 And welcome. It's a great pleasure to introduce this evening, Sir Peter Cook. There's probably no living architect today who needs less of an introduction, of course, than Peter Cook. He's a legend, a mythical figure, who has been shaking up the discourse, practice, and imagination of architecture and its possibilities since the 60s. When he founded together with Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, and Michael Webb, and David Green, the radically experimental group Archigram. I still remember vividly my first encounter with Cook and Archigram's work. It was on the occasion of their retrospective exhibition at the Centre Georges-Pompidou, sometime maybe in the mid-80s, I would guess. This is still one of the most mind-blowing exhibitions I've seen. The sheer excess of imagination, the reinvention of everyday life, the embrace of technological innovation for pure play and unbridled pleasure, a radical faith in the future in progress and in thinking, architecture as environment, as media, infrastructure, as mobile, lightweight, plugged in, in capsule form, instantly consumable, disposable, and more importantly, unapologetically sexy. The freshness and irreverence of endlessly projected new worlds, with names such as Walking City, Instant City, Plug-in City, Living Pod, etc., was not only highly influential for the speculative ideas they presented, they were ultimately seminal for architecture as radical new forms of representation. Beyond the environments were the drawings themselves, which embodied architecture at its most fundamental level. Architects don't build as much as they draw, as our own right-hand-hold Martin often says, and drawing is what Archigram contributed in sheer, endlessly inspiring excess. In his recently republished Drawing the Motive Force of Architecture, Cook writes, much of the most memorable or most definitive architecture comes forth at a moment when a set of ideas exists as a form of attack, a retort to another set of ideas. The pressure of rhetoric or drive needing to find an outlet, needing to shout loudly to insist, awaken, reveal. A paradoxy of drawn mannerisms are deliberately chosen cool in response to hot or sparse in response to complex, closely paralleling the architecture itself or its cultural background. At this point, we must face a nagging suspicion, he continues, that the drawing can possibly be better than the reality. Reflecting on the relationship of drawing to computer renderings, Cook also notes in his video the battle of drawing from the retrospective of drawings at the Tobin Foundation in Berlin recently. The other thing is that the computer does things correctly. I think in architecture it is important to do things incorrectly. Drawing is more than a tool, it is the extension of one's head, it is its waywardness as well as its accuracy and depiction that is important. This passion for drawings power certainly contributed to rendering Cook's time as the director of the ICA in London and then of the Bartlett School of Architecture both legible and highly memorable, a legacy which continues until today and this testimony to Cook's seminal and often sizzling contribution as a great educator. But as I noted maybe earlier, great architects continue to reinvent themselves and in recent years Peter Cook has given us wonderful buildings. In 2016 he completed the drawing studio at the Arts University in Bournemouth where his passion for drawing inspired a beautifully lit and sensuous studio space. In 2014 the playful, theatrical and filled with unexpected moments for meeting and interaction, Abidian School of Architecture was completed at Bond University in Australia receiving the National MBA Public Building Award the AIA Gold Coast Building of the Year and the Education and Health Inside Award WAF, WAF. The snaking and colorful Vienna University School of Economics was completed in 2014 and received the Reba European Award as well as the WAF Collar Award and maybe the most archigram-like, the alien-like, Kunsthausgras of 2003 received a Reba European Award. Peter's achievements have been of course widely recognized and there are too many to name here all tonight, but of note is in 2004 Archigrams members were awarded the Reba's highest award, the Royal Gold Medal. In 2007 Peter was knighted by the Queen for his services to architecture and he is a Royal Academician and a commander of the L'ordre des arts et lettres du public and is currently a senior fellow of the Royal College of Art in London. His professorships include those of the Royal Academy, University College, London and the, I cannot say this, Steydusch in Frankfurt, Maine, Germany. Peter's continuing work as a lecturer of considerable renown makes him a familiar voice within cultural institutions around the world and so we are really incredibly honored and thrilled to have him tonight with us and we're also excited that our own Bernatumi will offer his response. So please join me in welcoming Peter Kirk. It's interesting in your introduction that you talked about these businesses of teaching and exhibiting and making books and making drawings. The things that really support services to the fundamental business which is making a architecture, this rather curious path towards and this rather curious mixture now as it stands of a lot of drawing and a bit of building and a lot of talking and a lot of events like this which one really uses to rethink constantly what it all adds up to and I've just come in five days ago from opening probably my largest solo exhibition which is to celebrate the new rather horrible building of the Barclay, the rebuilt Barclay but we sort of screwed it up with a lot of funny drawings and I think it's a good place to start. The other thing is of course an explanation for my... That's funny, it should have another slide on. Well there was an explanation of my title, Dreams and Reality. Many years ago when he was more often in the street that we live in, up at the top of the street, I bumped into Remkul Haas and we reminisced about the days at the A when we were all considered to be artists, artists. We weren't anywhere near the business of building and then we listed out all the people who in between had actually started to build and the list was long, it included all these so-called artists or wankers or theorists or whatever you might call them and we listed out the number of buildings that were done between us and then we said what do they say now? Because in a way it was a conspiracy theory, it was extremely convenient for the people out there to put us in a useful pigeonhole which is that we are non-competent, we are involved in these support activities and these visionary activities so-called. Okay this is a sort of popery of what happened five nights ago and it of course is another attempt to post-rationalise and I gave up post-rationalising halfway through planning the exhibition. It is a conglomeration, not quite as chaotic as it looks in the collage there but it is a conglomeration of things dreamt of and things built and the question this evening is to what extent the dreams have sometimes touched with reality and to what extent the dreams continue to be dreams and to what extent it might be useful for them to be and maybe you have to come to the conclusion of what is useful. I go back autobiographically to the formative period of my architectural experience which is I am not actually from this town but I am supposed to be from it because it saves people a lot of money in listing out the ten other towns in which I lived as an army brat but Bournemouth is a funny place in which to go to architecture school it was the smallest school in England at the time it was the last place in England that you had to learn the five orders of architecture to be able to draw them using scale rather than using dividers and so on and it is a town which is a sort of retirement seaside town and a repository for a very large number of Victorian churches and I wonder about that because although we were having James give drum down our throat I wonder if it wasn't the churches that I was sort of subconsciously interested I remain if the 19th century classifications to be made I