact, I am 
not familiar with any coastline quite like this: the edge of East Anglia is too flat 
and the estuaries lazy, and Poole Harbour or Oslo Fjord are too full of islands. 
So if I am honest, the water configuration was almost created as a deliberate 
and nudging counterpoint to the key streets and strips of parkland which then 
led, in further drawings, to the idea of canals within the body of the building. 
The culture and language of the North Sea (which I feel increasingly drawn 
towards) and of the Baltic rely upon mechanical devices, clever openings with 
platforms and winches, lookouts (turrets perhaps?), a morph between porthole 
and window and, at the extremities, ropes and tarpaulins – the ship becoming 
a parallel antecedent to the Plug-in City.
Layer City, coming after the Arcadia City (see Motive 5), is both more particular 
and more analytical. Its land-bound detail exists only in a single drawing where 
some notions of vegetation, rotating offices and overlaid grids take shape. 
Peter Cook, Layer City at Shadow House, 1984.
Taking Christine Hawley’s Shadow House drawing 
(2008) as a point of departure and then weaving 
a series of watercourses, winding vegetated 
glades, and cross-grids that inform other villas and 
hedgerows, and suggesting systems of offices, 
effectively fleshing out the Layer City.
221 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
Peter Cook, Layer City, 1981.
The ‘outriders’ of the city are a series of towers 
that sit in the water and then send back tentacles 
onto the solid ground further back.
Peter Cook, Layer City, 1981: plan.
An imagined coast of southern Norway, with 
long boulevards, many parks and various grid 
organisations layered over each other. 
222 PETER COOK
223 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
opposite
The three-dimensional city: Osaka.
Tight interlacing of high-powered rail and 
vehicle ways.
The three-dimensional city: Hong Kong.
The street acting as a virtual ‘magnetic path’ for 
series of strands at different levels.
THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL CITY
Beyond these layers, the concept of the three-dimensional city is a latent 
theme that has nonetheless always been hovering: one that harks back to 
the heroics of the admired schemes in Archigram 5 and certainly part of the 
Plug-in City’s ‘Maximum Pressure Area’. This was reinforced by those analyses 
of London’s infrastructure with its myriad of tunnels, lost and pipe-enclosed 
rivers, hydraulic systems and endless service runs, exploded upwards by the 
poetry of escalators gliding up out of holes in the ground and beyond into 
atria. Feed into this a growing suspicion that the classical dominance of the 
piano nobile, with rugged basement below and a hierarchy of diminishing 
but parallel floors above and with its appropriate architectural symbolism, 
was flat-land based – whereas some of the most interesting buildings were 
those on the sides of hills where you might even enter from the top! Add in a 
weary recognition of the classic American skyscraper where the ‘architecture’ 
is invested in the lobby and the top (skyline) profile and the rest (with some 
glorious exceptions) is just a run of windows, those scintillating escalators just 
being lost within. Then add a taste for the Modernist ramp; and then brace 
yourself for a final prompt, found on my first visit to São Paulo, where the 
underside of Lina Bo Bardi’s Museum of Art (1968) is poised above a cliff into 
which several streams of traffic are being sucked: the power of the elements 
both above and below suggest that some wonderful combination of Antonio 
Sant’Elia’s Futurist visions from the 1910s, Fritz Lang’s epic 1927 science-fiction 
film Metropolis and the Plug-in City section all live between. The three-
dimensional city lives!
224 PETER COOK
My generation of architects was always attracted to the pyramidal section, the 
molehill and the atrium with a triangular profile. It was just waiting to grow the 
idea into a fully three-dimensionalised version. Therefore, a whole series of 
projects, from Plug-in City, through the Kawasaki Information City (1986; see 
Motive 4) and certain aspects of Way Out West – Berlin (see below) became 
exercises in the idea of gradual climb.
Only in 1986 did I feel the conscious urge to invest a project with a series of 
disparate ideas that could be wound up into a metamorphic scheme. (As well 
as Plug-in City, Addhox (1971), Urban Mark (1972) and Veg House (1996 and 
2001; see Motive 5) have been others.) The challenge came from Kristin Feireiss 
of the Aedes gallery to take part in ‘Berlin: Denkmal oder Denkmodell?’ (‘Berlin: 
Monument or Thought Model?’), a large show at the Kunstverein in Berlin. 
Knowing that Morphosis, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and Lebbeus Woods 
were taking part, I invested half a year in the run-up. 
The theme had to be ‘Berlin’ and I had an immediate wish to satisfy a query: 
why does the Kurfürstendamm – this beautiful and sophisticated street – just 
peter out at its western end? The Halensee lake is surrounded by elegant and 
quite romantic villas, and behind? Some railway yards and some motorway 
spaghetti. At the time there was still ‘West Berlin’, and the idea of overlaying 
political reference to America – complete with a skyscraper and some street 
grid – prompted a naughty thought: let’s make it not just America-as-west 
but the American (Wild) West. From Arizona, the cactus: a growing piece of 
vegetation, but an aesthetically rather silly one. Let it morph, let it infect the 
hard architecture. Moreover, the slightly spooky quality of the lake and the 
goods yards suggested the idea of embodying a quasi-mystical process: the 
tiny island in the lake as a core for rotating ‘vibrations’ as a formal counter-
system to the grid. Further to this, I had a fascination for the pre-war Berlin of 
Christopher Isherwood’s 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, the acidity of Kurt Weill’s 
sound and Otto Dix’s sinister figures. 
Lina Bo Bardi, MASP – São Paulo Museum of Art, 
São Paulo, Brazil, 1968.
In this segment of São Paulo, we clearly see the 
range of dynamic activities that pile upon each 
other (and dive into the hill) as well as the audacity 
of Bo Bardi’s heroic art museum on giant legs that 
shelters an open-air market.
225 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
This last ingredient consciously infested the project: not only did the cactus-
led growths become very active parasites upon the face, and then the 
whole physiognomy of the first-stage buildings, but the swirling, creeping, 
vegetation-cum-cement-like substance descended on the lower levels into 
a mixture of remnant railyard tat and a literal ‘underworld’ into which a 
reincarnation of Isherwood’s protagonist Sally Bowles might well descend 
among the transvestite bars and seedy clubs. As with the other ‘metamorphic’ 
projects, the first one or two stages would never totally anticipate the forms 
of the eventual (fourth) stage; it was as if the drawings prompted the story as 
the story prompted the drawings. The key drawings are those of the details in 
which the cactus is constantly tweaked by a set of more febrile strands, pylons, 
drifting lines anddeliberate inconsistencies of form.
226 PETER COOK
227 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
MAKING RELUCTANT CITIES GET REAL
I was fascinated by the way in which German cities had, in the 19th and early 
20th centuries, espoused industry and sometimes located it very close to 
quite bourgeois housing. With ‘Real City’ (1986) I had experimented with the 
territory between Frankfurt and its poorer and smaller neighbour, Offenbach 
– less loaded than Berlin but prompting a slightly similar query: why did 
Frankfurt hanker after being a metropolis but leave so much random space 
between itself and its surrounding smaller towns? Let it be a real city. So came 
the insertions of hybrid villa structures. Setting up a rough frame that could sit 
there until a wide range of infillings could come along: formal, ‘fruity’, random, 
temporary or elegant. An upswing in Offenbach’s liveliness might just occur. 
The difference between the two schemes is considerable: Real City dependent 
upon positioning and the full stretching of a known typology, while Way Out 
West – Berlin sought to constantly implode upon its various fascinations and 
suppositions – without conclusion but leaving a rich taste in the mouth.
Peter Cook, Real City, map of the 
Offenbach–Frankfurt interface, 1986.
Creating a more heroic city by infilling 
between Frankfurt and Offenbach with large 
villas and avenues.
opposite
Peter Cook, Way Out West – Berlin, 1988: 
plan sequence.
A curious area of picturesque villas around a 
small lake with derelict railway land behind 
is layered over by both gridded and radial 
systems that gradually metamorphose – 
inspired by the American ‘Far West’.
228 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Way Out West – Berlin, 1988: 
corner, stage 1.
A library, some offices and some ‘underground’ 
clubs hardly notice the presence of the strange, 
cactus-like object.
229 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
Peter Cook, Way Out West – Berlin, 1988: 
corner, stage 2.
Years later the cactus-like object and its progeny 
have taken over and transformed the library, 
office and club. 
230 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Way Out West – Berlin, 1988: 
tower, early stage.
More-or-less standard East Coast 
American influence.
