Peter Cook

Peter Cook’s dis­tinc­tive draw­ings have cap­ti­vat­ed and inspired gen­er­a­tions of design­ers. Freed from styl­is­tic or func­tion­al con­ven­tions, his graph­ic spec­u­la­tions have rede­fined the lan­guage of archi­tec­tur­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Spec­u­la­tions spans Cook’s entire career, pre­sent­ing some 160 draw­ings that range from stu­dent projects in the 1950s, through Archi­gram, to new work com­plet­ed short­ly before going to press. Arranged chrono­log­i­cal­ly, these draw­ings chart the course of what can now be seen as an enthralling archi­tec­tur­al adven­ture. Cook’s own obser­va­tions about the nature of archi­tec­ture and urban­ism, and the con­cept of the build­able, are com­ple­ment­ed by pieces from archi­tects Frank Gehry, Toyo Ito, Thom Mayne and Peter Wilson.

As a founder mem­ber of the vision­ary col­lec­tive, Archi­gram, Peter Cook (1936-) pro­ject­ed rad­i­cal­ly new pos­si­bil­i­ties for archi­tec­ture, pur­su­ing his fas­ci­na­tion with ​‘the puz­zle­ment of the strange thing’ to cre­ate com­pelling forms. The pre-emi­nent archi­tec­tur­al edu­ca­tor in the UK, from 1990 to 2006he was Chair of Archi­tec­ture (now Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus) at the Bartlett School of Archi­tec­ture, where he trans­formed an aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly sober insti­tu­tion into one of the world’s lead­ing cen­tres of cre­ative design. In 2007, he was award­ed a knight­hood for his ser­vices to archi­tec­ture and teach­ing; and in 2004, his achieve­ments with Archi­gram were recog­nised when the group was award­ed the RIBA Roy­al Gold Medal.