remain a gothicist rather than a classicist but there are other seaside memories I had as this army brat one little town in particular called Felix Stowe who none of you will know had a conglomeration of three bits of building that stayed in my brain for years and years and years it's a little lunar power the helter-skelter I realized afterwards after all was the first time I'd seen a megastructure the cafe on the right I realized after was the first time that I'd seen Art Deco and the little tiny funny house at the bottom led me in a long roundabout way towards the taste of policy but then I came to London I was to the AA on state money what was interesting was that I had been reading and reading and reading and had read everything I could lay hands on about the Smithsons and Pallotsy and Sterling and Gown and so on but I went to hear a lecture on my second DNA given by that same Pallotsy and only six people turned up but the same night 250 people turned up to hear about English arts and crafts and I was shocked as a modernist provincial as a futurist provincial whatever it was and I wonder about that that sometimes the raw unwashed tacky provincial is hungry for what's really important going on at the time okay this was followed of course by the heroic archigram period which we celebrate, we continue to celebrate I think even Dennis Crompton is in the room who has made a wonderful industry of keeping the flame alive of archigram it was heroic stuff I look at it and wonder how we had the balls to do it at the time I look at it and I think what was really going on in my mind I keep telling people, I keep telling PhD students and those people who try to reinvent history but actually the plug-in city was not so much about technology for me it was about romanticism it was romanticizing the idea of the prefabricated object and then I entered school a very funny thing happened which was that I was brought in after being on many many many crits at the AA to be a humble but useful person called the assistant to the fifth year master now traditionally the assistant to the fifth year master is a sort of fact totem who runs the grandmaster and he's a useful person to see if you're feeling sick or your girlfriend's left you or whatever the hell in fact I had published Plug-in City of no other thing than the Sunday Times colour supplement which at that time was read by more than a million people every one of those students sitting there thought what am I going to do with this guy I had never had the comfort of anonymity and I think that is obviously coloured one's attitude towards teaching one has been a person of rhetoric without even asking to be and this drawing in comparison to the previous one was done a year later I did almost no drawing in my first year of teaching I became an amateur psychologist I think rather than anything else and hardly drew at all and then in the summer it all came out and the relative additional layering of ideas into the maximum intensity area compared with the early drawing was interesting because I don't think I've ever followed that again that one hardly drew for a year but somehow it was all running around in one's head and one was probably already starting to do that thing that I've done ever since which is to have sort of subconscious conversations with one's students when you're doing a drawing or subconscious conversations with friends when you're doing a drawing you'll enjoy this what about that? you'll hate this and it led to various other more formalised aspects of the plug-in city in a way I think looking back on it the plug-in university was actually a piece of neoclassicism which is not really what plug-in city was about which was a piece of romanticism and then this led to the incident city which of course was the period and interestingly a drawing done on my first trip to the United States I was on the faculty at UCLA and I sat drawing an imagined situation in England but I was sitting in LA and I wondered to what extent the drawing itself was affected by that subconscious looking over the shoulder at the sort of googie architecture it could have done and then at a certain point one reapplied it back to home town the first dream I want to kind of cogitate upon is what I call the dream physical metamorphosis and I look not only at the early metamorphic project but I look at the exhibition five days ago where the metamorphic project are still in there as keys to some of the more static project and the morphing still goes on certainly in some competition project so they tend to be the ones that we don't win the more static ones seem to have a better chance and a key project really is the one of 67 which was the urban mark the notion of something that had a sort of generic follow-on from the plug-in city going stage by stage into a condition of what the late Cedric Price would have called a scrambled egg and later with a favorite project of my wife's which is the way out West Berlin which was discussing the fact that at that time West Berlin was still walled from the east and was propped up by American money but I chose a site which was at the western end of the great West Berlin street the Kufustendamm and I was fascinated because I'm greatly a lover of that street but it's weird because about a mile and a half up is it just a piece of art there's nothing at the end I was fascinated by the territory what would happen if there was something at the end what would happen if that was America what would happen if it was west the west of the west are I used the cactus of all architectural icons as a kind of focus for the metamorphosis of the bits and pieces here we can see three out of the five stages of metamorphosis of the actual grand plan itself years later when getting involved in vegetation which I will come back to interestingly or sadly or ironically many of my projects have involved vegetation we've never though we have started to do building none of our actual clients ever seems to want any even if we sometimes draw the vegetation usefully kind of ameliorating the hard surfaces they say yes that might be very nice but we don't want it to happen so there is this interesting sort of resistance but in this project which I only show three out of the six stages one starts off with a small triangulated sheltered area for the dwelling and some armatures that have reasonable little bits of vegetation on them and some beginnings of hybrid equipment which is between audiovisual, groweries things to do with ventilation and so on and over time it sprouts vegetation creeps in and the apparatus becomes a kind of combination of different kind of apparatus and then the series of drawing goes on and this is something that has often happened with drawing where I have in my head the general program of the project and how it will change but only about two stages ahead and when I get to stage two I'm already thinking what stage three or four will do and then somehow the scheme takes over it's very weird, there's a certain point of which you're drawing something you never couldn't even imagine you might be drawing and it usually gets into an absurd state towards the end where you say my god, I've hatched a monster and then you bail or you stop and you elegantly say this was the intention that there would only be six stages of this thing but of late of course there's another kind of physical metamorphosis that occurs which is of the built object itself so this is the Australian built one of the scoops of the Australian built photographed in the early stages when simply almost the raw figure is there when the raw figure starts to be involved in other raw figures and then at the smooth, at the shaved version of the cosmeticized stage of the thing and the thing is in a constant state of metamorphosis or to take another building, a Vienna building on the left the day it was opened and on the right a photograph taken only one year later mostly containing things that we intended to happen certainly the vegetation, certainly the the grain of the slats certainly the patina occurring on the concrete other things may happen when bits start dropping off that we won't want it to happen but in general one