231 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
Peter Cook, Way Out West – Berlin, 1988: 
tower, later stage.
The cactus-like ‘far west’ and its kind have 
transformed the tower.
232 PETER COOK
Other aspects of Germany had sunk in, and have remained in my mind as 
I have designed: the existence of inner suburbs with quantities of trees, 
but bounded by housing that is taller than in the typical English city; 
enjoying bourgeois districts with very large rooms and a preponderance of 
corridor-plan apartments (especially grand around the Kurfürstendamm); a 
combination of uses from workshop, office, studio or family apartment to pied-
à-terre, with these different usages found together in the same building; or the 
‘Hofhaus’, where in the courtyard some quaint or ramshackle or even heroic 
interloper exists to provide very identifiable space for an architect, a school or 
a restaurant. Based on such a formula, even quite small cities take on an almost 
metropolitan air.
Typical German villas: Villa Godesberg 
hotel, Bonn.
Bourgeois villas as vehicles for romantic 
nostalgia for a world that never was.
233 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
It was during an extended stay at Rice University in Houston, Texas in the year 
2000 that, as a visiting Academic, I found myself defining the various types of 
city of my experience. ‘And what do you make of Houston?’ was a query. As I 
answered, and drew a series – Italian hill town; London; Los Angeles; Houston 
– I spontaneously added a fifth: ‘Super Houston’, thus talking myself into a 
project that I developed between visits. Taking the implications of Houston as 
I found them – endless one- or two-storey houses under the trees, far fewer 
points of focus than in Los Angeles, excessive use of car access – I suggested 
an extension of the city where the car would be electronically guided. There 
would be even more trees. There could then be points of high visual identity 
along the key highway: a series of giant billboards would cross the route, one 
set every mile or two; and structures that would be revealed as buildings and 
linked back to a general territory on the far side of the highway that would 
be a long, meandering collage of parks, institutions, workshops, lakes and 
exhibition grounds. Some of these would be temporary, and some developed 
directly into the ‘billboard’ structures, which could be configured into virtual 
villages. It still remained a little detached from the American dream of life in 
the wicker chair on the deck under the verandah, but picked out from America 
at its best, in the form of West Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, using it as the key to 
non-urban urbanism. It was a simpler dream than Way Out West – Berlin, but 
again, in the detail of an idealised Super Houston house, where there would be 
no division between bedroom, shower and backyard-garden, I was seeking to 
break open those old typologies.
Sunset Strip, Los Angeles, California.
The inspiration for ‘Super Houston’, shown here in 
about 1979, with billboards for Cher, Eddie Money 
and Judy Collins.
234 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Super Houston, 2000: aerial view of 
exhibition village.
The freeway separates the ‘houses under 
the trees’ from the ‘village’ marker buildings 
(inspired by the LA billboards) and the recreation/
education/industry area.
235 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
Peter Cook, Super Houston, 2000: 
typical houses.
Always under the trees.
236 PETER COOK
Even harder has been the challenge of a city that refuses, so far, to urbanise 
in the manner that we might expect. In the 1980s a one-afternoon whizz 
from Brisbane down to Gold Coast excited me because it was starting to 
have 20- or 30-storey apartment blocks rising out of the beach. There was 
virtually no infrastructure. Returning more than twenty years later (to build 
the architecture school at Bond University), we also reached the final of 
the competition for Gold Coast’s cultural precinct. The city nears 600,000 
people, and there are many more and taller high-rises, still landing onto a 
poor infrastructure and still with no real downtown. Its virtues lie along the 
unmatched beaches and potentially around the myriad of crafted lagoons. 
A peninsula site already containing a theatre and the diminutive City Hall 
had to absorb more theatres, galleries, cinemas, recreation gardens and, by 
implication, a quality of urbanism.
Artificial culture parks are a tricky proposition: think how long London’s South 
Bank Centre needed to really gel after it was instigated for the Festival of 
Britain in 1951, and I wonder too about New York’s Lincoln Center (opened 
1962) as an implant? Furthermore, Gold Coast is at present nearer to honky-
tonk under the skyscrapers, surfing at six in the morning and a few beers aside 
a lagoon. Symphony audiences are still bussed up to Brisbane and bookstores 
are hard to find. Working as a team at CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural 
Bureau), we piled in idea upon idea, we tackled the climate of many bright days 
but heavy rain when it came, we shot decks out onto the lake and river, and we 
brought in the kiosks, clusters of hedges and trees.
Most significantly, we contrived the larger buildings to huddle together 
and then scooped out caves at their edges to provide both identity and 
shelter from sun or rain. These scoops were brightly coloured to contrast 
with the shimmering mass of the layered-glass forms. Ramps and galleries 
– rarely found in the rest of Gold Coast – carried the wide range of activities 
folded together. 
CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural 
Bureau), Gold Coast Cultural Precinct, Gold 
Coast, Queensland, Australia, 2013: night-
time view of theatre ‘scoops’.
The scoops are places to meet and take 
shelter,and they offer clues to the interiors of 
the main buildings.
237 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
CRAB, Gold Coast Cultural Precinct, Gold Coast, 
Queensland, Australia, 2013: aerial view of 
whole project.
The lake is bounded by boardwalks that turn into 
open-air theatres; underneath are craft and acting 
workshops. The main theatres and art gallery 
establish key zones. There are art walks with 
gallery/kiosks and eco-hedges as well.
238 PETER COOK
All the time, with this vocabulary, we were conscious of virtually inventing 
an urbanity where none had stood before. Yet the underbelly of the whole 
scheme was perhaps its most exploratory statement: that for real, ongoing and 
creative cultural activity you need space in which to experiment and so, just 
as in Way Out West – Berlin, there is an underworld. Shed space (that might 
occasionally flood – but would be very cheap) acquires all manner of casual 
studios, workshops, fringe galleries and ad hoc performance spaces, and 
moreover it frays out towards the lake and the river. Part of it erupts to become 
an open-air venue for concerts based on a floating stage in the lake. Around 
this lake is strung a perambulation among the trees that glances past a series 
of mini-galleries, art platforms or kiosks. Even the car parking, which lies under 
reconstructed meadowland, sprouts clusters of trees, small foci of spiralling 
paths and ozone-hedges.
239 MOTIVE 8: THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
In this way we evolve a city language that derives from the seaside as well 
as from the world of the boulevard. The chosen scheme was infinitely more 
hedonistic, but our Gold Coast language still intrigues: as with Way Out West – 
Berlin, it sets up conversations that will not yet go away. 
In the same way, a return to Bournemouth in order to make a building, the 
Arts University Drawing Studio (2015; see Motive 3), whetted my appetite to 
respond to that town’s own cussed paradox. The next-door town of Poole 
morphs into Bournemouth, but they refuse to bond (as did Brighton and Hove) 
and therefore remain a city manqué. So I roll in a series of towers and multi-
level deck-platforms of parking and that same Gold Coast shed space.
Carefully pitching the matrix of towers to take advantage of the south-west 
views and evening sun (very typical of the local microclimate), the intention is 
to simultaneously run the towers from low at the seaward side to high at the 
northern back. It all spans the border between the two towns and has some 
grand avenues running towards the sea and some not-so-pretty suburbia 
to the west, where most of the decking lands. All of this is interwoven with 
swathes of pine trees planted during the mid-19th-century capture of the very 
sandy heathland, binding the soil and giving shelter: organised planting, but 
tough, thick and tall so as to compete successfully with the rising structures.
To what extent are the mannerisms of these last two projects fundamentally 
English, or to what extent are northern Europe and California wrapped up 
in there somewhere? Notwithstanding the enormous buzz one repeatedly 
gets from the vast but never terrifying city of Tokyo, or from Kyoto – a city 
of nooks, crannies and ghosts. The bizarre and the contemplative fold over 
each other and represent a strange parallel, as both the British Isles and Japan 
lie offshore of a continent that sent them culture – only to be reinterpreted, 
often dismembered and folded into a damp island inhabited by folk who are 
ostensibly correct, but actually fiendishly wayward.
CRAB, Gold Coast Cultural Precinct, Gold Coast, 
Queensland, Australia, 2013: model.
In the foreground is the main theatre. Paths and 
kiosk pavilions also play a major role.
240 PETER COOK
MOTIVE 9
ON DRAWING, 
DESIGNING, 
TALKING AND 
BUILDING
242 PETER COOK
The bulk of my activity is spent in talking: as much (or maybe more) as is spent 
in making drawings and buildings and, as a teacher and critic, I have become 
a specialist in prising out sequences of idea, cause, effect and prejudice. So 
inevitably the technique of post-rationalisation creeps in without me noticing.
