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prof.Peter Cook

 8.1.1 In your opinion, how important are the public documents for attracting people to the school?
I think they are probably more important then I would give them credence for being. I think the question of attracting people is a very complicated one. You don't really want to attract people for what you're not, but you do want to attract people for what you want to be. In other words, if one has a feeling that you can always improve, then it's important to set your sight slightly ahead, or even considerably ahead, but not ridiculously ahead, of what you could come up with.
     The better students you get, the better teachers you get. the more you can do. The more things that they achieve hereby the more you can do. So the publications, if they are the products of that system the wish dream for pulling itself. If the publication involves in a certain pitch, or a certain conversation, the chances are that you can reach that conversation. If you pitch it down, you just go in for lower and lower common denominator. I think the relationship between what you do and what you publish is also the product of how good a mechanism we have.  

Our biggest problem here is that we are grossly under funded. We don't have any spare money. And Christine and I took the decision about a year and a half, or more, ago to divert some money into Artifice. Since I came here I had the feeling that the first thing to improve was the teaching, the second thing would be that the students would become more creative as a result of that and you would get better students. I think these two things have happened. Next thing was wanting to do exhibitions and publications, and the other arm is to make sure that you get enough outside influences, in the form of outside lecturers, extra to the people teaching.  
     Now those three other things, the publications, the exhibitions and the outside lecturers, you really need enough money to do them all very healthily. I think for the moment they are not as healthy as they should be, because we don't have enough money. we are trying to get money from the outside. And the three of these things are very similar in a way, in that they are extra to the curriculum, they are incentives, they are reminders, they are initiators. I think we have some talented people teaching here, and therefore it's important for them to have the opportunity to do their own things, and to be seen to do there own things. So that means that the exhibition end is important. But we have no money for it, so we can do it more modestly then I would like.  
     The magazine is also very important in recording that things existed. And the outside lecturers are very important to make us feel uncomfortable, because I think that any academy always gets to feel very comfortable, particularly if they are doing quite well. Now, the publication, at the moment our main publication is Artifice. The initiative for Artifice came from Duncan McCorquodale. And he came to us saying I want to do a magazine within the school. I had, independently, increasingly felt that at some point we must do a magazine. So the two came together and we said here's a guy who has already proved that he is a sophisticated animal that can produce an interesting magazine. And that's how the two came together.  

I think though that I would like there to be another layer of publication. More in the nature of papers, or small publications, catalogues, or something. If somebody came to me with the money, or if I could find the money, I would say that it would be very good for the architecture department to produce four or six publications a year, which were small pamphlets. each designed in the manner of the people doing the work. These pamphlets could be collected over a period of time. Rather like in New York there is a magazine that was initiated by Steven Holl, called Pamphlet Architecture. And it's one of the papers in which for example the machine architecture, which is a sort of special document, extraordinary successful.
     I think that's one of the best publications I've seen in the last ten years, and it has become a kind of secret document. when ever you visit somebody, you look on their shelf to see if they've got that particular copy of Pamphlet Architecture. And I happen to know that it has been reprinted twice, which is a very unusual thing for something as relatively esoteric. And I know that Lebbeus Woods was first published, way back twelve, fifteen years ago, in a Pamphlet Architecture. Somebody who wasn't connected with anything very important, but had been picked up by Steven Holl and put into this.  

Now I would like to have a kind of version of Pamphlet Architecture perhaps. That would be my ambition in addition to having Artifice. But you have Artifice which is a sort of, if you like fancy magazine, that you look at your leisure and stick on your cd-rom and so on and so forth. And then you've had something else which was more, maybe modest in the sense it would be the product of who ever was doing that particular project, so one pamphlet might be consisting entirely of pictures, another pamphlet might be consisting entirely of mathematical formulae, or another pamphlet might be the transcript of somebody's lecture. They would exist independently, and would be saleable to people who are interested in that particular field. For example at the moment, Pete Silver who teaches with Stephen Gage, want's to put together a kind of cybernetic show here to do with interactive machines and so on. Now this is something which should have a catalogue. or at least one of these pamphlets. So that would be my, I don't know if I am answering your first question, I may have strayed off to something else but...

Yes. But please go on.