enjoys and this may be being an old sort of hairy European one enjoys the notion of patina there's of course in parallel the metamorphosis of an idea one is familiar with this from the process let's say of sketching of moving towards something and then on the right a stage at which the process has reached some kind of nearly conclusion or there is another one interesting sequence a few years ago where I was asked to do a drawing for AD magazine I can't remember what the issue was but I was interested in talking about something I've always wanted to happen which was a comfortable vegetated club you don't see the liquor and the sound but you get the general idea of a comfort veg club fairly normal attention I think and then Eric Moss down in Syark said why don't you come and do an exhibition and I did an installation with my friends which was to some extent the comfort veg club it's only an eight thousand dollar operation so it couldn't have a lot of the gadgetry but it did a bit of it and indeed it was comfortable and vegetated in fact I can report that it was so comfortable but very naughty things happened later tonight which I am regard as a success and then in fact I've done something there which I haven't been able to do very often which is to report back to the original drawing so I copied the installed part and then had further thoughts about what it could be so you kind of roll over a meager project in the middle and then you move forward I'd like to be able to do that again there's a little piece of the job going through the office at the moment which is the children's room of a club in Mumbai but sometimes the notion of an idea that moves through a number of projects can happen so that my very early nineteen sixty three God help us, nineteen sixty three tower on the left the notion of the tower as a kind of coat hanger as a kind of armature upon which you cast other things moves through into the 2010s and later a number of the notion of the tower as the kind of portmante or the hanger is something that interests me considerably another dream is a kind of dust effect the kind of enclosure that one makes the business of slithering I once was having to make an exhibit next to this wonderful ramp in Saapala it's a very hard place to show a show because it is so beautiful, so total and it's slithered, you just slither around I really knew how to do these things and other friends of mine such as Ron Arad do the slither, you're getting the feel of the slither and then in a project for Berlin again one was fascinated by the notion of picking up on the aesthetic of certain round corners but liked and preferred and suggesting a slithering process but I think it's also in a way affects how one operates one does actually slither I tend to use this kind of pen that allows you to just drift I hate that kind of intersection I like to slither and in an unsuccessful competition project we took up on the current success of British cyclists and put a series of cycle tracks as the kind of activating force within a campus this notion that even in the coldest winter of Helsinki you would see people gliding around there would be the movement of the bike and I was inspired by some weird troughs that I saw once in Kuala Lumpur with a whole lot of guys on scooters pouring out of it I've never been able to find it since but I thought what a great thing that you have these troughs with movement there's a woven in between buildings but slither certainly informs our largest building to date which is the law faculty and the admin building the two buildings in Vienna and if you look at the way that we track the periphery we are slithering around it and then that slithering comes into the building because in fact the interstitial spaces between the more formalized room also start to slither and open up into a kind of a series of stomach-like conditions so the slithering isn't just only an encompassment it's also a way of folding into space but it can also be the kind of slithering that one was looking at in some of the rhetorical drawings of the 80s and then able to be applied back again many years later in Vienna or even the idea of interior slithering of spaces that would not be hard definition and in the Australian building which we'll see more of later there is also some trace of the same way of encompassing the contained space a little more modestly slithering because this had to be a very cheap building in fact not quite as cheap as it turned out to be social housing in Madrid the story of this was that it was half built and then stayed with just a tire crane and a dog for about two years waving in the wind the guys had gone bankrupt and then eventually when a builder was found it built just the minimum enclosure but it still to some extent the organization still takes advantage of the diagonal views and diagonal conditions that you get from the slither or there's a detail of slithering around the space that you can pick up in the Gratz building and in the Australian building the scoops which are a way of slithering and holding space so in recent drawings I say yes slithering is still a dream funny trick I've set myself over years is going as I travel a great deal and sometimes return to the same place quite often made a kind of secret pact with myself that if I'd been there for something like a month I would comment on the town by making a project for it nobody's ever sort of then said why don't you do it but nonetheless I try a long time ago my first ever visit to Brisbane was for a month I was teaching a project which was based upon the south side of the Brisbane River which now is developed at that time and I came up with two towers one a kind of what's now become a generic commercial sleek tower a slithery tower the other one based very much on the kinds of buildings you see in the bottom right hand picture which are the old metal probably cast iron bungalows or two story buildings which were lifted up on legs and allowed the breeze to blow through natural cross ventilation and lifted on legs so the bugs didn't crawl up into the house and I thought what would happen if you actually made a tower that was in effect a succession of these structures and that was what was behind the first Brisbane project and then it also involved catching the wind and making foot bridges sort of casting wind catch trying to get breeze down what is sometimes a rather hot town my wife city is Tel Aviv and over the nearly 30 years that I've been coming and going to there I have made certain observations about it one is that it is full of very very active people very entrepreneurial people and so the tower on the left which is intended although there is no client intended for the centre of that circle Mr Neymar visited Tel Aviv and did a couple of scribbles apparently and said that there should be and then some local guys built the actual circle but it was Neymar's intention that there should be three towers in the centre which haven't ever happened so I said right let's take the three towers the apartment block the car parking structure and this which is a kind of kebab of a number of different kinds of enterprises and just like a kebab you stick the stick up and you don't expect the tomato to be the same as the sausage or the you know whatever and you don't expect the car showroom to be the same as the day hotel or the dentist waiting room etc so it's a series of entrepreneurial types which are kebab the other Tel Aviv towers at the other end of town where I've often stayed and here I'm looking at the notion of a building in a mental training condition which has a series of kites which are effectively movable screen conditions within it so you have basically predominantly glass building but then you have this series of kite-like conditions within it I broke my rule because I haven't actually trotted up quite as much as a mum in Rio or in Sao Paulo but I'm so fascinated I mean from being a second year student in Bournemouth I was fascinated by Roberto Burley Marx even before Nima and Carmen Miranda was a kind of phenomenon when I was a kid and somehow this whole and then actually being for a week and a half in the middle of the Iberapuera park Nima