Big and naughty architecture

CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

If I say ‘big and naughty’, your first thought won’t be of architecture - unless of course you are Sir Peter Cook, the iconic, influential architect, and co-founder of avant-garde architectural group Archigram. As he explains to our host Louise Bennet, Sir Peter began designing ‘big and naughty’ architecture as statement against bland buildings – driven by a desire to be exotic in calm and orderly places.

Sir Peter is Emeritus Professor at University College London, The Royal Academy of Arts and the Frankfurt Staedelschule, with recent works including the construction of his radical Art Museum in Graz, Austria (the Kunsthaus). Sir Peter Cook visited the University of Melbourne recently to participate in a Melbourne School of Design Summer Intensive Studio examining the spirit of Archigram, 1960s ideas, how they might have been revolutionary, and whether they are still relevant today.

LOUISE BENNET
Sir Peter Cook.

PETER COOK
Yeah.

LOUISE BENNET
Welcome to the University of Melbourne.

PETER COOK
Thank you.

LOUISE BENNET
It's so lovely to have you here. Who are you and what are you known for?

PETER COOK
I'm an architect. I at a very young age was part of a group called Archigram (which meant Architectural Gram) which did sort of inventive, high-tech architecture, naughty architecture, lots of ideas about throwaway buildings, cities that devolved, cities that walked, houses that melted, houses that were caravans, really, blah-blah-blah, lots of different ideas. We got exhibited and published a lot at an early stage; it was six of us. Then most of us got into teaching and I must have been considered fairly good at it because I started to go up the teaching ladder and I ended up in charge of schools of architecture.

In parallel, my career was very odd because in my - only in my mid-forties did I even remotely do any real building, and then in my fifties and beyond I've done a few buildings, some of which are very known. My career was in reverse; I was written off as an academic and drawer, a person who did drawings that went in galleries and then actually started doing the actual biz. As I start being retired as a full time academic, I'm carrying on and I'm 82, though I'm surrounded by people much younger than myself, including my very clever architect wife, who is an interesting architect in her own right, though we don't work together. We decided not to because we would drive each other crazy but we love each other dearly, so that works. We have a son who is a music producer toing-and-froing to Los Angeles. In fact, his Wiki slot is longer than mine already. I got knighted for both architecture and teaching.

LOUISE BENNET
For both?

PETER COOK
For both.

LOUISE BENNET
That must have been pretty special.

PETER COOK
Whether I would have got a knighthood just for architecture I don't know, because who knows, but I got it for architecture and teaching. Then I have for a long time been very networked into a whole international - a lot of people who were students of mine, friends of mine. My wife is Israeli, not English. Most of my friends are from other parts of Europe, hence my dread of Brexit et cetera, and I have a lot of people in this city were students of mine. Therefore, this networking I think is very important because the people with whom you discuss these things are scattered everywhere, from Reykjavik down to Chile and wherever, wherever.

LOUISE BENNET
May I ask, do you feel any affinity with Peter Cook, the comedian and satirist at all?

PETER COOK
No. We were roughly the same generation but not really at all, no.

LOUISE BENNET
The reason I ask is obviously you share a name, but also when looking at your work, there seems to be so much humour invested in it.

PETER COOK
Yes. I think I've become more humorous as I got older. I've become more interested in people as I got older. When I was a student and an early-days teacher, there was a lot of chitchat about sociology and so on which I found incredibly tedious and done by boring people who were trying to be clever. Over 50 years of teaching you start to be an amateur psychologist; you cannot help it. I'm interested and I'm becoming more and more and more interested in people. I start even over the last few years drawing cartoons which I even include in submissions for competitions and occasionally, once in a while we win one, and the cartoons don't seem to put people off. When I give the public lecture next Tuesday, you will see that I've got a lot of these funny cartoons which are mostly based on life.

I think I'm fascinated by people and I'm surrounded by people from every which way, every which place, and not just particularly English people. In fact, I find English people not particularly interesting. I think that if you're interested in buildings and you're interested in people you are never bored, except in the desert, which I never go near, but if you're on the tram coming up the hill - if you just sit there on your own, you spot funny little things.