This would be my next objective. I also think that the relationship of Artifice to the work at the school is a very complicated and delicate one, both McCorqoudale and Christine Hawley and myself, are quite keen that the magazine should not read like a school magazine, you know. On the other hand it should read as coming from the Bartlett. But it has to be a very delicate and subtle mixture of material that has its own external value. It's readable anywhere. On the other hand it should have a flavour of the Bartlett. And there's a certain amount of push and pull between our views and Duncan's view on this, you know perhaps Christine and I would like to se more Bartlett material. Perhaps he is less interested in that.

8.1.2 What do you think we are particularly good at in this school?

What I think at the moment we are particular good at is intelligent speculation. I think we are also incidentally good at making working models and drawings, and exploring the edges of architecture. But in particular, if one was to summarise that, I would say that our best work is inventive and exploratory. I think we have the benefit of having rather bright students, who are also creative, compared with many types of schools. And I also think we have the advantage of having many teachers who put the largest part of their creative intelligence into their teaching. This acts to their detriment as known architects. I think we have relatively few famous architects, you know most of the people teaching are teachers. Although, when you do get them on one side and you see, like we had the other Saturday morning we had Neil Spiller, cj lim, and Nat Chard actually talking about their own work, then I think their work holds up very well. They are creatively quite brilliant, but they are not famous around town. I think our role in publication ought to be to help them become famous around town. Because one has to think of their creativity too.

8.1.3 And what are we bad at?

I think we are very bad at publicising ourselves. in general I think we are very bad at finding money.

That's almost a sort of a global problem for architects, isn't it? To actually market themselves or their abilities.

Yes, I think we are particular bad at that. I think we are shy and lazy, but also don't know enough people who have the money. I'm sorry it comes back to money, but you know, I myself personally have a long track record of producing pamphlets, and books and so on. From the days of Archigram and onwards. When we made Archigram we had no money at all, but then in the sixties, and the seventies, you could publish modestly. But the funny thing that has happened to publishing during my career, which is when we started Archigram, you could print a hairy sheet and staple another hairy sheet to it. and people thought it was rubbish, or thought it was interesting. You could then print more hairy sheets and staple them together, and if the material was interesting, people didn't care if it was funnily produced. But it was produced on a typewriter basically.

One of the things that I like about the machine architecture, architecture machines pamphlet, is that it's very dense in information. You know you pick it up and it is actually [packed] with stuff, whereas I think that particularly on the English scene, it also existed elsewhere, and it's a period thing. I'm sounding like an old-fashioned person saying that it doesn't matter how it's produced, as long as it has its contents in it, whereas now it seems to me now that a lot of people, much younger then myself, won't publish anything unless it's on good paper, elegantly produced and it looks like an art gallery catalogue, meaning that you can't go out and do something for five hundred quid.  
     Except, interestingly, the guys who bothered to produce bartlist again. Quite modest, and they say: Look, we wanted this thing to start up again. And it's printed in some fairly primitive way, but here it is. It exists in the hand. Somebody has actually done it and said: OK, we're not pretending that this is more then a printed list, but it does it's job, and you even see what the pictures look like. And I think if we could do that, then if you imagine doing something that was twenty of that, you almost have one of my papers. If you imagine twenty of those or ten of those, whatever it would need to be, maybe that is what we should be doing.

As a compliment?

Well, I think that Artifice is elegant, and I can go around the world with copies of Artifice, and I give them to very famous people, or infamous people or anybody, and they all say oh! And now I sort of notice that it's known around the world. People are beginning to know it and are pleased to be given one and they say: Oh! you produce things like this, do you? And that is very positive, and I think underneath that you need a lot more publications.
     My experience of publications is everything from producing something more primitive then this at one end, to producing whatever you can produce that gets the information across. But I must be guarding against my own nostalgia primitivism, that I am a person of a certain generation. And maybe people would say: Oh, that was alright for you in the sixties when it didn't matter, but now we have the World Wide Web. Maybe we should be bothering more about putting stuff on that? It is something which we don't do enough. And I believe that there is work going on in this place which could keep readers and lookers very interested for a long time, and we are not putting it on page. So I feel very frustrated at the moment, and the main cause of the frustration is the lack of money. I know exactly what one should be doing, that makes it worse. If one was sort of innocent, saying. oh, I'm not really quite sure of what we should do, then that would be alright. But I know that producing publications could be creatively very useful.