and park with Burley Marx doing the manscaping is extraordinary this extraordinary sort of joie de vivre even though it's dangerous and all the hell but it's something that gets you and as a North European it's a challenge to try and say what is it that I could one ever be as exotic as that so if you look at the tower carefully you can see that it's a standard bit of post-plugin as your father but then it has kind of Brazilian-er draped upon it I don't claim that it's my best tower but it's one where one's heart on one's sleeve in a sense and then an invitation from the intrepid Christian Fieryce Berlin again to do a project this time for Paris now of course the London people have a big problem about Paris because it's there and we cherish the differences despite the similarities and there I did a naughty you know wouldn't get to be built anyhow but I said okay I will be modest of the English I won't take up much of your space I must go to the edge of the same near the Godast and just put half the building in the wash excuse me just a little time and then I will put these apartments and we'll make them rotate so that if there's a row going on in the next apartment you just sort of push a button and turn out of your shop or if the lupins are coming out and there's a lot to blow in or wherever and towards that time and then a very dear friend of mine came in the next morning and showed me a picture of some German guy in 1928 who of course had done a house he's done exactly that this sometimes happens and it's often a friend who points out that your idea isn't original what do you do I think he's like my life is my life is but for nothing or you say right, bloody good idea wasn't it and you have to take the latter you have to take the latter position but what do you also have in this particular conglomeration are little naughty houses you actually have kind of North European allotments with little allotment huts so that the bourgeoisie possibly there I say the male member of the bourgeoisie can disappear out into the bushes bushes and read this dirty newspaper or whatever people do in huts that are in allotments of course it's well known amongst my friends that my favourite spot in the United States is Santa Monica we're heading there on Friday and I we stay sometimes in a hotel that looks back on another hotel which looks like a kind of prison I mean it's expensive I've never stayed there but it's it looks like a prison you think we are in Santa Monica it's the most wonderful moment it's the furthest west of our civilization kind of thing and then you build a bloody hotel that looks like a prison wouldn't it be wonderful to pull a piece of the Hollywood Hills into Santa Monica well that's my excuse I just sat and did the drawing actually looking at the building I said let's do this the most recent drawing I'm going to show you was finished two weeks ago and it's a tower for an area that I walked past about twice three times a week because it's very near our studio it's Hybrid Corner which is a fairly sort of non-descript piece of relatively inner London it's a sort of local centre of some sort and my tower is also looking at possible materiality I think that in this particular case it's very useful to have a marker for Hybrid Corner and I look across the street at the old Victorian chapel I look at the bottom and I look at the tradition of red terracotta and red brick and in the middle the glass building and perhaps more progressively into something that is actually created by digital means and growths it will be containing groys that will perhaps rather it hadn't done the six stages of this tower which would take a lot of drawing but we would then show that actually the part that we see here created in this man overtake and creep down rather like an extraordinary kind of creeper that would then replace the skin that's the idea behind it in this section the last illustration is of a project this isn't strictly speaking a tower and doesn't have a particular location that raises another issue which is sometimes in one's imagination thinking about not the narrowness or the insistence of a particular site but of the implications of certain things seen and enjoyed I am fascinated by Edinburgh Castle the top because somehow the building appears to grow out of the rock it's hard to tell in some parts of it which is the actual rocker which is the building in the U-boat pens in Trondheim you get the notion of this extraordinary kind of object by the water this strange object but my general fascination with water side buildings is of course in the period of the marvellous warehouses of which I think the Hamburg warehouses are some and the best where the water kind of almost infiltrates into the building the building is a mechanical device for things being taken out of the water planted into the building this funny object on the right though it also has a lot to owe to the vegetational sway that my work is nonetheless very much influenced by these kinds of sideways thoughts now what happens as it starts to evolve into real stuff early days with Christine Hawley we did a small piece of Berlin easy to design because on the west was a marvellous view of the Tiergarten and the square below and at the back was a sheltered courtyard and therefore the building in a sense designed itself and I still love going back to Berlin it's my third favourite city and I'm afraid I still gravitate a bit to the west but I'd need a whole afternoon to explain why that is and of course there's the famous Kunsthaus with Colin Prunier one in competition we had I think a marvellous jury I would say that wouldn't I but I can't imagine other juries having bought the thing it had to be done cheap it is not high-tech it really is not high-tech it came in 2.5% only over the normal budget for a flat roofed gallery it came in 2.5 months late which for an arts building I think it's almost coming in on the nail therefore it could not it could not have expensive detailing it benefited from the the kind of geopolitical situation which was at that moment there was still a leftover of the old sort of east European thing therefore you could get blokes coming over the border on bicycles you could get cheap pieces of steel in rail yards there was also the advantage of a territory the Moor Valley which has had centuries of iron smelting and crafting and timber crafting rather similar to the area around Stuttgart and the building was a very simple proposition when we looked at the 100 or however many entries for the competition I think one criticism of other projects I could make was that they were too complicated this is a funny old thing but it's not actually that complicated it's just a piece of enclosure of the available site you just again glide around the site say that's the potato that's the element and you just have a pin that goes from the obvious corner because we knew the town very well already and it sits comfortably within its context and of course as night falls it has these 920 points of illumination which are again done on the tube just electric glass electric lamp standard bathroom fittings and it sits like a friendly dog in the basket at the town if you want to see the curved architecture if you look carefully a lot of those baroque churches already had a curved architecture not quite so radical really another competition win was in words for a municipal theatre in a small town called Verbania north of Italy on Lake Maggiore but it was a city and we never got to build it it was a city and somebody copied it and got the money I'm very bitter about this but anyhow to return to the project it was a simple issue of really taking advantage of a small town yes there is an auditorium for 500 people and perhaps on high days of holidays the burgers will go in and sit there watch a third-rate piece of acting and go to sleep and then take our take with everybody in the four years but the real contribution the building can do is to create a place where things can happen both inside and outside the terraces the places where you can watch open air movies the places where this kind of thing sorry can this kind of thing can readily happen with the important part