You look out the window, you spot funny little things; you're sitting in a Chinese restaurant, you spot funny little things; you come into a uni - I just came along this corridor now and I saw a lot of people standing at computers and I think I wonder if they are robots or they're real people. I suppose if I hovered outside the toilet or something, I'd start to pick up on the fact they are real people.

LOUISE BENNET
It's so interesting that you say that because you talk about a society that is probably predominantly these people standing at desks like automatons and yet your work is almost alien sometimes. How do humans create an inspiration for you to create something like the museum in Graz?

PETER COOK
Well, to answer that in a roundabout way, that kind of architecture is probably sitting in one's head and is a sort of taste or procedural response, but I knew that site in Graz before we did the competition, because I'd taken students to Graz, which is a very interesting architectural city and there's a dodgy bar that used to be on that site that was open at three in the morning and I'd been there with Bartlett students in this bar, which is near the red light district. I also - my colleague on it, Colin Fournier, at that - and for a long time had a girlfriend who came from Graz, and I'd been to Graz even myself eight times.

We knew the site, and that's very interesting because you do a building that looks like it maybe it out of context but actually, it's very bedded into the context of that particular - you know the noisy street, you know the quiet street, the dodgy street, the one where people will come off the tram, the bit of the site where people will burst out of a narrow street across the bridge and suddenly see the bridge which is like a table in front of the building, but the trees mask it from the right and the heavy trucks come there. All that is running around your head but you're doing your bubble, but it's not an abstracted bubble, it's a bubble that lands in a certain way with a certain door and a certain back door and a da-da-da.

LOUISE BENNET
Because it looks like something from under the sea.

PETER COOK
No, but it's actually something that lands on that very particular site and even its shape was dictated by the fact that it wasn’t actually a straightforward rectangular site. It was a site that had a bit chipped out of the corner of it where we had to keep these old baroque houses. The fact that it had that corner made us almost squirt the building into the site, allowing a two-metre fire escape down the side, and that gave it its special shape.

Then we had to keep a metal building that was there, the earliest piece of cast iron work in southern Austria as part of the indigenous culture of the place, but it had come from Sheffield. The bits 100 years ago had been brought in on the back of donkey carts or whoever they got stuff from Sheffield. I thought ah, right, there's some characters from England in the 19th century brought their funny bits of metal and a bunch of characters at the very end of the 20th century bring their funny bits of plastic. So, so much for the local indigenous architecture.

LOUISE BENNET
Just the circularity.

PETER COOK
It is the product of stuff arriving and being mixed in with the local.

LOUISE BENNET
Is that how the necessity feeds into your creativity?

PETER COOK
I think that it's very difficult to design even ordinary stuff or interesting stuff into a vacuum. As soon as somebody says you can only enter from the west or somebody says you've got to stick car-parking underneath it or as soon as somebody says you've got to have special air-conditioning because it's expensive works of art that they will only lend if it's [controlled]. It's not a bore; it allows you to then concentrate the mind and do something interesting. There's nothing worse than an open, square site and you sit looking at it, where do we start, what do we get off on? As soon as there's a restriction, [a funny] and a bridge and a wind and trees and a noisy tram one side, ah, now we're getting the…

LOUISE BENNET
Gives you a nudge.

PETER COOK
Well, it's several nudges simultaneously and then you start to move.

LOUISE BENNET
So then how did you get into architecture?

PETER COOK
I've always wanted to do it. My dad was an army officer and I moved school and town umpteen times. There was no architecture in the family; my parents both come from poor families and somehow aggrandised themselves a little bit. I was - as a kid, my mum had wanted to go to art school but never did; my dad - no, he didn’t even draw. He wrote quite well but as a kid I used to play hooky from school and go around with my father looking at buildings, because one of his jobs at the end of the Second World War was as what they called a quartering commandant; he'd fought, god help us, in the First World War, got lots of medals and decided in the Second World War to avoid being posted out to Burma.

He somehow, not having any architectural or surveying training but already by that time he's a colonel and he got this job as quartering commandant, and he took me as a little tiny tot to see Italianate villas in the middle of England that they were going to put parachutists in or airborne groups or tanks, and I would see my - one afternoon I went with my father to a field somewhere near Leicester and he looked around this field and he said let me put it here, whatever the IT was going to be. Then I think I went back about a couple of months later and there was the enormous POW camp with Italian prisoners in it and watchtowers and stuff. I thought that's a good game. My dad plays this game where he goes - he says we'll put it here and then you come back…

LOUISE BENNET
Then it happens.

