About this talk

Running time: 29 minutes

Peter Cook, erstwhile partner in the well-known Archigram group, graduated from the Architectural Association in 1960. He has been on the staff of the AA since 1960 and guest professor at many international universities; and since 1984 he has headed the Architectural Department of the State Art Academy (Stadelschule) in Frankfurt.

As a result there has been much interaction between all his students, and also staff, from the various educational bodies including North East London Polytechnic's Architecture Department presided over by his present partner Christine Hawley. Cook and Hawley have won many prizes and their designs have been exhibited and published worldwide. But it is only now that they have any work under construction - a housing block in Berlin.

In this talk Peter Cook discusses recent work and continues to be preoccupied with change and metamorphosis, layering, conditions of translucency and transparency. He does not see architecture pragmatically or spatially or organisationally with hard lines between. "So, although most of the projects start from a base of a grid or a series of grids, the edges then melt and they lap over one another".

Projects act as generators for subsequent projects as he tried to discover "a sort of rhetorical architecture".

This is the second of Cook's talks for Pidgeon; Melting Architecture in 1979 was his first.

Please note that a transcript of this talk is available - please contact us for further details.