When lecturing, I run back over items where the original motives have become 
overlaid by other people’s response to the look or usefulness of those items. I 
package (for the spiel will be different for the audience at the Home Economics 
department of a friendly suburban college to that at a picky, elite powerhouse), 
and it sometimes helps in aerating the brain if I deliberately take out my most 
famous project and feed in one that is an old, almost forgotten friend.
At the moment of writing, I am 
simultaneously pursuing a new 
idea that takes account of a very 
crowded city which needs to expand 
a university. It seems that every city 
enjoys building upwards: for fiscal 
reasons, because it saves thinking 
about land-use and maybe (though 
rarely stated) as a form of macho-
show-off statement. Yet as an academic 
insider (explained at length in Motive 
3), I hit upon the notion of separate 
buildings that could be placed one 
on top of the other with a tall void 
between each. I ascribe the ungainly 
term ‘chunks’ to describe each part 
or ‘school’ and then reinterpret the 
basic format of five floors with rooftop 
‘quadrangle’ in a variety of ways. 
Peter Cook lecturing at the Strelka Institute, 
Moscow, 2011.
previous spread
CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau), 
Abedian School of Architecture, Bond 
University, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia, 
2014: interior with evening sun.
Architecture really is theatre.
243 MOTIVE 9: ON DRAWING, DESIGNING, TALKING AND BUILDING
A seminar at the Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, 2012.
Peter Cook drawing in Toto Gallery, Tokyo, 2012.
Yael Reisner watching.
244 PETER COOK
By making the basic structure very straightforward and obvious, in which 
the four legs of the construction form a substantial concrete mass insulating 
the escape stairs, and then by encouraging the development of ‘parasite’ 
temporary structures that can hang off or sit on top of the main chunks 
(which contain lecture rooms within their core and studios, laboratories or 
study rooms where there is a good view of the city), likely changes in terms of 
curriculum, attitude, day/night cycle but, most of all, identity are accounted for. 
I am certain that the constituent schools of Engineering or Law or Art want to 
set up their own atmosphere, so that not only are the ‘quadrangles’ different 
and more or less neatly or haphazardly interpreted, but even the entrances at 
the feet of the building (one foot per chunk) have quite different pavilions to 
introduce themselves to the visitor.
So recently I have arrived in lecture halls or seminar rooms with the playing-
out of this project in my head; yet in a seminar there should be a cut and 
thrust, a questioning of assumptions, a refreshment of the brain by those with 
fewer or different prejudices (and no interest in vertical universities). Selfishly, 
the event is an incentive to work ideas over again – or, at best, to come away 
rarin’ to go on a new approach (as in Rice University and the Super Houston 
project of 2000–1; see Motive 8).
In my book Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture (2008) I look at three 
stages of Christine Hawley’s Shadow House (2008) and suggest that maybe 
the most published version (in colour, with hard line graphics) may not be the 
moment of greatest inspiration, but that the high creative moment existed 
– if there is such a thing – somewhere between the pencil sketch and the ink 
‘carcass’ drawing.
Later, in Motive 4 of this book, I make a plea for the fact that the built version 
of the Vallecas housing in Madrid (2013), lacking as it does the sports roof, the 
kiosks and the cute shutters that we proposed, has lost much of the spirit of 
245 MOTIVE 9: ON DRAWING, DESIGNING, TALKING AND BUILDING
Peter Cook, Vertical University, 2015: platform 
of the Arts and Humanitiesblock.
The university is a stack of four blocks. From 
top to bottom: Club/Administration; Arts and 
Humanities; Business and Economics; Science 
and Engineering.
246 PETER COOK
Peter Cook, Vertical University, 2015: 
concept collage.
A drawn ‘conversation with myself’, 
taking the issue of academic inflation, 
departmental identity and university ritual 
as interwoven issues.
247 MOTIVE 9: ON DRAWING, DESIGNING, TALKING AND BUILDING
the architecture, the ‘high moment’ never having been reached. Once you 
build, the role of the unfettered drawing, and the creative trajectory of a good 
lecture with a sudden inclusion of ideas that were not there at the time but 
certainly add to the experience, are an essential part of your development.
The built building always surprises you: through the unexpected depth of 
a beam, the darkness of a narrow space, the darting shaft of late afternoon 
light (particularly in my case in the Abedian School of Architecture in Australia 
(2014; see Motive 3)). Even good models cannot always anticipate these things 
because they are to do also with scale, sound, patina, grain, climate – back 
to the theatre of architecture. Although it happens all too rarely, it is exciting 
to sometimes experience an architectural space that has suddenly been 
transformed by a single, deft stroke. Such was Yael Reisner’s intervention in 
2014, into the Plaça de la Mercè of Barcelona.
Intellectually there is a need to place values in a hierarchy, and thus to seek and 
analyse the truth of the greatest creative moment. 
Yet this may be an unattainable Holy Grail: so meanwhile one circles the issue, 
expanding the territories of enquiry – in every direction.
Yael Reisner, Take My Hand, Plaça de la Mercè, 
Barcelona, Spain, 2014.
Plaça de la Mercè was created in the 1980s when 
the architect and planner Oriol Bohigas plucked 
out a building to open the La Mercè church into a 
new square, where the Civil Registrar of Barcelona 
happened to be on its other side. For the Catalan 
Freedom Festival in summer 2014, Yael related 
the theme of ‘democracy’ to the opening-up of 
the civil marriage ceremonies into the square, 
turning them into ritualistic events. Hovering 
above is the symbol of human rights, interpreted 
as an inflatable – its shade protecting people and 
the 21 columns of pure white flowers (of honey 
fragrance) from the summer sun.
248 PETER COOK
Frampton, Kenneth and Futagawa, 
Yukio, Modern Architecture 1920–
1945, Rizzoli (New York), 1987
Glusberg, Jorge, Clorindo Testa, pintor 
y arquitecto, Summa (Buenos 
Aires), 1983
Gössel, Peter and Leuthäuser, 
Gabriele, Architecture in the 20th 
Century, Taschen (Cologne and 
London), 2012
Hejduk, John, Mask of Medusa, Rizzoli 
(New York), 1985
Khan-Magomedov, Selim O, Pioneers 
of Soviet Architecture, Rizzoli (New 
York), 1987
Klotz, Heinrich, Vision der 
Moderne, DAM – Deutsches 
Architekturmuseum (Frankfurt 
and Munich), 1986
Lodder, Christina, Russian 
Constructivism, Yale University 
Press (New Haven, CT and 
London), 1983
Lund, Nils-Ole, Nordic Architecture, 
Taschen (Copenhagen), 2008
Migayrou, Frédéric (ed), Bernard 
Tschumi, Centre Pompidou (Paris), 
2014
Posener, Julius, Hans Poelzig, MIT 
Press (Cambridge, MA), 1992
Atelier Bow-Wow, Bow Wow from Post 
Bubble City, INAX (Tokyo), 2006
Banham, Reyner, Theory and Design in 
the First Machine Age, 2nd edition, 
MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1980 
(first published 1960)
Caldenby, Claes and Hultin, Olof, 
Asplund, Stockholm Architektur 
Förlag in association with Gingko 
Press (Stockholm), 1985
Cook, Peter, Drawing: The Motive Force 
of Architecture, Wiley (Chichester), 
2014
Cooke, Catherine (essay), Architectural 
Drawings of the Russian Avant-
Garde, Museum of Modern Art 
(New York), 1990
Crompton, Dennis (ed), A Guide to 
Archigram 1961–74, Princeton 
Architectural Press (New York), 
2012
Evans, Robin, The Projective Cast, MIT 
Press (Cambridge, MA), 1995
Fehn, Sverre, Sverre Fehn, National 
Museum of Art, Architecture and 
Design (Oslo), 2009
Flora, Nicola, Giardiello, Paolo and 
Postiglione, Gennaro, Sigurd 
Lewerentz, 1885–1975, Electa 
(Milan), 2006
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Prix, Wolf D, Get Off My Cloud, Hatje 
Kantz (Ostfildern-Ruit), 2005
Reed, Peter (ed), Alvar Aalto, Museum 
of Modern Art (New York), 1998
Reisner, Yael, Architecture and Beauty, 
Wiley (Chichester), 2010
Schama, Simon, Landscape and 
Memory, reprint edition, 
HarperCollins (London), 1995
Schorske, Carl E, Fin-de-siècle Vienna, 
Vintage (New York), 1980
Sorkin, Michael, Exquisite Corpse, 
Verso (London), 1991
Steiner, Hadas A, Beyond Archigram, 
Routledge (New York and 
London), 2009
Vidler, Anthony, James Frazer Stirling, 
Yale University Press (New Haven, 
CT and London), 2010
Woods, Lebbeus, Radical 
Reconstruction, Princeton 
Architectural Press (New York), 
1997
249 INDEX
Figures in italics indicate captions. 