and therefore one might say run the pompously this sort of urban contribution is the key to the project the dream of melting now that's a much more tricky one very very difficult years and years ago I was fascinated by almost implicitly destroying the tyranny of the window of saying does it have to be architecture says that you make a solid carcass and then you make hells in it and then the discussion of the elegance or otherwise becomes a discussion of the proportion of the decoration of those holes which it still seems to be isn't there some other thing that can happen can't we melt can't we glide into transparency, translucency solidity and various drawings did a little bit of it on grass until they discovered we were doing stop, it's getting too expensive and there which is there the old little moments in grass where we could melt and then there are other projects where the veg house that we've seen already becomes a veg village but the village is a series of melting one condition into the other or another competition project the notion of melting colour around a built condition or of a town melting into the fjord in this case melting into the water or here in a sort of joke drawing done for populace suggesting what would happen if various types of sport facility could be one typology melting into another typology a particularly positing sort of the climate on top of the hotel, the football observed from helicopters and so on very much in the kind of early architecture tradition though it's much much later in time and then about a year ago I was asked by a Los Angeles magazine to do a little quick piece of architecture that uses a Los Angeles architecture with London architecture rather inelegantly they called it the caliphate issue of the magazine and my response was a couple of peers one sticking out by player del Rey incorporating consciously London overtones and one sticking out near Gravesend in the 10th estuary having Los Angeles overtones another dream that I think is very noticeable in 20th century certain 20th century project is the dream of flying as a student of the AA I remember being allowed to see the original edition of Chernikov's 101 fantasies and that image has stayed and when we got to the point my wife will remember this we got to the point in the building of Graves where suddenly this thing happened I was more excited by that than the Bulba's part which everybody always sort of made all the fuss about this thing leaping into space that was my magic moment and I think that since I mentioned you know Yerotubak did a project in Barcelona where it doesn't fly but again it points out that consistent tradition of architects to wish to inhabit the sky or is it that we can achieve this end by other mysterious means and the wish is still to let it fly another dream which I've already mentioned is this question of overgrowth of vegetation as a constituent part of architecture as a language of architecture language certainly of the coming and often I've been in Germany and I've been doing these drawings and somebody comes up to you and says there's a place like you are making the drawing in our town and you're dragged along to see some piece of Italian like Schvetzingen which is an amazing place with Italian gardeners of the 18th century were doing this and my favorite example is in Carthage where in the middle of the 19th century there was this enclosure made now boring people say oh well of course there was probably glass in it but no I found the actual drawings there was not glass it was intended as an armature which would take growing original not first off idea it's been going for a while probably one has to admit to certain projects or drawings being one's own favorite this is a particular favorite of mine where I made an artificial landscape which had certain structurings within it now it also includes bits of deliberately provocatively naughty actual architecture it has certain conditions which suggest organized drifting it has other conditions where you see something sticking out that probably is architectural another one there but then you get other conditions which are deliberately and I was playing with myself so to speak but one is deliberately provoking the question to what extent is the natural object or could it be a tectonic condition as in the urban mark last state to what extent does the architectural event have to be concealed or happening as an interloper and to what extent are there is there a given take between these conditions I was fascinated by the notion of innuendo and complicity and drift and in a way generic time which of course is simplified in other projects where one says yes this is very definitely a this is a project the governor and I did together for one of the analysts and it deliberately places vegetated objects within the condition or here where one uses vegetation as both a garden encasement and a drift and in a very cheap project that I've been working on lately one suggests a serious influence in a way by the narrow frontage Japanese buildings where one places vegetation as a kind of backdrop number one and as a as a system and then one goes to little local pieces of things that are in the tradition of the vegetated balcony or the winter garden but perhaps the same kind of layered drift doesn't have to only have grown vegetated the notion of of laying drifted objects and layers and objects is something that perhaps can be applied to other projects one of our Taiwanese projects where the pieces are actually wind farming are to do with solar collection and do with shading but they are layered in series and in a ridiculous piece of the London exhibition at the moment one makes a kind of collage which is deliberately in that tradition another dream is a dream of the three-dimensional city Hong Kong is a marvellous example I love that condition in Hong Kong where you go a series of escalators engaged with the cross strata as you do about the hill I'm fascinated I've used this picture before I know but his is Sao Paulo again and if you look from underneath Bobada's wonderful art museum you stand on that platform where the market is and you look down and suddenly realize there's a six or eight stories below there's another layer of activity then you look and there's another further on there's another layer crossing you realize you are standing on top of a piece of three-dimensional city it's tremendously inspiring and I think that sometimes one's projects are taking off from after all I was a student and I was very inspired by the deck conditions which of course have been often misinterpreted but I still think the notion of dancing over the ground setting up a three-dimensional situation is exciting and that three-dimensional situation can take all sorts of physical forms it can be laid as a kind of porous three-dimensional city on top of another city and the porosity includes the solid slightly less solid but very unsolid and the totally percolated again rather like the notion with the non-window window that there are many degrees of the presence of the object or the presence of the surface and one pursues Oslo in that manner even in a much smaller project for a part of Madrid one is laying the main buildings on legs and letting the hill walk that's on drift under and amongst it and that led in a way to the built building which was intended to have the sports happening on the top wonderful shutters and various kiosks operating underneath it just they didn't have the money to go through all I hope one day they will more lately a project for placing a piece of a university as a series of buildings up on a four-cornered armature so there's space between each department and each space then can take on small scale and temporary each space has its own quadraggles it's like a university building and a quadraggle then up another one and another quadraggle and up and another kind of chunk city should you wish or of course the three-dimensional implications of some of the tower projects both again the 63 one but also some much more recent tower project where one is constantly implying the diagonalization of connection funny little old dream is really not a central one