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.