PETER COOK
It was better than Lego [laughs]. Whether that was one incentive; the other thing is - so looking subconsciously at these funny buildings all over the place - the other was my mum wanted to be an arts student, so maybe there's a thread of that going through, and she did funny little flower paintings, very precisely. Then there was a particular thing that I do remember very vividly, which was going from place to place, we were often in funny English provincial hotels where we would stay or have lunch or whatever, and they always had these etchings on the wall, very typical thing that you get. It says prospect of Winchester from the southeast or something, or prospect of Norwich from the north or wherever it happened to be. You always get these etched lines of buildings with churches and houses and a castle if there was one, and I started to mimic those in school exercise books. I started to make my own towns like these things.

By the time I was at grammar school, I got a scholarship to the local art school at 16. I only did O levels; didn’t do A levels. Fortunately, we had an art master who was very informed about architecture and he - there were four of us in that year at grammar school in Bournemouth who all wanted to do architecture and he fed us information. He said look, there's a college down the road and you can get scholarships to it, and I did. I went at 16 to do architecture, already at 14 being - had bitten the bug and I went to the public library and I took every book about architecture I could find, of which there was quite a lot.

I was reading Pevsner, which is a famous historian, basic historian - I was reading Le Corbusier at the age of 15. I'd started looking at modern architecture because as a kid I'd gone around persuading my parents to take me to see Roman ruins, cathedrals; I made balsa wood cathedrals as a kid. I could do that. I'd done the historic bit because I'd lived in historic towns like Norwich and so on, so I was already getting into modern. Then the funny thing was the local architecture school was a remnant 19th century school; it was the only place in England where you would learn - you were taught to draw all the classical orders of architecture by proportion. You had to go and measure churches with bits of lead around tracery and then you were fed Victorian books about the grammar of ornament and stuff; it was actually an old-fashioned school.

But I'd already been reading about Le Corbusier and looking at South American gardens in Brazil and stuff, so that was weird because it was a loop; I'd looked at the - I'd been fascinated by the old stuff, almost gone through that and then was pushed back into it. Then it was a very old-fashioned school but I was an enthusiast and then I did a couple of years in a local office before going to the posh school in London which was the AA and enjoying myself amazingly, although - and having some famous teachers. But I look back at some of the old Bournemouth stuff and it was actually a little bit more like the stuff I did later than the correct stuff I did as a diligent and good student at the Architectural Association. So, my nuttier side was already there, though I had - I think having come from never actually doing a university degree because the AA does not give degrees, I ended up having three professorships and adjudicating people who were doing PhDs, which is funny.

I came into it via the back door. I have for donkey's years, even when I've acquired professorships, still regarded and done a lot of teaching and taught thousands of people including some of the professors here. I still have - almost now regard myself as a designer who happened to be doing a bit of teaching than actually an academic. Even the books I do are really chatting about designing. I'm not an academic. I'm not much into theory. I invent theory but I'm not much into it.

In the business of reconstruction I think that universities everywhere spend an enormous amount of time saying we have to restructure the curriculum and we're going to do this with the curriculum and we're going to do that. Whether we are a faculty or a department and all that stuff, I don't think it matters that much.

You can have a bum curriculum, you can have an awful curriculum which you can pick endless holes in but if you've got enthusiastic people teaching, if they're prepared to really go with it, if they're prepared to really try and understand the students and then enthuse them, you can even work a crap curriculum in a bad building in a hot, cold or flooded town with people who have or have not had good previous education. If you can get them enthused, you can get them rolling and find out what turns them on, to put it [slightly] different. It can be all right and you can take the most elegant building in the most interesting town with the most sophisticatedly-reared students and it still can be - it won't be the worst, of course, but it can be dull.

LOUISE BENNET
Do you think your interest in people has a very strong effect on your creativity?

