Lives in Architecture

Peter Cook

Peter Cook

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000451122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Saggi e monografie sull'architettura

Peter Cook has been a pivotal figure within the architecture world for over half a century. He first came to international renown in the 1960s as a founder of the radical, experimental group Archigram, winners of the 2002 RIBA Royal Gold Medal. He is also former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, and Emeritus Professor and former Chair of the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London). Suffused with Peter's infectious energy, enthusiasm and charm, this intriguing memoir explores major themes in architecture through the lens of his life and work. Taking the reader on a journey through his colourful and wide-ranging career, it touches on his early years and architectural education, his relationships with key figures within the architecture community and his work teaching and lecturing internationally. It also provides an inside account of his leadership of the Bartlett, for which he is frequently credited as a central figure in rescuing the reputation of a once-ailing, now world-famous, school of architecture. Featuring full-colour images of his most famous drawings, including Archigram's 'Plug-in City', and built works, such as the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria and the Vienna Economics and Business University's Department of Law and Central Administration Buildings, this book is a window into the life of one of architecture's most celebrated rebels.

The Provincial

My earliest memory is of eating a banana in a hotel in Carlisle. It was the last fresh banana for probably eight years. It was also the first and last time I visited Carlisle. In fact I have childhood recollections of eating all over England: a very good Norfolk dumpling in Swaffham probably in 1946, a very good piece of breaded plaice in Miller’s of Felixstowe sometime in the late 1940s … and in late middle age, around 2008, I remember a very good meat pie in a pub by the River Colne in Essex. That is surely one way of making progress.

Looking at it from another direction, I have very early memories of standing in hotel corridors fascinated by the inevitable framed 18th-century etching of an old town, ‘Prospect of Northampton from the East’ – or whatever. They fascinated me because they were about the place in which I was standing, but if I looked out of the window, time had moved on. Eventually, I would start making my own invented town prospects. In the beginning they followed the rules and had accumulated gabled houses interspersed with the occasional church or castle. Gradually, though, I found it agreeable to draw them and then progressively rub bits out … almost without noticing it. Replacing the gables with flat roofs and horizontal lines for the windows. Modernist architecture had caught my eye.

But the making of the camp was the real turning point, and here I must back-track.

As far back as I can remember, my father was a military man and my mother a housewife. By the time I was able to discriminate I was led to believe that (a) I was tall and (b) I was privileged. Odd really, because my father was very short (his military sword had to be specially made) and the privilege had lasted for relatively few years. In fact, both my parents had come from poor families: his in sub-industrial Suffolk and hers of Irish-Scottish workers in North London. But as an under-age volunteer to the 1914–18 war, my father had somehow stuck his neck out, captured villages and very rapidly become a highly decorated officer, with three Military Crosses, a Distinguished Conduct Medal and a mention in despatches. He was then sent out to the North West frontier of India to train a Camel Corps, before returning home to marry the pretty North London girl. His early retirement was spent in odd enterprises: agencies for this-and-that and, briefly, the financially disastrous proprietorship of a prep school in Maida Vale.

In many ways the Second World War probably saved him from that odd no-man’s land that both retired army officers and returned colonials seem to inhabit: lurching from one unsustainable activity to another. He accepted a commission in an RAF that was desperate for officers as the war loomed – and then was claimed back by his regiment: the Cheshires. All this was going on before I was really aware, so that when I was being allowed to totter around hotel lounges or military cocktail parties I was already the son of a lieutenant-colonel and palmed-off onto a nearby junior officer (male or female) to attend to my needs. Of course there was a war on. Indeed, disgruntled shop assistants were always – quick as a flash – intoning this and ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’ was the standard riposte to almost any request. Anyway, he had deftly avoided being sent out to Burma and would often admit that ‘I’d rather be a live Major than a dead Major-General’. So he ended up being the Quartering Commandant of Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire and responsible for grabbing big old mansions or inhabiting fields for the benefit of British and Allied troops – and prisoners. Which is where the camp comes in.