24H Architecture 37
Abe, Hitoshi 67
Abraham, Raimund 176
AHMM (Allford Hall Monaghan Morris) 
203, 203
Allen, Laura 148, 148
Alps 152, 180
Amsterdam, Netherlands: Het Schip 
social housing 219, 219
Antwerp, Belgium 99
Archigram 31, 41, 43, 47, 79, 103, 115, 144, 
162, 165, 191, 191, 192, 212, 216
Archigram pamphlet
fifth issue 216, 217, 223
sixth issue 169
Architectural Association, London, UK 60, 
77, 94, 161, 168, 217
School of Architecture 58
Archizoom: No-Stop City 212
Arcosanti, Arizona, USA 212
Arizona, USA 224
Art Nouveau 98, 192, 192
Aslin, CH 59
Asplund, Erik Gunnar 21, 22, 22, 157, 159
Australian architecture 130
Austro-Hungarian Empire 73, 74
Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, Austria: museum 
of Roman antiquities 172, 172, 174, 175
Bad Kreuznach, Germany 149
Baltic Sea 220
Banham, Reyner 29, 29, 162
Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four 
Ecologies 162
Barcelona, Spain
Civil Registrar of Barcelona 247
Igualada Cemetery 15, 15
Institute of Advanced Architecture 
of Catalonia (IAAC) 82
La Mercé church 247
Take My Hand, Plaça de la Mercé 
247, 247
Baroque architecture 106, 177, 179, 185
Bartholomew, Stuart 96
Basel, Switzerland: Hasenrain private 
apartment 107
Bauhaus, Dessau, Germany 59
elemental analysis 58
school of architecture 43
INDEX
Bax, Arnold 141
Behrens, Peter 10, 15
Benson, William 141
Berlin, Germany 12, 73, 168
Aedes gallery 224
Grosses Schauspielhaus 14, 15
Halensee lake 224
Kunstverein: ‘Berlin: Denmal oder 
Denkmodell?’ ('Berlin: Monument 
or Thought Model?’) 224
Kurfürstendamm 168, 224, 232
Lützowplatz: winter gardens for an 
apartment block 203
Prenzlauer Berg 112
Technical University of Berlin: 
Umlauftank 106, 106
Beuys, Joseph 66
Birch, Eugenius 167
Birmingham, UK 123
Hill Street 116
remodelled New Street Station 114, 
115, 116, 116
Selfridges 115, 116
Stephenson Street 116
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) 130
Black, Milton 61
Black Mountain College, North Carolina 
94
Blacksburg, Virginia, USA
Virginia Polytechnic Institute 62
Carol M Newman Library 
renovation and addition 63
Blanc, Patrick 151, 153
Bo Bardi, Lina 184–185, 185, 223, 224
Bohigas, Oriol 247
Böhm, Domenikus 77
Bollinger, Klaus 64–65, 64, 182
Bollinger + Grohmann 64, 180
Bonn, Germany: Villa Godesberg 232
Boston, Massachusetts: Public Library 
33, 33
Bourne River 147
Bournemouth, Hampshire, UK 57, 127, 
146, 168, 185
Arts University Bournemouth: 
Drawing Studio 96, 96, 97, 99, 126, 
127, 239
beach 103
Bournemouth and Poole College 
57–58, 60
Lansdowne Campus and clock 
tower 57
Bournemouth Steps project 167
Central Pleasure Gardens 146, 147
Invalid’s Walk (Pine Walk) 125
Brandlhuber, Arno 23, 23
Braque, Georges 161
Bremen, Germany
Böttcherstrasse 196
Martin Kiefert hot-dog kiosk, 
Philosophenweg 196, 197
Brighton, East Sussex 102, 239
University of Brighton 82
Brinkman, Michiel 219
Brisbane, Australia
Queen Street 199, 236
State Library of Queensland: Nielson 
Design Lecture (2010) 82
street life and advanced kiosk 119
University of Queensland 62
Bristol, UK 168
’brownfield’ 125
Bruck an der Mur, Austria 182
Brunel,Isambard Kingdom 103
Brussels, Belgium 99
Expo (1958)
Atomium 161
Norwegian Pavilion 161, 161
Philips Pavilion 161
Maison Saint-Cyr, 11 Square 
Ambiorix 98
Buckminster Fuller, Richard 162
Buenos Aires, Argentina: Bank of London 
and South America, San Nicolás 105, 
106, 185
Busan, South Korea: Busan Cinema 
Center 65
BUSarchitektur 67
Cairo, Egypt 140
Cam River 59
Cambridge, UK 59
University of Cambridge: Churchill 
College 59, 59
Campbell, Colen 140, 141
Carnuntum Roman encampment, Austria 
172
Casey, Adam 153
Digital Reconstruction of Forgotten 
Landscapes, Invisible Landscape, 
Unit 22, Bartlett School of 
Architecture, University College 
250 PETER COOK
London (UCL) 153
Catalan Freedom Festival (2014) 247
Chalk, Warren 162, 215
Cherwell River 69, 140
Church, Thomas Dolliver 161
classicism 22
Classicists 79
CoBrA 215
Colletti, Marjan 42–43, 189
2&1/2D Drawing representing line 
and spline-based blots rather than 
NURBS and surface-based blobs 
42, 43
Cologne, Germany: Glass Pavilion, 
Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition 21, 21
Constructivism 43, 106
Cook, Peter 242, 243
Addhox 224
Arcadia City 22, 131, 132, 135–137, 
143, 151, 167, 220
Arcadia ‘A’ 132, 133, 151
Arcadia ‘B’ 133
inhabitants 138
Arcadia ‘C’ 134, 135
an inhabitant 130
inhabitants 138, 139
‘Sleeklucent’ apartment 
137
Arcadia ‘D’ 134
Arcadia ‘Lofts’ 135, 135
inhabitants 139
Arcadia ‘Mesh Marsh and 
Trickling Towers’ 136
inhabitants 139
Arcadia ‘Peninsula Apartments’ 
137
inhabitants 138
Chunk City 4
Comfo-Veg Club 106
first drawing 108
second drawing 109
Drawing: The Motive Force of 
Architecture 244
elemental analysis of Walter 
Gropius’s Bauhaus at Dessau, 
Germany 58
Frankfurt Westhafen/Real City, 
Germany 37, 110, 110, 167, 168, 
168, 212, 227, 227
Hidden City 35–37, 35
Ideas Circus 216
Instant City 35, 163, 165, 175, 212, 216
Jungle City 188, 204, 205
Layer City 37, 212, 220, 220, 221
Living City 37
‘lumps’ or ‘mounds’ series 26, 30, 36
Smooth Lump 27, 29
Vegetated Lump 27
Medina Circle Tower, Tel Aviv, Israel 
39, 40, 41
Montreal Tower project 169, 170
Pine City 127
Pine City (1) 126
Pine City (2) 127
Plug-in City 31, 37, 103, 104, 110, 
169, 175, 215–216, 216, 217, 220, 
223, 224
A Predilection for Noses 17
Santa Monica Mound Hotel 204, 207
Sponge Project
Gunge 29
Nests 28, 29
Orifices 29, 30
Patchwork 29
Super Houston 105–106, 233, 233, 
234, 235, 244
Swiss Cottage Tower 38–39, 39
Urban Mark 224
Veg House 110, 143–144, 146–147, 
224
Stage 1 143, 143
Stage 2 143, 143
Stage 3 143, 143
Stage 4 143, 144
Stage 5 144, 144
Stage 6 144, 144
Veg Village 146
Vertical University 245, 246
Way Out West - Berlin 224–225, 227, 
227–231, 233, 238, 239
Coop Himmelb(l)au 65, 75, 176
Copenhagen, Denmark 130
Kongens Nytorv: kiosks 195, 195
orange kiosk 199, 199
CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural 
Bureau) 12, 17, 47, 47, 48, 50–53, 66–71, 
67, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 84–92, 94–97, 112, 
113, 114, 116, 121, 121–125, 123, 151, 192, 
193, 200, 200, 201, 203, 236, 236, 242
Crompton, Dennis 216
Cruz, Marcos
‘Hypodermis’/Cyborgian Interfaces 
(Study of Inlucent Materiality) 43
The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture 
43, 43