PETER COOK
I think it has in recent times. I will when I do the public lecture on Tuesday, I will talk about a building we built in Australia, actually, up at Bond University which is their architecture school. I did - because I'd done it before elsewhere, I was persuaded by my colleagues to do cartoons about - bearing in mind that this is a unique opportunity. You are not only an architect; you have been a regular educator. You've run two schools and then you get a competition for designing an architecture school.

You're the guy sitting at the other side of the desk as well. You are in effect the client as well as the designer. Actually, with the art museum in Graz I had also run the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London for two or three years so I had been the - I had run an art museum, and then you know what are all the funny things. Basically, you don't just design by the book, you don't just go through the book and say we've got to have one of those, six of those, the door has to be in a certain place.

You know the anecdotes, you know that in an art gallery the big hassle is not just getting the stuff in the right place on the wall, it's dealing with the next exhibition arriving before the customs officer has got there and the existing exhibition hasn’t been struck, so you've got to allow that. You've got boxes of catalogues arriving halfway in the afternoon but an opening that evening. It's the hassles that you have to sort out. Same with an architecture school; how do you get different groups of people moving.

My cartoons were actually anecdotal. Our references, when we were sitting in London designing this thing, Gavin and I would sit there and say you remember that funny corridor they've got at UCLA in Los Angeles, that's a good idea because you can look at the crit going on but you don't interfere with the crit because it's like - that's not a bad - you know that funny basement at the Bartlett where they make funny things that poke up, that's not a bad idea. You know that big room at Cooper Union in New York, that's quite an interesting one, it's different from the one at Harvard where this roof does something different, but the great thing about the Cooper one is it has these funny little rooms just off it. So you use actual examples from your own experiences and you sort of stick them in your back pocket, anecdotal things.

So, instead of doing the rulebook you say funny things go in architecture schools, don't they? What happens if you are the 'Chief Big' and you've got a boring person coming in your direction; is there a secondary means of escape, can you get the hell out before the boring bastard gets there? Which leads us to put two bridges over the central space, one of which is for escape. Things like can you watch the students without interfering with them unless you want to; can you invent spaces where they can do special non-curricular things and also use them as spaces to hang out or have a tête-à-tête or sit and…

LOUISE BENNET
They're for humans.

PETER COOK
They're for humans because it's human, not just institutional. That's where it becomes really, really interesting, I think. Now, whether everybody understands the significance of all this, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. At the very lowest, you enjoy it yourself. You think well, somebody will get the hang of this, maybe, and/or they may misuse it.

If you're living in London, half the buildings we are in are misused. We work in a little office in a, god help us, a Jacobean building. You didn’t know there were any of those left in Islington - where I bump my head because Jacobeans were smaller than me, but inside the rooms are people at computers. Well, the Jacobeans probably wouldn't have even - where does this take us?

People have design studios in old churches, they have film studios in old churches. They have lofts in cigar factories, whatever, whatever, whatever, and actually sometimes to great advantage. I once said that the Graz, Kunsthaus's art museum that we did, if it's turned into a car showroom, I wouldn't worry. I don't think it has to be that precious. So, it's a car showroom.

LOUISE BENNET
I really want to go back a little bit to what you were saying about creativity. What I gleaned from that is creativity being superseded by corporate.

PETER COOK
Well, yes. To cut a long story, yes, I think that is a really serious cultural issue today, but it's not universal. I think what may happen - if you take obviously issues of history, the cinema came in and people said it will kill the theatre. Well, it did for a while but then it regrouped and people with theatre training, I think why there's so many Brit actors that are so successful is that there's a very good training in the theatre and they become very good at movies. People said - at the moment they're saying the internet will kill locale but I'm not so sure. At a certain point - already it's very interesting statistically that Kindle, the book reader, is going downhill and the number of books being sold is going uphill, contrary to what would have been the perceived wisdom five or 10 years ago.

LOUISE BENNET
Is there any application then for the thought that perhaps computer programs are killing architecture?

PETER COOK
Yes.

LOUISE BENNET
Where do you think drawing sits in all of this?

PETER COOK
Well, I think drawing has a spontaneity that if I take up this pen and I let it drift around the paper it has an immediately spontaneity. It can't even predict what my hand might next do. People doing the same operation on a computer, the computer tends to be correct. You can program it to be nearly not correct but it still has certain observances. I think me drifting around with a fountain pen and somebody with a computer who can then extrapolate that is a perfect combination but at the point of creativity - there are many, many layers of argument going on and I have friends and colleagues who would say no, the computer now can create things that your pen can never imagine, and that is to some extent true.