One afternoon I accompanied him along the side of a muddy field near Leicester. ‘We’ll put it there,’ he said, ‘there’s a good drainage ditch at the bottom of the slope.’ And that was it, for a month later we went back and ‘it’ was filled with fences, huts and watchtowers – and Italian prisoners-of-war. What a nice game, I thought – and continued to think so through to the years when I started to buy used books about town planning in junk shops. I would go into his office and be transfixed by the collection of pins on maps of the English Midlands. So alongside the etched prospects of towns, I was similarly intrigued by maps. Particularly the Ordnance Survey 1 inch to 1 mile map which I began to imitate – building up imaginary towns and then rubbing bits out, inserting docks and airstrips and suburban sprawl – which of course would have been interpreted by those same flat roofs and horizontal windows.

It was in Leicester, where I lived from the age of four-and-a-half to nine, that I began to be aware of spaces, atmospheres and markers. The presence of Lutyens’s war memorial arch at the corner of the large, flat, open Victoria Park, the nearby, rather elegant Avenue and the Greek classical Museum that contrasted with the Victorian aspirations of the Grand Hotel (where I was sometimes taken for tea). In parallel, my parents took advantage of the intriguing role that Leicester seemed to play in the later stages of the war – as a relatively safe spot for visiting orchestras or ballet and opera companies. It is clear that they consciously wanted me to experience all the culture that they had not been able to enjoy for themselves.

Figure 1 Frederic William Cook MC DCM (Peter’s father), when still a Captain.

Figure 2 Peter Cook as an infant.

From the time I was six, we went to a symphony concert every week. Add to this the period from the ages of 15 to 20 of weekly concerts by the Bournemouth orchestra and I now have the standard symphonic repertoire successfully embedded in my brain. Historic figures came through: the violinist Ginette Neveu, the conductor Charles Munch, the pianist Solomon, amongst others. I still faintly remember the visual impact of Kurt Jooss’s ballet The Green Table without realising its political significance. I was also often taken to the theatre but it has never gelled with me: fine for training movie actors, but somehow artificial and annoyingly declamatory. Perhaps I get irritated by being forced to think along the thought process of the writer – or maybe it’s those stagey voices that I can’t stand.

Amongst other memories is that of moving from a house to a flat in a purpose-designed block of faintly Modernist overtones, its ‘electric’ kitchen only partly compensating for the low ceilings, but its ornamental pond providing a background for hours of creative disrespect. Yet I realised when I recently went up to Leicester for a lecture, that my memories had been quite selective. Did I really never go into the old centre of town, or did it not intrigue me and therefore melts away from my mind? Was my real world that of leafy, bourgeois Stoneygate where I lived? With the weekly sortie down the hill to the concert? Today’s Leicester seems to me a rather sad place – even if the museum portico can still impress.

This raises all sorts of questions about the extent or range of a territory that you can comprehend as a child: a corner of a room as a baby, a house as a young child, a district as a slightly older child … a town as a teenager … a succession of towns or a city as an adult. Or is it like conversations, where your brain usefully forgets the boring ones? Yes, let’s face it, many parts of English provincial towns can be very, very boring.

Figure 3 Peter Cook aged 7 or 8.

Figure 4 Peter Cook with his parents in their garden at Stoneygate, Leicester, c 1944.

Then we moved to Norwich, which was smaller than Leicester but far more picturesque. Not many concerts but plenty of ancient churches. The school on Unthank Road was very similar in atmosphere – and particularly similar in location – to Stoneygate in Leicester; it seems that small English private schools have to reside in reassuringly comfortable Victorian houses amongst trees. Yet in retrospect the move would be the first of a long sequence of moves that were sometimes unnerving, sometimes sad, as I had to abandon newly made friends at each school in each place that I left for the next town. But there was an upside, for I developed some natural antennae for quickly sussing out new places. As I grew older they dealt with finding the model aeroplane shop, the chip shop, the ice-cream shop, the bus, the round-about (but interesting) route home, the quick (but dreary) route home. Plus the corner of the eye, and I have come to recognise the importance of this underrated territory more and more: both for myself and as a part of my repartee with students and colleagues. Is it too much to claim that what you see daily in an apparently unengaged way is as telling as those things or places to which your attention is drawn? Sketching or photographing a significant building has a certain insistence about it, but the glance down the end of a street that you pass every day on the bus may either tempt you to get off and walk down it, or suggest to you that there’s no point, or even that it might be a bit creepy – so let’s not.