it's a dream that I call a hidey hole we all want a hidey hole from time to time and I'm fascinated when I go to Germany by two places particularly one is the Gleiniger Gardens of Schinkel these little tiny hidey places and the other one is the Matildenher in Darmstadt where Ulbricht parks these funny little tempting little wee conditions and in a very old drawing of mine the prepared landscape has effectively a secret a secret gully you walk along over the hill and then the thing is within and if you go to Rauschen my favourite English garden there are these very spooky hidey holes which have toads and water probably goes as coming out of them nice funny little example I found about a year so back and otherwise non-responsive streets in Tel Aviv called Disengar a big old commercial street minding my own business and suddenly there's a sweet little lady popped out of a pink little hut it's very un Tel Aviv and she sells antiques because I was using a proper camera I didn't get round to the iPhone and she saw me taking the camera she darted straight as do things what live in hidey holes do they tend to dive back in I wish I could have captured her it's a wonderful in and most all this sort of dust and concrete loudness the little sweet hidey hole but another kind of hidey hole are the curious re-entrant spaces that you sometimes get as a product of the building so if we look at the you know and not really one would like to say they were highly intentionally they were there all along but no they became some of the best parts of the building are these which are in themselves hidey holes or there can be little kiosks that hide in crevices or there can be pieces in our coloured Birmingham project which are piercing in or they can be the hidey holes within the Madrid housing or they can be the scoops that we find in our architecture school hidey hole or in another project for our stray they can be the hidey holes that are cut into the edges of the building itself or they can even sometimes be little hidey holes within kiosks this is in Taiwan honey seems to not be let's see if it goes stopped is there an expert ah it hasn't stopped and more hidey holes in a project we're doing for a retreat in India stuff years and years ago I started giving lectures about stuff particularly in centres of excellence where people don't do very much stuff but talk a lot and not mentioning any names of course and it's interesting when you start getting from being a sort of drawer to a stuffist and what and then you start noticing that you do tend to repeat yourself or at least you have preference for certain kinds of stuff now these are all now I'm able to say built pieces of stuff of different scales of different material are basically letting the light in but doing as it happens doing it in very very different ways but the party is the same party but then sometimes one does very exaggerated stuff one of my towers is really an essay in all kinds of surface treatment if you like or stuff as built we've done furniture we've been lucky enough to do all the furniture for the school some of the furniture for the Austrian building and we are now doing more and it's a certain kind of stuff it has its own preference it even has its own little hidey holes within the stuff of course and then there's the stuff within the stuff which becomes very very interesting in a moment I'm going to be showing you the monocoque the all steel monocoque structure but of course the part that now you don't see is all the flanging which is actually the thing doing half the work and here it is being made transported from Germany dropped into Bournemouth but the flanges the force field of the stuff is now hidden by the very elegant glass room plaster oh before I forget the magic of the gadget being a child of the period of the Second World War and of England where we're all boffins and guys that go into huts and fiddle around with funny things it goes back over years and years it goes back to Victoria in time we love these gadgets it goes to the period of the early robots it goes through David Green and his and a particular person I recommend to you who's the English cartoonist of the early part of the 20th century called William Heath Robinson whose constructions are bizarre and stupid and daft and sometimes horrific but they link in a curious way to the British high tech movement I'm inviting some keen potential PhD to trace that because it would be really fascinating I think but we live with gadgets all the time we use gadgets without even a thought and now the gadgets take on various forms that most people in this room don't quite know why they do what they do anymore some architects like to have gadgets so that their bedroom can go out into the rain I was actually sitting on the bed at the time when it started raining and by golly we pushed the button pretty damn fast and only yesterday we were in the Guggenheim looking at the wonderful piece of creative gadgetry of course and there are other people who are sending out gadgetry in their own ways and way back one of my first pieces of built work was a gadget opens when it's hot and shuts when it's cold not high level but gadgetry nonetheless and gadgetry is with us more and more even if sometimes we can't see it even if sometimes it's deliberately silly and lovely and it becomes an inspiration these are algae growing gadgets made into one of our Taiwan towers and later gadgets in the later tower and of course the kind of gadgetry that leads to something when we were doing the scoops in Australia we had to contrive we wanted deliberately that they weren't all the same that they were molded slightly differently but we had to keep within budget and so we put our cleverest person in the office onto the mass it took her about two months to get it sorted out how you could use a very minimum number of pieces of shuttering and still get the computer that made each scoop different we did also have to use some wonderful German patent movable shuttering so it's the gadget as a lead in to something oh, can't resist showing you things like this because some of the nicest projects we've done have been really bone ugly and deliberately so or I go to be an artist I don't look at all the serious stuff I try and find the silliest exhibit and I sometimes do drawings that have absolutely no purpose whether they lead anywhere and yes, lovely silly situate I love both the British press and the German press when Graz has built the blob, wonderful blob, you know and then God help us there was a conference about that time done in Frankfurt called blobmeister I loved it because blob, I mean blob, blob and meister, that is the meister of course there's this tremendous combination of the silly and the pompous and in fact because I have to explain that we have a great tradition of blobs in the UK the best blobs and we have, we used to I don't know what happened to him but we used to have this cartoon character it's a kid's character called Mr. Blobby I have appropriated him and we collect, yeah I was in Beijing and saw a very good example of a cat and I was in Valparaiso Chili and was photographing the kiosk I collect kiosks and was photographing the bloke who had no English and I certainly didn't have any whatever they speak, just Spanish and he brought, he saw me getting the camera up instead of doing what the lady did in the pink thing of diving away, he brought his dog up so that the dog would be photographed as the proprietor of the kiosk it wasn't a very good photograph but I sent it to my friend Tom Hennigan in Tokyo and he immediately sent this much better dog back in, in, in, who is of course a Japanese dog as proprietor of the kiosk there's another series which I haven't bothered you with this afternoon which is called People Who Wear Animals On Their Head which is another byway I don't think I got it but I have of course had periods myself doing dark things dark applied and sometimes happen we Gavin and I have a penchant for doing impossible competitions for which the prize money is less than what it costs to draw the thing and in no way is it going to be done this was a footbridge competition in Skopje God knows why we did it