On the other hand, I think the wilfulness inherent in the drifting pen on paper, there's a certain level of instinctive, creative wilfulness which is a very precious thing. I don't think everybody can use it, but it's important in all levels. We were having a conversation this morning somewhere along the line that the similarity between orchestral scoring and urban design, which is where - and John Warwicker, you know the graphic guy? Maybe you don't; he's a professor at the art school. He's a very famous English graphic designer of the company called Tomato, we've been spending a couple of mornings together.

The conversation then between us is - we were talking about cause and effect and space. He introduced a thing of the issue of silence or space between pieces, between objects, and then I drew the analogy with symphonic scoring where you will set up a bit of a theme and then you'll let it drift and then you will have a quiet passage and then somehow there'll be a hint of something else happening which then develops up.

If you think of that extrapolated into space, into avenues and terraces or monuments or intensities of towers together as against less intense groupings of towers, think of it compositionally or think of landscape or think of Japanese gardens where you are led to a platform from which if you take a certain view line you see a special object, you move towards the special object and from that point you see the teahouse.

You then move towards the teahouse and your state of contemplation is different from outside the piece of stone and then you - in other words, it's theatre, it's trajectory, it's kinetic, it's compositional and these sorts of compositions, how an author will - or a film writer will introduce a character at a certain moment in the narrative where that character will develop a persona that becomes more and more important vis-à-vis the other charters. Same way as by a composer introducing a sub-theme…

LOUISE BENNET
You're the artist then taking the audience with you on the journey.

PETER COOK
Yeah, but it's also a question of timing, positioning, spacing, iconography, to what extent something is special. Now, that almost comes back to architecture. If you just give a very bland piece of architecture, then you're putting an enormous amount of onus on the inhabitant to do something special which they may not be up to. The result is boredom into boredom. I think there are too many people standing at computers and in bland spaces and provided with bland lunches and…

LOUISE BENNET
And expected to keep motivated.

PETER COOK
Yeah, but maybe - then what do they do? They have expensive holidays in Bali, if they're Australian, it seems to me. They go off to Bali and do all sorts of naughty things and then come back.

LOUISE BENNET
Speaking of naughty, I've heard your work described as big and naughty.

PETER COOK
Yeah?

LOUISE BENNET
How do you feel about that?

PETER COOK
Great. Pleased. Flattered.

LOUISE BENNET
What makes it big and naughty?

PETER COOK
Because it sort of deviates from the norm. It's also a bit of an easy categorisation. In this town you have a lot of buildings done by firms like Ashton Raggatt McDougall, the Lyon family, there's some buildings I know, and they're not exactly - I think my stuff is more straightforward than theirs. I understand their naughtiness; I also knew when he was alive Peter Corrigan, who was their teacher and I sort of know where it's coming from. I think I know where it's coming from.

I think their buildings - even if they're hated by a lot of people, I think they're doing a great job in Melbourne and they make Melbourne a bit special. I'm not saying every building should be the same but that gives Melbourne a bit of a twist and it goes with a town that has a very good series of restaurants that also have lots of things that give it a twist. Melbourne should not underestimate itself, and I've travelled to lots of places.

LOUISE BENNET
What are your hopes then, architecturally and perhaps for humanity, for the future?

PETER COOK
Well, I wouldn't - I just hope people cheer up a bit. I hope they get less circumspect. I hope there's another generation. The impetus may come from somewhere we don't expect.

LOUISE BENNET
Sir Peter Cook, it has been an absolute rich adventure thinking about and talking about your incredible architecture. Thank you so much for speaking with me today.

PETER COOK
Thank you.

CHRIS HATZIS
Thank you to Sir Peter Cook, Emeritus Professor at University College London, The Royal Academy of Arts and the Frankfurt Staedelschule. And thanks to our reporter Louise Bennet.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on January 31, 2019. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Silvi Vann-Wall and Dr Andi Horvath. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2019, The University of Melbourne. Drop us a review on iTunes so other people can find our podcast easily, and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.