8.1.4 In your forewords and writings in the various public documents one can sense a lot of optimism and joy. You really seem to enjoy your role at the Bartlett and what we are doing here. Is it important to have fun while exploring the future of architecture?

Yes, I think that there are far too many people around in the world of architecture who enjoy to reduce things to a sort of, you know, you got to suffer, and it's got to be dull and it's got to be cool and it's got to be kind of worthy. I think that there's even a lot of rather secondary talents around in London, who do very ordinary looking stuff, rather grey looking stuff, and they try and make a virtue of it. I don't apologise for enthusiasm.  
     I think that architecture is wonderful and that it could come to an extraordinary range of things, and I think one should celebrate it. Also I think that, you know, on a cold gloomy day you have to sort of be optimistic. It should be better. And I think there are some extraordinary student work which makes me feel good just being around it. Just knowing it's going on, seeing it on the wall, outside or criting it or whatever I'm doing. It's wonderful. And we shouldn't be shy about it. We shouldn't pretend that it doesn't exist.

8.1.5 I remember my own interview with you last spring quite clearly, and that enthusiasm and joy really made me feel that I wanted to take part in the courses here. Is that something that you think should be projected to the outside?

Yes I think that it's very important that it's projected. And I think that is our hope, that we come across as the creative and enjoyable place to be, and also not so stupid with it. I mean I think if we were just simply people waving our arms around. I think the fact that we have very intelligent students in helps. But then you can do quite outrageous, or funny things, and still when they are explained even the sceptical observer has to admit that it has something in it. I mean... you're in Phil's unit and I have seen some beautiful things going on ...

Well I'm in his dissertation group. I'm with Carl Callaghan.

Ah! That's interesting, because I think that Carl is a difficult teacher. But he is somebody who is thinking on his feet. He is not stuck in a groove, he is not doing what he was teaching two or three years ago. And I think that is very, very healthy. I would like Carl to publish something.

Yes, that would be interesting.

You know, and I think if he did a pamphlet, it would be fascinating.

8.1.6 Are there some fields of research or work going on in the school that is not getting enough exposure outwards?

Yes, I think that there is work going on, I mean I think there are those sort of personal opinions and observations, I heard Carl give a lecture, and I think it was a revelation, you know, because I realized what his position is. Reasonably it's sort of art history and the necessity to make architecture, but also value he now places upon drawings, whereas two or three years ago the value he placed upon kinetics and movement. He's somebody who's intelligent and working his own way through the significance of architecture.  

I think that work going on in Steven Gage and Pete Silver's unit, some of it is highly experimental and has to do with robotics and to do with interactive forces and electronics. I think that some of the machines that comes out of Christine's unit, and the architecture that emanates from that, you know, or Neil's stuff in cyberspace or some of Nat Chard's people are extraordinarily inventive and original. I haven't traced anyone doing the same stuff. It should be documented, it should be there, and what to my frustration for the last, say, three years there have been a number of student pieces that has been done, and research accompanying them often in the form of technical dissertations and so on, and it sort of goes out of the window, I mean it's there on a few slides and bits of it appears in exhibitions here and there, but still nothing like what it ought to be. I ought to be able to go up to and say: Here is now what we did in the last two years and work your way through it. Maybe published no more elegantly then that.[bartlist]

Should that be done within each unit do you think? As for the unit work, or should someone else be responsible for collecting the information?

I'm not sure about the answer to that. I think it still is the budget and I don't know how in hell I'm going to do it, but I mean, I do know how I want to do it. I think initially one would offer kind of chunks, saying: Alright, you guys could produce enough material for thirty-two pages, and you have a budget of so much. It's up to you how you do it. Or, here is a format, you know if we could print it like this [bartlist], anything you could do to print it, and we will pay for somebody to sit a few evenings wrapping it up, or whatever. I think mechanics is the easy bit. earning the money is the difficult bit.

