I’m fairly sure of the value of certain moves as I’ve been too long a teacher and a commentator. What interests me intellectually is the recurrence of certain themes. PC: Yes, more thematic - I find that more interesting.
#Peter cook architect portable
The reason I showed lots of kiosks last night is that they are very useful portholes onto life, they are a common thing, they are consistent with the Archigram notion of a portable building, the capsule, not being a real building … It’s not just “there’s the wall and there’s the thing”, it’s a different position from the David Chipperfield type of architecture, which is very elegant, very solid and total, and instinctively I’m against that. In my lecture last night I started with two slides and said, “One is Peter Cook the young architect, Plug-In City one here is Peter Cook the old architect, with Kunsthaus Graz” - the difficult bit is what’s in between and I didn’t go chronologically. We were still teaching and it gradually fizzled by and maybe the six different people were more different and on different trajectories.
We worked on it for three years, but it was never built. Then we won a big competition in Monte Carlo and it looked like our fortunes were made, but only three of us wanted to work on this. Everybody did some drawings, some critiquing and some of the boring bits. In simple terms, it was a slightly older group and a slightly younger group but with enough overlap to give it the atmosphere of a college studio, being mates with other people but also in competition with them. The thing about Archigram that is not often appreciated is that it was a coalition of six different people spanning ten years in age, not from the same college and with different tastes. We were bored with what had gone on before, we thought it was far too narrow-minded, far too solid, we had a lot of ideas. Peter Cook: I think it’s enough to say it was about right, because it was very needed. Forty-five years later, do you reflect on this period thinking it was crazy or about right? Stuart Harrison: I thought we would start in an obvious place, with your seminal involvement with the Archigram group.
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