Danish architecture 130
Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany: 
Mathildenhöhe artists’ colony 72
de Klerk, Michel 219, 219
de Kooning, Willem 162
De Stijl 115
Deconstructivists 79
‘decorative art’ 75
Delius, Frederick 141
Denari, Neil 165
Derbyshire, Andrew 60
Deutsche Bank 64
Diaz Alonso, Hernan 42, 42, 43, 45
Still Flesh 41
Dix, Otto 224
Domenig, Günther 26, 27, 176, 176, 
182–183
Düsseldorf, Germany 78
Eames, Charles and Ray 162
East Anglia, UK 125, 149, 220
Eastbourne, East Sussex, UK: pier 167
Ehn, Karl 218, 219
Eiermann, Egon 77
Eiffel, Gustave 103
Elbe River 167
Elias, Nick: ‘Poohtown’ 153
Ellwood, Craig 162
English Awakening (1960s) 57
Erskine, Ralph 219
Evergreen Review 162
Expressionism, Expressionists 21, 21, 26, 
27, 79, 196
Fano, Italy: basilica 11
Farnsworth, Benjamin 192
Faure, Lorène 125
‘Features: Monte Carlo’ project (1969) 177
Fehn, Sverre 161, 161
Feireiss, Kristin 224
Flitcroft, Henry 141
Florentine groups 216
Forty, Adrian 171
Foster, Norman 31
Foulness Island, near Southend, Essex, 
UK 149
Fournier, Colin 13, 24, 25, 116, 156, 176, 
251 INDEX
177, 177, 178, 179, 179, 180
Frankfurt am Main, Germany 78, 146, 
227, 227
Alte Brücke 168
apothecary’s shop 75
Hoechst Chemical Works 10, 15
kiosks 199
Städelschule Kantine 64–66, 64, 65, 
96, 182
Freud, Sigmund 73
Friedman, Yona 216
‘Paris Spatial’ 215, 215
Frühlicht Expressionist journal 21
Fujisawa, Kanagawa, Japan: Shonandai 
Culture Centre 164
Functionalism 219
Fung, Hsinming 62, 62
Future Systems 115, 116
Futurism 223
Gary Paige Studio 83
Gebhart, David: Guide to Architecture in 
Los Angeles and Southern California 163
Gehry, Frank 86, 165
General Motors Technical Center 
(Warren, Michigan) 161
German architecture 168
Giencke, Volker 176, 182, 183
Glasgow School of Art 58
Glaskogen nature reserve, Sweden: 
Dragspelhuset (Accordion House), 
Övre Gla 37, 37
‘Glass Chain’ architects’ chain letter 21
Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia 85, 
86, 236
Bond University: Abedian School 
of Architecture 17, 17, 82, 84–86, 
84–92, 89–90, 92, 94–95, 94, 95, 
236, 242, 247
City Hall 236
Gold Coast Cultural Precinct 236, 
236, 237, 238–239, 239
‘Googie’ architecture 162, 219
Gothenburg, Sweden 219
Law Courts extension 21, 22
Gothic architecture 130, 185
Gowan, James 147
Graz, Austria 176–177, 179
Catholic Educational Academy 183
Eggenberg Convent 176
Eisernes Haus (Iron House) 177, 178
European City of Culture (2003) 180
General Motors vehicle plant 176
Hauptbrücke 177, 179
Institute of Botany, University of 
Graz 182, 183
Kunsthaus 13, 17, 24, 25, 65, 81, 116, 
156, 176–177, 177–180, 179–180, 
182–183, 243
Steirischer Herbst 176
Technical University of Graz 182
Blazing Wing 176
University of Graz, Austria: Institute 
of Botany 182, 183
Grazer Schule 176, 177
Greene, David 23, 23, 162, 215, 216
Grimshaw, Nicholas 31
Gropius, Walter 58, 59
Guimard, Hector 192
Habsburgs 81
Hadid, Zaha 67, 224
If only buildings could move? 43
Hamburg, Germany 167, 171
Chilehaus 171
Elbe park 167
Hamburg Land-Pier 166, 167, 167
offices 171–172, 171
Happisburgh, Norfolk, UK 148, 148
Happold, Ted 31
Hapsburg Empire 183
Harvard University (Cambridge, 
Massachusetts), USA 82
Hasegawa, Itsuko 164, 183
Hawley, Christine 25, 25, 64, 64, 65, 65, 
133, 166, 167, 168, 171, 171, 172, 174
Shadow House 220, 244
Heath Robinson, William 31
Carrying out the Correspondence 
Course for Mountain Climbing in 
the Home 32
Hejduk, John 12, 13
Helsinki, Finland: Aalto University 123, 
123
Herron, Ron 162–163, 166, 167, 212
Hertfordshire schools programme, UK 
(1950s) 59
Herzog & de Meuron 151
High Neoclassicism 33
High-Tech 31, 32, 103
Hoare, Henry 141
Hodgetts, Craig 62, 62
Hodgetts + Fung 62
Hoffmann, Josef 75
Höger, Fritz 171
Hollein, Hans 75, 216
Honegger, Arthur: Pacific 231 103
Hong Kong: the three-dimensional city 
223
Hopkins, Michael 31
Houston, Texas, USA 233
Rice University 233, 244
University of Houston, Texas 82
Hove, East Sussex, UK 239
Howell Killick Partridge & Amis 59, 147
Hunt, Tony 31
Hurtado, Eva 102, 117, 117, 118, 119, 120
Huth, Eilfried 176
Immendorff, Jörg 66
India 185
International Style 130
Isherwood, Christopher: Goodbye to 
Berlin 224, 225
Isozaki, Arata 22, 162–163, 165
Ito, Toyo 180, 183
Japan 165, 167, 203, 239
Johnson-Marshall, Stirrat 60
Jones, Wes 62, 63
Jugendstil 219
Kada, Klaus 176
Kahn, Louis 21, 58, 59
Kaiserlautern, Germany 82
Kansas City, Missouri, USA 82
Kaohsiung, Taiwan: ship terminal 123
Kaplicky, Jan 116
Kawasaki Information City, near Tokyo, 
Japan 110, 111, 167, 224
Kelp, Günter Zamp 23, 23
Kent, William 140, 140
Kikutake, Kiyonori 169, 170, 171
kiosks 191–192, 191–201, 195–196, 199, 
200, 203
Klagenfurt, Austria 26
Klimt, Gustav 73
The Tree of Life 73
Klippan, Sweden: St Peter’s Church 22, 22
Knutsson-Hall, Maria: ‘Architecture and 
Nature’ 45, 46
König, Kasper 64, 96
Korn, Arthur 168
252PETER COOK
Krauss, Julius 23, 23
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 123
Kurokawa, Kisho 215
Kyoto, Japan 110, 167, 185, 239
Ginkaku-ji Temple Gardens 111
Kyoto Seika University 82
Labrouste, Henri 33, 33
Lacey, JW 57
Lammers, Maartje 37, 37
Lang, Fritz 103, 232
Lasdun, Denys 56, 60
Latin America 156, 159
Le Corbusier 21, 159, 161
When the Cathedrals Were White 159
Lee, Yong Ju 30, 30
Leo, Ludwig 106, 106
Letchworth, Hertfordshire, UK 146, 219
Garden Studio 124
Lewerentz, Sigurd 22, 22
Lim, CJ 171, 171
Lincoln, Nebraska, USA: Civic Centre 23
Lissitzky, El 43
Ljubljana, Slovenia 73, 74
London, UK 99, 130, 156, 192, 223, 233
The Acid House 127, 127
Austin’s clothes shop, Shaftesbury 
Avenue 162
Borough of Westminster kiosks 192, 
193
Dalston 112
Freud Museum 73
Green Cottage restaurant, Swiss 
Cottage: ‘the duckist’ 191, 191, 209
Hornsey College of Art, Haringey 
216
Institute of Contemporary Arts 161
King’s Cross Station 15
Lea Valley 149
Lloyd’s Building 59
MARS Group Exhibition, New 
Burlington Galleries: mural 
depicting the needs of leisure 
161, 161
MARS Plan 168
Mr Coffee - He’s So Frothy, Exmouth 
Market 191, 191, 192
‘New American Painting’ exhibition 
(Tate Gallery, 1959) 162
Olympics (2012) 124
Oxford Street 192
Raines Court housing scheme, 
Hackney 203, 203
St Paul’s Studios, Talgarth Road, 
Baron’s Court 99
South Bank Centre 236
University College London: Bartlett 
School of Architecture 12, 42, 43, 
82, 86, 94, 152, 153, 177, 208, 209
Loos, Adolf 73