8.1.7 Is there a danger do you think in having strong trends of interest in an architecture school?

No, I think there would be danger if it was a small school. I think at a school of about this size, one of the reasons why I was always very keen on making the Diploma School the size of about ten units is that once you get to ten units, there is a range of pushing and pulling. And the principle of the first series of evening lectures series were very deliberately me trying to get some of the faculty to act as hosts for their own positions. To say: Right, there isn't one position, there is a number of positions. And they will rise and fall, they will over a cycle of time.  
     If you have a very small school, you have somebody who is a sort of famous person, somebody who is a clever person, somebody who is a creative person and a couple of people who are the other people, and that's it. And everybody comes in and knows where they go. Once you have ten or more, and with the undergraduate perhaps fifteen something, seventeen elements. It comes and goes, you know, it can be a sort of some people who more consistently do this or that, but there will be rises and falls of interests within the school, and surprises. I want there to be surprises. I want there always to be a sort of shifting emphasis, because I think that's more creative. And I think you get a kind of metamorphosis, you get something that emerges out of a mixture of two or more things. Callaghan and Chard taught together for a while, quite a long while, and then Chard and lim taught together, and then they split. Whereas from lim to Callaghan there is no apparent connection.

But from Chard.

But from Chard, you can see connections either way, but then he start to emerging in his own position, and I think things like that are very interesting.

8.1.8 Do you think that it is important to choose just the right descriptive words and illustrations in the public documents?

Yes, but how do you do that? I mean, I've just published a book which attempts to be a sort of attached and objective description of architecture, but I think it is subject to all my usual indulgences and short cuts, you know. The book actually comes out today, it's called The Primer, and it's done by Academy. It took me more then a year to do, but I seem to be doing it in a hurry, and it seems to be the product of my own slide collection. And so it got a lot of Scandinavian examples in it, and relatively few African examples, because that's my bag, or influence or habit. And it has a lot of Japanese examples, and relatively few North American examples, again because of my own taste or habits. And maybe it also benefits by that, rather then attempting to be completely objective.  
     It is, as my wife described it, like me talking. And if people wants to buy that, that's great. We have somebody coming here later this month called Juhani Palasmaa, from Finland, and he has just had a book done, and I would gather that it will also be like him talking, and he is an interesting man talking. So I would imagine it is an interesting book. When I was a student there were relatively few books that you could get on architecture, unless you went and bought a big tone like Banister Fletcher's Space, Time and Architecture, you know, Le Corbusier, a few other things and, in fact, I myself did one of the first sort of cheap, general purpose, quickie paperback, and it sold a lot when I was very young, It sold a lot of copies. And then later came Frampton, Harman and a few others, but now there are lots and lots of books.  

I think that the role of the published book vis-a-vis the magazine has changed. I mean, I'm a friend of several publishers and I have these conversations with them, and I say: Why do you take so long to produce a book? And they say: Because you guys take so long to write them. But Academy is one of the fastest. I didn't really have all the material in until about November, and it's out. I had most of the material in by September, but there was the odd little corrections and they had the dummy out before Christmas. And here it is sitting. And that was flown in about three weeks ago. And it's actually in town now and in stock. That's not bad, and I think if all publishers could move that quickly then, you know.
      I happen to know that among younger architects, the key document that comes out these days, is the El Croquis. I would say that El Croquis is probably the most coveted document and it could go against twenty quid or what ever it is. And you would probably rather buy that then a book-book, and it is as elegant, it is as well edited, it is as relevant and so the whole concept of the book is different. I think there could be pamphlets that would be modest. The only problem is a lot of people immediately they do a little publication, they want it to make it fancy and expensive. And all the money goes to buying expensive paper and using large white margins. You need heavy money to do that.

8.1.9 Is there a metaphor or analogy that you think fits the school today?

A metaphor? Well I like to think of the school as a workshop. I think a workshop for ideas. I'm only interested in a school that is as good as what it's producing. I think that architecture schools are extremely fragile, and I think that they can very quickly become mythologies. People were talking about the Liverpool school of architecture as great place when I was a student, and even up to very recently, they were still going on about the Liverpool school of architecture as a great place, because it has had a very important professor called O'Reilly who made it a great place, roughly in sort of the thirties or forties, and I think that James Stirling was one of the last students of this particular period. Now that's a long time ago, but it sort of ran on as a mythology, but the reality if you look at Liverpool work, it is nothing special. It is a rather boring school, whereas John Hejduk has made Cooper Union a special place, because of himself and the people he gathered around him.