of course and I'm heavily into kiosks which I explain here and I said let's put a kiosk on the bridge you see think perfectly reasonable across the Britain newspaper ice cream and then Gavin said hey why don't we make the kiosk move at which point I said hey why don't we put a bar on the top of the moving kiosk on the bridge which has legs that come down at a certain time in the afternoon so kids can buy a choc ice underneath and somebody can go up a sliver bits and look at the Poxy River bit got down there and of course I was showing this about the year later in Japan of all places suddenly a voice that was not Japanese at the back said they built a concrete one and he came from Skopje we knew they were going to build it I mean this is the darkness I knew all the time they were going to build a concrete one there was no way they were going to but I keep I keep with it because somebody somewhere should build a bridge with a kiosk that moves and has a bar on it and this is my policy for the last god knows how many years it lasted 8 or 10 years whatever 9 years old I still trot it out in every lecture that I can remotely make an excuse for it being in because somebody out there somebody's got a parent and Beijing or whatever hell it might be that wants a kiosk that moves I guarantee I believe it I'm getting near the end not quite near the end and one other thing my wife says that as I get older I get more interested you can't teach for nearly 50 years without noticing people I think and even in early projects of the 70s early 80s whatever one was interested in associating certain type of person with a certain kind of environment and a certain piece of the town and another type of people in a different kind of environment in a different piece of the town and so on when we did the competition for the Vienna building law faculty I did a couple of cartoons one of which this one on the left suggests that a university doesn't have to be a deadly place that you could have my reading of Vienna's life particularly that Vienna's life which I know well that could go on in a university you see and when we won the competition and built it we kept the notion of these as I described earlier in our flowing spaces we kept them in the project unfortunately I can't get a slide with anybody doing anything in there you can kind of make the space but they don't seem to be doing anything nothing going on there at all it's all going on outside sometimes you have a situation this was the competition to do a cultural area a cultural zone in Gold Coast anybody who knows Gold Coast knows that it's actually its cultural scene is this they're not big on opera and stuff like that they're not big on reading books in fact there's no book shop in a city of half a million there's only a book shop that sells sort of cookery books very weird anyhow but we tried to make it chirpy nonetheless but we're getting into safer territory or more contentious territory was being invited to take part in a competition for an architecture school because you have to remember that when one did grants I had actually been the director of the Institute of Canary Arts I had run a thing called Artnet I knew about hanging exhibitions crates and programs that come late people who have a fit hanging something on a wall and I did know a little bit about architecture schools by the time we came to do this and Gavin who'd been to several including GSD and other places so we were mostly when we were discussing the project we were really using anecdote you know that funny corridor at UCLA which goes above the crit room but you don't have to go in that's not a bad idea you know that funny corner they got down in the basement you know the room at the A that's the thing the one behind you know Koopa's big room that's not a bad idea that's not a bad idea and it really well you'll see it's had quite a sensible plan but it sort of grew from anecdotal information and it grew so that it could in fact for large parts of it the students create the conglomeration themselves and a lot of it is based on anecdotes such as this as an old teacher I observe how the pompous young faculty can put the student in a nervous state and there's Barbara her hand shaking and Joe, her friend is already nervous and Fred has a typical barking situation has a wonderful electronic thing but with working last Thursday will almost certainly not work on this occasion and then when you just come off the durian you're going down to have a quick drink the faculty member can run you it's got it working you go back and then it stopped working and this is a typical situation and it is in fact based exactly on truth there is Barbara in Siam with her papers in her hand nervously commenting or trying to deal with a smart ass young faculty comment the young faculty as is very common in the US of A it's more interested in making an impression upon other members of the faculty not particularly interested in the project but they can be good I suspected I might hit A here's another you have to bear in mind that Gold Coast is a half a million people with even suburbs called surface paradise it's the best beaches in Australia and it is unlikely that all the members of the school community are actually in the building and here's a typical situation nice to see in the building tools and the important thing here architecture is to deal with alternative means of escape and having if you're more particularly if you're the director of the school you are the one that most needs the means of escape you see some be incredibly boring heading in your direction God help you you need a second notice you don't have a very good means of space you're too democratic it's very important both for cat and for mouse here's another one which I was able to quite nice because sometimes I did 25 of these cartoons not all of which I'm trying and it was interesting after we built the building I could find actual situations here's a typical situation is poor guy he doesn't really he doesn't stand a chance with a girl in the corner but you know it's an excuse for opening up studios to each other and indeed I found a dark haired girl sorry I keep pressing on a dark haired girl there she is in pretty much the location that I had imagined you have to be it's Australia and so there's always a bottle of wine and situations which we know well but this is really encouragement to the faculty to make sure it was a 24 7 20 condition a little bit of flattery to the jury to suggest to suggest that there might be people passing through for Princeton and of course as we know from visiting critics they're always somewhere tomorrow night's plain but it was flattering and the key thing about the building is that it captures light and in Queensland you get some wonderful light you have to capture it but you also have to protect the interior from the light and another thing which is happening is that the building is being used by the whole university as a kind of quote unquote venue as we predicted you can certainly see the guy with the teeth fully enjoying the facility or here's a wonderful one because I had my cartoon was really again sending out faculty saying this poor guy here's the poor guy who's mortgaged his house 50 something maybe mortgaged maybe 60 something mortgaged his house to do a master's degree listening to oh you guys have to accept the point of departure and then I'm caught with the exact same the same gestural movement the life of it takes art I think and we capture the light and then there's the proud of the building coming forward always of course it's Australia and they're very health and safety consciously the amateurs such as myself it's impossible to photograph anything without a hydrant booster or to this wonderful place lots of other lots of other conditions I'll just mention the one on the left it's important as a teacher to pretend that you find everything interesting here are two young faculty members trying to have a sort of afternoon in the sun and this guy come I thought you might find this interesting it is not remotely interesting but the trick is to pretend that you do find it interesting otherwise a guy might be done for the next 10 