Los Angeles, California, USA 61, 62, 130, 
162–163, 165, 165, 219, 233
billboards 233, 233, 234
Hollywood Hills 162, 219
SCI-Arc 42, 82, 83
Towards Comfo-Veg installation 
106, 108
Ships Coffee Shop, Wilshire 
Boulevard, Westwood 162
Sunset Strip 233, 233
Tail o’ the Pup 61, 61, 199
University of California, Los Angeles 
(UCLA) 60–62, 162
Architecture and Planning 
Department (later Perloff 
Hall) 60, 94
Chiller Plant/Cogeneration 
Facility 62, 63
Towell Library 62, 62
Westwood Village 60, 163
University of Southern California 
163
Venice 61, 163
Lovell, Mr and Mrs Philip M 163
Lynn, Jack 147
‘machine architecture’ 62, 63
McKim, Mead and White 33, 33
Mackintosh, Charles Rennie 58
Madrid, Spain 130, 153
CaixaForum 151
Polytechnic 82
Vallecas housing 17, 121, 121, 122, 
203, 244, 247
villa 151, 151
Mahler, Gustav 73
Main River 110, 168
Malmö, Sweden: hot-dog stand 194, 195
Manila, Philippines 185
Marx, Roberto Burle 156, 156
Mayne, Thom 165
Meir, Richard 162
Memphis group 204
Mendelsohn, Erich 39
Metabolist group 169, 212
Metropolis (film) 103, 223
Mettmann, Germany: Neanderthal 
Museum for the Evolution of Mankind 
23, 23
Mexico City, Mexico: Central Library of 
the National Autonomous University 
of Mexico, Coyoacán 158
Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig 159, 161
Milan, Italy: HOMI, home international 
show (2014) 163
Minimalism 39, 153
Miralles, Enric 15, 15
Modernism, Modernists 33, 39, 59, 77, 
130, 153, 158, 159, 161, 161, 177, 192, 192, 
199, 219, 223
Moholy-Nagy, László 43
Kinetic Constructive System 44
Montreal, Canada 131
Expo tower project (1963) 215
Habitat 67 215
Monty Python television series and films 
31
Morphosis 224
Moscow, Russia
Moscow Architectural Institute 
(MARCHI) (previously First 
Stroganov State Art Workshops) 
82, 82
Strelka Institute 242
Moss, Eric Owen 165
Motherwell, Robert 162
Munich, Germany: BMW World 
headquarters 65
Mur River 177, 180
Mur Valley, Austria 185
Nazis 12, 13
Neo-Romanesque 60
Neoclassicism 57
New York City, USA 62
Brooklyn 112
Central Park 116
Coney Island 102
Cooper Union School of Art and 
Architecture 12, 82
Factory 94
Lincoln Center 236
‘liveable lofts’ 135
Pratt Institute 82
Tribeca hot dogs, drinks and 
pretzels kiosk 191, 192
253 INDEX
Newby, Frank 31
Newcastle, UK: Byker Wall residential 
block 219
Newport Beach, California, USA: Lovell 
Beach House 163
Niemeyer, Oscar 21, 156, 157
Niewenhuys, Constant
New Babylon proposals 212
concert hall for electronic 
music 215
Nitsch, Hermann 66
NO.MAD Architects 67
Norfolk, UK 124, 148
Broads 148, 149
North Sea 220
Norway
Layer City plan 221
use of wood 130, 161
Norwich, Norfolk, UK 168
shopping mall under Norwich 
Castle 131
University of East Anglia, Norwich, 
UK: dormitory ‘ziggurats’ 56, 60, 
60
Nottingham, UK: ‘Nottingham 
Craneways’ exhibition (1962) 215–216, 
216
Offenbach, Germany 227, 227
O’Gorman, Juan 156, 158
Olbrich, Joseph Maria 72, 73
Olmsted, Frederick Law 116
Osaka, Japan
Expo (1970) 169, 170
the three-dimensional city 223
Oslo, Norway 220
‘Funkis’ housing schemes 219
Security, Christiana Square 12, 13
Oslo Fjord, Norway 220
Oslo School of Architecture 12, 13
Ottoman Empire 192
Oxford, UK 59
Pampulha, Brazil: Church of St Francis of 
Assisi 157
Panton, Verner 106, 107
Paris, France 73, 99, 161
Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève 
33, 33
Centre Pompidou 31, 81
École des Beaux-Arts 82, 137
Maison Coque at Salon des Arts 
Ménagers (Exhibition of Domestic 
Arts), Grand Palais 104
Métro 192
Pérez Arroyo, Salvador 102, 117, 117–122
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA: 
University of Pennsylvania: Richards 
Medical Research Laboratories 58, 59
Phoenix, Arizona, USA: Cosanti 
educational foundation, Arcosanti 215
Piano, Renzo 31, 81
piano nobile tradition 33, 223
Picasso, Pablo 161
Pichler, Walter 75
Picturesque 115
Pierson, Rex 31
Pinós, Carme 15, 67
Pinto, near Madrid, Spain 102, 117, 
117–120, 121, 122, 123
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 215
Plečnik, Jože 72, 73, 74
Poelzig, Hans 14, 15
Pollock, Jackson 162
Poole, Dorset, UK 127, 239
Poole Harbour, Dorset, UK 200
Porro, Ricardo 156
Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK: University of 
Portsmouth 82
Post-Modernists 79, 204
Price, Cedric 176
Pristina, Kosovo: kiosk, pedestrian mall 
196, 196
Prouvé, Jean 103, 104
Queensland, Australia 85, 86
Rationalism, Rationalists 79, 153
Regency period 102
Regionalism 153
Reiser, Jesse 31
Reisner, Yael 243, 247, 247
Rice, Peter 31
Richter, Helmut 183
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Ministry of Health 
and Education roof garden 156
Ritoque, Chile: The Open City 175, 175
Riviera, France 102
Robotham, Gavin 12, 75, 76, 79, 82, 92, 94, 
124, 125, 148, 149, 151, 171, 171, 200
Rogers, Richard 31, 59, 81
Romanticism, Romantics 79, 144, 151, 
161, 171
Rome, Italy
Renaissance palaces 33
Via Appia (‘House at an Intersection’ 
competition) 25, 25, 132, 133
Rothko, Mark 162
Rotterdam, Netherlands: Spangen 
housing 219
Rousham House and Gardens, 
Oxfordshire, UK 140, 140, 141
Ruiz, Javier: Spatial Sprezzatura - 
Architecture of Gradients and 
Transitions, Unit 20, Bartlett School 
of Architecture, University College 
London 208, 209
Saarinen, Eero 161
Safdie, Moshe 215
Salvador de Bahia, Brazil 169
Santa Monica, California,USA 207
Main Street 204
man with toy animal on head, Third 
Street Promenade shopping mall 
189, 189, 209
Sant’Ella, Antonio 223
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Sao Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) 
184–185, 223, 224
SESC Pompéia 184, 185
Schama, Simon: Landscape and Memory 
37
Schiele, Egon 73
Schindler, Rudolf 163
Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 22
Schneider-Esleben, Paul 77
Schoenberg, Arnold 73, 75
Schorske, Carl E 75
Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and 
Culture 73
Schwarz, Rudolf 77, 161
Secession art movement 72
Second World War 32, 86
Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK 177
Park Hill 147
University of Sheffield: extension 
60, 60
Shinkenchiku Residential Design 
Competition (1967) 25, 25
Sibelius, Jean 141
Sims, Ronald 215
Situationist International movement 215
Skopje, Macedonia
earthquake of 1963 192, 192
kiosk, Macedonia Square 192, 192
254 PETER COOK
moving kiosk on footbridge 200, 
200
Smith, Ivor 147