Norwich was great for peering down mysterious alleys yet the half year that we lived there left too little time to really explore, whereas the three years that were next spent in Ipswich established various routines. Christchurch Park, for instance, was infinitely more engaging than Leicester’s Victoria Park, for it had a lake, an arboretum, a series of segments with different atmospheres on a gently undulating hillside. I went to Ipswich School, located across from the arboretum, and in the late 1940s a kid could fairly safely walk through a park without molestation. Ipswich was my father’s birthplace and I guess that he nostalgically contrived to become the region’s Army Recruiting Officer. There were still regular but unmemorable visits to the local repertory theatre and to almost anything special that was going on at the Ipswich Museum – indeed a pretty standard pattern of provincial life, yet it would also prove to be the prelude to an unnerving pattern of family life.

Perhaps an unmentionable ‘glamour’ surrounding the wartime colonel had worn off. Now we were just a three-person family adjusting to a new, strange period of continued austerity along with the ebbing away of the former privilege. This surely encouraged demons that were festering within my mother’s psychology: her brooding frustrations of never having been able to go to art school, or really having had a glamorous life in London – or maybe other issues, who knows?

She began to intone the phrase ‘I’m a Londoner’ more and more, increasingly grumbling about a town that was perhaps disappointing after Leicester or Norwich, though I would not have been able to articulate this at the time. After a while, there were various moves to nearby small towns: a few months in Woodbridge in a strange hut-like house on the heath where I had a great time losing pieces of Meccano down rabbit holes as I created a ‘town’, then a slightly longer period in Felixstowe.

English seaside towns are a strange phenomenon and until the late 1960s people went to them, hoping against likelihood that the weather would hold. If the very rich could make it to the South of France or Italy, the slightly posh might have to hide from the wind and rain in the sun lounge of a Grand Hotel, and the rest could huddle in a shelter on the promenade. Cromer (which had been our first seaside holiday location) and places like Swanage have a certain charm, but Felixstowe was really the seaside satellite of Ipswich and was not only (as already noted) good for fish and chips, but also for ice-cream, model boat sailing and small-time Variety shows. (I remember a particularly delicious pistachio ice-cream that rewarded you if you sat through the Variety.)

It was also a jolt as I spent a few months at the local grammar school – which really shouldn’t have been graded as such. Somehow there were lessons taken from the radio and a general air of laissez-faire. I slumped in subjects like geography that I had hitherto relished. Yet two visual experiences remain very strongly in my mind’s eye. First, the mysterious object that stood in the sea a few miles out: visible with the naked eye and even better (but still unfathomable) through the available one-penny telescope. It was a defensive fort from the Second World War that – had I been able to see more – could already have contributed to my architectural vocabulary. Second, a trio of structures in Manning’s Amusement Park: the wooden cage of the helterskelter, the surprisingly adept Art Deco of the restaurant block and – of course – the crazy house. The last two still exist: so I had met for the first time (a) a megastructure, (b) a piece of Modernist styling and (c) the poor man’s Expressionist architecture. The sort of combination that you can only get away with at the seaside!

Growing up also involved the business of not taking everything at face value: my parents’ favourite Felixstowe pastime was to sit in the parked car looking out to sea and comment, sometimes wittily, certainly critically, about the people passing along the promenade – my first introduction to the art of cynicism.