I think the world doesn't know that you are living. I'm very conscious of the fact that there are eight schools in London, and another four or five very close by. My own experience of the school down the street, you know I was a student there and taught there for two dozen years, is a sort of illustration of that. You can do wonderful things with the mythology, but you have to really live up to it. And for a school like this, we're only as good as we are. We can't say: Yes, we're in a lovely University, and have a dome and lots of people who have taught here has got Nobel reprises. I mean, that doesn't affect the architecture in question. It is a product of what we do, what we produce, and the publication should be a record of that. But if you go in libraries the funny thing about publications is that they never quite get the essence of the reality. If you know the people, and I know lots of the people that appears in the publications, it's always more interesting to go into their studio and see what they are actually doing. It's always more interesting to go into the building to see what it is really like and the magazine, or the document never gets more then sort of eighty-five percent of that. It never can, but I think also that the document can be an extremely good coercive force. I know that from Archigram days.

Because we did Archigram, we had to do something to put into Archigram. Because we did Archigram it gave us a kind of name of a group of people and I think that I am very conscious of the importance of publications. But in the end also, one of the last of the things I want to say is that I'm very concerned that there is a tendency, that mainly has come from the United States, towards a support of ideas which are purely verbal. And references that are purely verbal or literate, and that the involvement with the object and the use of paper to describe and discuss the object, the actual process of the object itself, is not fashionable. It must become fashionable again, otherwise we're done for. And I think that too many people are producing books and pamphlets and preaches and lectures about architecture and that don't actually have much sense of stuff and things, and how things work and what they're like and what they're like to touch. They are concerned of metaphors, and some are concerned with philosophical anagraphics and systems, and they would actually be happier doing English literature but they sort of call it architecture, and they have had an unhealthy influence, and I am sure they are due for a demise, because people in the end will get bored with it.

As you said somewhere, architecture is very much stuff, very much objects and things...

Exact, yes. You know I think with the building with the building ,where you are, in Gothenburg, no photographs or descriptions can handle it. You just have to go there and be in it. But it looks rather boring, it never comes across in photographs. I've seen photographs of it for years, I was brought up on it, on that sort of stuff. And as I happened to be in Gothenburg giving a lecture, I was sort of taken in there, and it was so much more interesting then it could ever appear to be in the photographs. So much more exquisite, and so much more clever. And so much more to do with light. to do with light falling of surfaces. And none of the photographs get it right, and very few of the descriptions talk about it.
     And another thing about Gothenburg, one of the great things about Gothenburg, I think, is the way in which certain buildings pick up the corners conditions of the canal system, and lead you on with these strange towers usually done by a Oedlund is it? I think his name is Oedlund, and they are very clever. the way that the canal system is being picked up, and in grey skies you can have their silhouette and you can say: I'm moving towards that. And then you turn and move towards that. I am sure it was conscious, and I think it is brilliant. And it is something that you don't know, and nobody talks about it much. You have to be there, and you have to see it. And it's wonderful.

Yes it's the thing with buildings on the corners really.

Buildings on the corners, and the use of sky, and the use of direction, the use of building as marker. So I mean, I am interested in those sorts of ideas. And it is a very good book to write about and if you do write, or even lectures, you show slides and you say: It's a great thing is to move against that corner. And they think: Yes I suppose that could be interesting.

8.1.10 Do you have any additional comments that you would like to offer?

I think that I'm very interested if you, or somebody doing your dissertation on this sort of subject, it suggests or hints to me that you may be somebody who is interested in producing publications, or that you know people around the school who are. I think if you are, I think you should go for it, and I send you that message. Go for it, and I think that you should excite people like myself to help you, not that it could be anything like with Artifice. But the core of it is money. I think that also, you know, the school doesn't just exist by sort of the teaching and on the day to day basis. It exists through these other things.



The interview was made by Erland Flygt at Febuary 5, 1996, as part of the Pre-Diploma Dissertation at The Bartlett School of Architecture,
University College London 1995-96.

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Last modified 31 March 1997.

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