Smith, Tom: ‘Simulating a Crashed 
Architecture’ 43, 44
Smithson, Alison and Peter 60, 60, 147, 
148
Smout, Mark and Allen, Laura: Retreating 
Village, Happisburgh, Norfolk 148, 148
Socialist Modernists 219
Soleri, Paolo 212
Arcology: The City in the Image of 
Man 215
BABEL IIB Arcology 215
Soloviev, S 82
Sottsass, Ettore 204
Spain: economic crisis 121, 122, 151
Spinadel, Laura P 75, 81
Steindorf am OsslacherSee, near 
Klagenfurt, Austria: Steinhaus (Stone 
House) 27
Stern, Martin, Jr 162
Stewart, Catrina 204
The London City Farmhouse 207
Still, Clyfford 162
Stirling, James 147
Stockholm, Sweden: Paradise restaurant, 
Stockholm Exhibition (1930) 157, 159
Stourhead, Wiltshire, UK 140–141
Palladian Bridge 141
Strauven, Gustave 98
Stuttgart, Germany 168, 182
Suffolk villages, UK 102
Sustainable Cities competition (2012) 
125, 127
Suwon, South Korea: Dispersion, Su-in 
Line Memorial Park 30, 30
Sweden: use of wood 130
Swindon, Wiltshire, UK: Renault 
Distribution Centre 31
Szyszkowitz + Kowalski 176
Taichung, Taiwan
‘Tower of Algae’, Taichung Tower 
No.2 47, 48, 51, 53
‘Tower of Droplets’, Taichung Tower 
No.1 47, 47, 48, 53
‘Tower of Living Energy’, Taichung 
Tower No.3 47, 50, 52, 53
Wedding Chapel 53
Taipei, Taiwan 115–116, 123, 185
Music Houses 112, 112, 113, 115, 137
music kiosk 200, 201
Tange, Kenzo 212, 212
Taut, Bruno 21
Alpine Architecture 21
Taylor Woodrow Construction 217
Team 10 215
Tel Aviv, Israel 39, 146, 203
kiosks 198, 199
Medina Circle Tower 20
pop-up shop, Shenkin Street 198
Testa, Clorindo 105, 106, 185
three-dimensional city 223–225, 223, 224
Tippett, Michael 141
Tokyo, Japan 239
Harajuku 112
National Theatre and Opera House 
11, 11
Tokyo Bay Project 212, 212
Toto Gallery 243
Tschumi, Bernard 11, 11
United States of America
city suburbs 215
classic American skyscraper 223
East Coast 230
Far West 130, 227, 231
Midwest 130
Valparaíso, Chile: Catholic University of 
Valparaíso 175
Vaughan Williams, Ralph 141
Venice Biennale (2006): East London 
Revisited project, British Pavilion 
124–125, 124, 127, 148–149
Venturi Scott Brown 63
Vesnin, Alexander 103
Vesnin brothers (Leonid, Victor and 
Alexander) 43
Vienna, Austria 73, 73, 75, 76, 79, 176
Kärntnerstrasse: hot-dog kiosk 196, 
197
Karl-Marx-Hof 218, 219
Kunstakademie 82
Majolikahaus 79
Prater gardens 66, 73, 75, 76, 77, 81
Prater Luna Park 66
Secession Building 72
Zacherlhaus, Wildpretmarkt 2-4 74
Vienna University of Economics and 
Business
Departments of Law and 
Central Administration 17, 17, 
66–71, 67, 75–79, 77, 79, 81, 
81, 92, 94, 137, 203
Executive Academy 67
Library and Learning Centre 67
mixed-use facility and Student 
Centre 67
Spain Department 67
Teaching Centre 67
Villanueva, Carlos Raúl 156
Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène 103
Vitruvius 11
De architectura (Ten Books on 
Architecture) 11
Wachsmann, Konrad 163
Wagner, Otto 72, 73, 79
Walker, Andrew E 127, 127
Wallis, Barnes Neville 31, 31, 86
Wallpaper magazine 205
Warhol, Andy 94
Waterkeyn, André 161
Webb, Michael 216
Cushicle 191
Weill, Kurt 224
Wellington bomber 31, 31
Wentworth Thompson, D’Arcy: On 
Growth and Form 26, 26
Wes Jones Partners 63
Wheeler, Frederick 99
Williams, Kirsty Sarah 153
Ivrea Natural History Museum, Unit 
17, Bartlett School of Architecture, 
University College London (UCL) 
152
Winch, Jill 124
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada: University 
of Winnipeg 82
Woods, Lebbeus 224
Wright, Frank Lloyd 130, 159, 161
‘Usonian’ style 159
Xefirotarch 41
Xenakis, Iannis 161
Yokohama, Japan: Tower of Winds 180
York, North Yorkshire: University of York 
60
Zeisser, Boris 37, 37
255 PICTURE CREDITS
PICTURE CREDITS
The author and the publisher 
gratefully acknowledge the people 
who gave their permission to 
reproduce material in this book. 
While every effort has been made 
to contact copyright holders for 
their permission to reprint material, 
the publishers would be grateful to 
hear from any copyright holder who 
is not acknowledged here and will 
undertake to rectify any errors or 
omissions in future editions.
Cover images © Peter Cook
Table of Contents: Motive 1 © 
Infraserv GmbH & Co. Höchst KG; 
Motive 2 © Peter Cook; Motive 3 © 
Peter Cook; Motive 4 © Peter Cook, 
Salvador Perez Arroyo and Eva 
Hurtado; Motive 5 © Peter Cook; 
Motive 6 © Peter Cook and Colin 
Fournier; Motive 7 © Peter Cook; 
Motive 8 © Peter Cook; Motive 9 © 
CRAB studio; p 2 © Peter Cook; p 
8 © Infraserv GmbH & Co. Höchst 
KG; p 11 © Bernard Tschumi; p 13 © 
Hélène Binet; pp 14, 20 © Ullstein 
Bild/Gettyimages; p 15 © Miralles 
Tagliabue EMBT/Image courtesy of 
Fundació Enric Miralles; p 16 © CRAB 
studio; p 18 © Peter Cook; pp 21, 22 
© Dominic Roberts; p 23 (t) © Zamp 
Kelp and Michael Reisch; p 23 (b) © 
Peter Cook and David Greene; p 24 © 
Peter Cook and Colin Fournier; p 25 
© Peter Cook and Christine Hawley; 
p 26 Courtesy of the University of St 
Andrews Library, ms42363; p 27 (t 
& c) © Peter Cook; p 27 (b) Photo © 
Architekturzentrum Wien, Collection; 
p 28 (t & b) © Peter Cook; p 29 (t & b) 
© Peter Cook; p 30 © Yong Ju Lee; p 
31 © Imperial War Museum: Q 73344; 
p 33 © Marcio Jose Bastos Silva / 
Shutterstock.com; pp 34, 35 © Peter 
Cook; p 36 © James Silverman; pp 
38, 40 © Peter Cook; p 41 © Hernan 
Diaz Alonso/Xefirotarch; p 42 © 
Marjan Colletti; p 43 © Marcos Cruz; 
p 44 © Thomas Smith; p 45 © Hattula 
Moholy-Nagy/DACS 2015. Image © 
Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung, 
University of Cologne; p 46 © Maria 
Knutsson-Hall; pp 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 
52, 53 © CRAB studio; p 54 © Peter 
Cook; p 57 © Paul Gillet; p 58 (t) © 
Corbis; p 58 (b) © Peter Cook; p 59 © 
John Partridge. Image courtesy of the 
Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill 
College, Cambridge; p 60 Courtesy 
of the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard 
Graduate School of Design. Alison 
and Peter Smithson Archive; p 61 (t) 
© Peter Cook; p 61 (b) © Henry Diltz/
Corbis; p 62 © Hodgetts + Fung 
Design and Architecture; p 63 (t) © 
Jones, Partners: Architecture (JPA) // 
design under HHPJ; p 63 (b) © Mary 
Ann Sullivan, Bluffton University; 
p 64 (t & b), 65 © Peter Cook and 
Christine Hawley; pp 66, 67, 68, 69 
(t & b), 70, 71 © CRAB studio; p 72 © 
Harald A. Jahn; Harald Jahn/CORBIS; 
p 73 (t) Photo: © MAK/Georg Mayer. 
