Sir Peter Cook, renowned English architect, will be lecturing at Pratt Institute Thursday, March 11th at 6pm in Higgins Hall Auditorium.
Sir Peter Cook (b Southend-on-Sea, Essex, 22 Oct 1936). English architect, teacher and critic. He studied architecture at the Bournemouth College of Art (1953-8) and at the Architectural Association, London (1958-60), where his teachers included James Gowan, John Killick and Peter Smithson. While working in the office of James Cubitt and Partners (1960-62) he met David Greene (b 1937), and, beginning in 1960, they produced the first of nine issues of the magazine Archigram. An ARCHIGRAM group was formed with other recently graduated young architects, including Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, Ron Herron and Mike Webb, who came together after Cook had joined the Taylor Woodrow Design Office in 1962. Archigram magazine was the group’s most important outlet, but a wider audience was also sought through exhibitions, for example the Living City exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (June 1963); through such events as the International Dialogue of Experimental Architecture, Folkestone (June 1966), a seminal conference for the architectural progressives; and through lecturing and teaching. Cook started teaching at the Architectural Association in 1964.
When asked to describe the inspiration for the marvelous form of his Kunsthaus Graz museum, Cook describes how an intimate familiarity with the project’s site (“It used to be the one place that you could get a drink after 3 o’clock at night”) helped make the design decisions for this acclaimed building “terribly easy.” (1:40)
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Image courtesy Kunsthaus Graz; photography by Nicolas Lackner.
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