We experimented, for nearly a month, with living in Dedham: a classy village in the ‘Constable Country’ halfway between Ipswich and Colchester. Quite frankly it scared me. Consistently, the countryside has remained a rather tiresome, smelly, eerily quiet phenomenon. Acceptable for an afternoon. Remote. Threatening: even in Dedham, that I have later come to recognise as a self-conscious little tourist spot. To my great relief – to the cry of ‘getting nearer London’ – we moved to Colchester. Though I don’t remember much about it, the school was undoubtedly better, and the town, though smaller than Ipswich, had a certain style and coherence, mostly on the top of a hill: a site chosen by the Romans for their English capital and the presumed seat of ‘Old King Cole’ of the nursery rhyme – yes, a proper place. Again, a school behind trees on a civilised-looking main road where I felt at ease, plus endless visits down the hill to the nutty old castle which is built over Roman remains.

It was not the first time that my taste for development and change – first expressed in those imitation ‘prospects’ of towns – attracted me to Roman remains and castles. I had dragged my parents out to the edge of Norwich where a row of stones along the side of a field are the remains of the Roman city (Caistor), and to similar rows in St Albans (Verulamium) or wherever. What fascinated me was that these guys had made towns – magnificent versions of my dad’s camp at Leicester, or of ‘town’ arrangements formed in the sand on Felixstowe beach which I had preferred to ‘castles’.

Then another strange move, getting ‘nearer to London’, to Letchworth. It seemed that it was near various of my mother’s relatives, but not exactly close. Of course, I may wish to make many claims for its influence on me as an ‘urbanist’ and its atmosphere certainly remains very clearly in my memory, but the older and more complex towns have given me more creative ammunition. I was sent to St Christopher School which was a bright marker within the increasing collage of school experiences. It had been set up in 1915 by members of the Theosophical Society as a progressive, vegetarian institution. Its core buildings are amongst the earliest to have ‘inside-outside’ classrooms and classroom terraces. Other classes were held in a variety of small cottage-like setups flanked by gardens or small fields. Unlike Ipswich School, where even the prefects wore gowns, here you called the teachers ‘Joe’ or ‘Mary’. So I aroused laughter when, on having my name called, I sprung to my feet and said ‘Sir!’ – which had been my training. Yet the year or more was a great experience, despite the vegetarian food. I think my mother was, at the time, picking up on the St Christopher’s vibe, but I myself discovered a wonderful way of cheering up nut rissole mixture – by adding real sausage meat to it.

As a 13-year-old I was already becoming intrigued by the ‘specialness’ of the town, with its plethora of obscure types of church and settlement and stories of nudists somewhere there behind a hedge. Letchworth certainly thrived on eccentricity, but not on alcohol, so my parents would have to walk to a pub in nearby Baldock. Meanwhile we lived in a U-shaped cluster of dwellings where the community could gather in a central dining room and take turns in cooking. My mother hated that. Alongside ran a pedestrian walkway flanked by trees, a feature that later inspired me to repeat it in projects of my own.

There followed, for reasons that – even in the light of increased eccentricity – I can’t imagine, another short move: in fact, to the town of my birth, ‘Southend-on-Sea’. Why this place, of all, has to exaggerate its location on the end of the Thames estuary with the sea itself held off by a mile of mud most of the day, has a certain irony, for surely Brighton or Bournemouth are more certainly on the sea but don’t have to say so! It was the nearest thing for East Enders from London, that was all, and in the early 1950s it still had a bit of tacky flair.

How Bournemouth came onto the agenda, again, I cannot really fathom. Except that my mother’s wanderlust – or constant frustration with wherever she moved to – was tolerated by my father who seemed to have to commute most of the time. I recall that in the early, congratulatory period of this move, a friend who had recommended the place had designated it as ‘the new world’. Well, I suppose that in the mid-19th century its eruption between two old towns (Poole and Christchurch) might have been memorable; but having later considered New to Old Delhi, Tel Aviv to Jaffa, or Houston in general, for me it was very consistent with most other English places – with the difference that at last I could remain in one place long enough to really dig into its nuances. Moreover, it paralleled my post-pubescent youth – that special period of discovery.

Of course, we chopped-around locations, some of them in bits and pieces of rambling houses (of course behind trees). If large swathes of the back of Bournemouth are ac...