Courtesy of MAK – Austrian Museum 
of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art; 
p 73 (b) © Freud Museum London; 
p 74 © Florian Monheim/Arcaid/
Corbis; p 75 © Peter Cook; pp 76, 
79, 80 © CRAB studio; p 82 © Photo 
by Zikkurat/http://wikimapia.
org: http://wikimapia.org/153682/
Moscow-Architectural-Institute-
Main-Building#/photo/3125918; p 
83 © Roderick Trompert; pp 84 (t 
& b) © CRAB studio; p 85 © zstock/
Shutterstock.com; pp 86, 87, 88, 89, 
90 (t, c & b) , 91 (t, c & b), 92, 93, 94, 
95, 96 (t), © CRAB studio; p 96 (b) 
© Jenna Al-Ali; p 97 (t & b) © CRAB 
studio; p 98 © imageBROKER / Alamy; 
p 99 © Maggie Jones; p 100 © Peter 
Cook, Salvador Perez Arroyo and Eva 
Hurtado; p 103 © Matt Gibson/LOOP 
IMAGES/Loop Images/Corbis; p 104 (t) 
© 2015 BI, ADAGP, Paris. DACS, London 
and Scala, Florence; pp 104 (b), 105, 
106 © Peter Cook; p 107 (t) © Verner 
Panton Design; p 107 (b) © GlebStock/
Shutterstock.com; pp 108 (t & b), 
109, 110,111 (t & b) © Peter Cook; pp 
112 (t & b), 113, 114 © CRAB studio; 
p 115 © Gordon Bell/Shutterstock.
com; p 116 © CRAB studio; pp 117, 118, 
119 (t), 120 © Peter Cook, Salvador 
Perez Arroyo and Eva Hurtado; p 119 
(b) © Peter Cook; pp 121 (t & b), 122 
(t & b) © Peter Cook and Salvador 
Perez Arroyo; p 123 (t) © CRAB 
studio; p 123 (b) © Mikael Damkier/
Shutterstock.com; p 124 (t) © CRAB 
studio; p 124 (b) © Jill Winch; p 125 
© Alwyn Ladell. Image downloaded 
from https://www.flickr.com/photos/
alwyn_ladell/6146804743; pp 126 (t 
& b) © Peter Cook: p 127 © Andrew 
Walker; pp 128, 131, 133 (t & b), 134 
(t & b), 135, 136 (t & b), 137, 138 (t, c 
& b), 139 (t, c & b), 140 © Peter Cook; 
p 141 © Florian Monheim/Arcaid/
Corbis ; pp 142 (t & b), 143, 144, 145 (t 
& b) , 146, 147, 149 (t) © Peter Cook; p 
http://wikimapia.org
http://wikimapia.org/153682/Moscow-Architectural-Institute-Main-Building#/photo/3125918
https://www.flickr.com/photos/alwyn_ladell/6146804743
http://wikimapia.org
http://wikimapia.org/153682/Moscow-Architectural-Institute-Main-Building#/photo/3125918
256 PETER COOK
148 © Smout Allen; p 149 (b) © Roger 
Tidman/Corbis;p 150 © CRAB studio; 
p 151 IKGM / Shutterstock.com; p 
152 © Kirsty Williams; p 153 (t) © Nick 
Elias; p 153 (b) © Adam Casey; p 154 
© Peter Cook and Colin Fournier; p 
156 © Malcolm Raggett; p 157 (t) © 
Photo by CG Rosenberg, from the 
Swedish Centre for Architecture 
and Design's collections; p 157 (b) 
© Ronaldo Almeida / Shutterstock.
com; p 158 © csp / Shutterstock.com; 
p 159 © Andrew Teebay/Liverpool 
Echo: p 160 © Architectural Press 
Archive / RIBA Library Photographs 
Collection; p 161 © Nasjonalmuseet 
for kunst, arkitektur og design/The 
National Museum of Art, Architecture 
and Design, photo Les Freres Haine: 
p 162 © Ned Paynter/Friends of San 
Diego Architecture; p 163 © Stefano 
Tinti / Shutterstock.com; p 164 © 
Itsuko Hasegawa atelier; p 165 © 
Peter Cook; p 166 © Peter Cook, 
Christine Hawley and Ron Herron; p 
167 © Janis Smith/Shutterstock.com; 
p 169 © Peter Cook; p 170 © Photo by 
Kirakirameister. Creative Commons 
Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported 
licence: http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/; p 171 (t & 
b) © Peter Cook, Christian Hawley, 
Kevin Robotham and CJ Lim; pp 172, 
173, 174 © Peter Cook and Christine 
Hawley; p 175 © Peter Cook; p 176 
Photo © Architekturzentrum Wien, 
Collection; p 177 © Paul Ott; pp 178 (t), 
181 © Peter Cook and Colin Fornier; 
pp 178 (b), 179 © Paul Ott; p 183 © 
Giencke & Company; p 184 © Pedro 
Kok; pp 186, 189, 190 (t & b), 191, 192, 
© Peter Cook; p 193 © CRAB studio; 
pp 194, 195, 196, 197 ( t & b) , 198, 199 
© Peter Cook; p 200 © CRAB studio; 
pp 201 (t & b) © CRAB studio; p 202 © 
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, photo 
Matt Chisnall; pp 205, 206 © Peter 
Cook; p 207 © Catrina Stewart; pp 
208, 209 © Javier Ruiz; p 210 © Peter 
Cook; p 213 © Akio Kawasumi; p 214 (t) 
Photo © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-
CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais/Jean-
Claude Planchet/ DACS 2015; p 214 (b) 
© Cosanti Foundation; p 215 © ADAGP, 
Paris and DACS, London 2015; p 216 © 
Peter Cook and David Greene; p 217 
(t & b) © Peter Cook; p 218 © graphia 
/ Shutterstock.com; p 219 © Børre 
Ludvigsen; pp 220, 221 (t & b) © Peter 
Cook; pp 222, 223 © Miroslava Brooks; 
p 225 © Photo Luiz Sadaki Hossaka – 
Collection of photographs Library and 
Documentation Center, São Paulo Art 
Museum Assis Chateaubriand – MASP; 
pp 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231 © Peter 
Cook; p 232 © Friederike Sträter; p 
233© Robert Landau /Alamy; pp 234, 
235 © Peter Cook; pp 236, 237, 238, 
240 © CRAB studio; pp 242, 243, 245, 
246 © Peter Cook; p 247 © Marcela 
Grassi
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EULA.
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	ARCHITECTURE WORKBOOK
	CONTENTS
	MOTIVE 1 ARCHITECTURE AS THEATRE
	INDULGING IN DELIGHT
	DISCOVERING NOVELTY IN THE KNOWN
	HONING IN ON THE THEATRICAL STATEMENT
	MOTIVE 2 STRETCHING THE VOCABULARY
	WAYWARD EXPRESSIONISM
	FROM THE TRANSPARENT … TO THE TRANSLUCENT … TO THE SOLID … AND BACK AGAIN
	AUGMENTING THE LANGUAGE OF ARCHITECTURE
	STEALING FROM ELSEWHERE
	HIDDEN CITY
	THE SWISS COTTAGE TOWER
	TEL AVIV
	VOCABULARY AS A FORCE IN ITSELF
	MOTIVE 3 UNIVERSITY LIFE AND ITS IRONIES
	UNIVERSITY LIFE VIA THE BACK DOOR
	THE CAMPUS PHENOMENON
	THE STÄDELSCHULE KANTINE, FRANKFURT
	DEPARTMENTS OF LAW AND CENTRAL ADMINISTRATION, VIENNA UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS
	ABEDIAN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BOND UNIVERSITY, GOLD COAST, QUEENSLAND
	ARTS UNIVERSITY BOURNEMOUTH: DRAWING ON THE STUDIO TRADITION
	MOTIVE 4 FROM ORDINARY TO AGREEABLE
	DELIGHTFUL FUNCTIONALISM AND STRUCTURED ESCAPE
	STRIPS AND STATIONS
	REINVIGORATING SUBURBIA
	PLAYFUL MASTERPLANNING
	INSPIRATION IN UNEXPECTED PLACES
	MOTIVE 5 THE ENGLISH PATH AND THE ENGLISH NARRATIVE
	RETURNING TO ARCADIA
	THE PASTORAL
	VEG HOUSE
	THE ENGLISH ART OF IMPLIED OBSERVATION
	MOTIVE 6 NEW PLACES AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
	EXPERIENCING AMERICA
	A TASTE OF JAPAN
	BACK IN EUROPE
	AUSTRIA AND THE KUNSTHAUS GRAZ
	THE FASCINATION OF FOREIGNNESS
	MOTIVE 7 CAN WE LEARN FROM SILLINESS?
	KIOSKS: AN INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON OF FUN
	WHAT CAN ARCHITECTURE LEARN FROM KIOSKS?
	MOTIVE 8 THE CITY – THEN THE TOWN
	ASSIMILATING REFERENCES
	THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL CITY
	MAKING RELUCTANT CITIES GET REAL
	MOTIVE 9 ON DRAWING, DESIGNING, TALKING AND BUILDING
	SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
	INDEX
	PICTURE CREDITS
	EULA