years and this is happening on the terrace condition the building designs itself in the sense that we have an east west oops the path runs east west the scoops articulate the path of different scoops and form the primary structure to the north which remember it's a hot site in Australia we put the smaller rooms the toilets and the stairs and the faculty rooms and the research rooms and the studios go gently down the hill and then this is the terrace condition that we saw the guy with the piece of wood standing outside it's a very simple direct plan when all is said and done here are the scoops in action and a cast back to the similar conditions that we managed to incorporate into the Vienna building on the right the students in fact create their own spaces really within and the captain of the ship that moves out into the front of course but one of the underlying interests in our I think both Gavin and I we don't like sort of there you are, there it is full-front architecture we enjoy things that are hinted at, that are glimpsed I think it comes back to that landscape drawing in a way the notion that there might be this is I think a very gothic condition and you have wonderful light there that you can make it with and then west the west is finally lighting down the street and the old cartoon from the competition stage is also really a statement too which is much of the business of designing after the initial thoughts they have the basic idea very quickly within the first day or so but the tweaking and the tweaking and the tweaking and the tweaking and the tweaking that's what makes it really come alive I move back to Bournemouth and the blue building my first piece of architecture in England really very much in absolutely straightforward building it is a studio therefore you study the north light you look at the studio tradition both particularly Belgium and some parts of London and the main orifice is in fact in that tradition it's just simply a studio north facing studio light that is tilted so that you are not distracted by anything happening at ground up you only see some of the indigenous pine trees which are very much important to Bournemouth and it sits in a small cleft within a very tight packed little campus and in the computer rendition we are already anticipating the kind of light conditions that happen and in an early drawing I don't do in this case cartoons per se but the cartoons are there and I report on that later of the types of people who are typically to be found in that university many of them local many of them getting into doing art pieces late in life specialised in that some who are not particularly interested but just some nicer ways to be others who are trying desperately to intellectualise others who are of course great and people who have been itching to be there all their lives and this is the reality of the situation poignantly opened by Zaha she was the opener building and died a week later it's the last time I saw her just before I leave by the way in case you haven't noticed I quite like colour it comes from the period of Archigram through to later times sometime very silly but they're not projects really they're drawings where you try out a whole lot of funny bits and pieces ideas that might crop up in something built later so the dreams go in and out of reality and colour can happen and can be very ridiculous sometimes so at the moment we have been asked to do another building on the same campus I can't show you much of it but there's a sort of hint something's going on there and it's to be deliberately so small you can't really see what's it's actually the fabrication laboratory the fab lab which we are making have certain robotic overtones to be you'll know in a few months when it starts being published looking at Bournemouth again sometimes in the pine trees doing a fairly large project in the middle of a giant tower two floors of a giant tower in Mumbai seems to now be happening but it's been taking ages to get going it's in lots of exhibitions at the moment and a weird one I don't know whether there's a psychiatrist in the house but why do I like noses I don't know you will forgive me finally for a quick piece of advertising thank you I'm starting to be speechless right when some of us have themes others have concepts but Peter has dreams and dreams are completely open-ended and this is what has fascinated me what you did tonight the open-endedness of every one of the theme you brought including the one of the highly holds find that as an architectural concept but also how towards the end you become serious and you say look at the light and it shows you show a cartoon then you show a drawing a plan real plan which is the cartoon is somehow irreverent but the plan is extremely elegant and then the built part is extraordinary because of what you then say you have to massage it you have to bring it into the light and here I discover a completely different side of you right the very sophisticated architectural builder and I'm excited about that so in reality we could have several conversations and I thought this morning that the conversation that we might have is what would it be to be Peter Cook today and let me try to bring five themes and then each of these five themes will become a question to Peter and Peter will respond whichever way he wants so let me start with the first theme you in the mid sixties in the middle of a rather conservative corporate architecture scene you and some of your friends Cedric Yonah Friedman and a few others invent a new and different form of practice you don't fit into a mold you don't fit into a precedent and that type of practice is interesting because at the same time it's like a social commentary second point architecture is generally fairly straightforward you have square meters you have office space you have living rooms you have theaters and cinemas and town halls and you guys start to think of walking cities plug-in cities instant cities the word city by the way is interesting but rock plugs you invent programs and I was happy to see that you haven't stopped right you'll scop your foot bridge the kiosk that moves with a bow on it is very much a continuation of this thing of saying no the architect is not simply a service provider as the AIA tells us but it's also someone who invents what we may need remember Cedric and his various artifacts thinking of the poetry it's an invention third point drawing you cannot think without drawing in such a way that it allows you to think in the direction you want to think all your melting all your slithering and your metaphor fosing requires a certain way of drawing or maybe it's the other way around is the way you draw that allows you to invent each of these quite extraordinary mode of not only of representation but of what the ideas are about and here I see something unbelievably important is the relationship between the thought and the way you draw I'll come back to that fourth point one needs somehow to have how can I say an outlet you have to do propaganda in a way for your ideas so you invent a vehicle called Archigram which is a media a media magazine in other words it's inventing also the mode of distribution of the ideas very important today in our days of fake news and my final point will be about education or my final question as in many ways you have been what would call the meister since you used that word of education because you have in a way taught many many of us so if you allow me now to go back to this very five very serious point the first one and I'm thinking very much of this audience which is also very aware of the fact that it's not the the profession as a friend of my filmmaker called the professionals of the profession I'm not quite the one that invent what it is and so how did you guys knew in particular because you were also a bit of a catalyst decided that there was a niche or a major piece of action that was possible without using any of the recipes or of the formulas that were coming in the day or today the same thing happens I think there's a simple one simple thing was that I and Ron in particular had read a lot about the period of Brinidad and the magazine Fröhlich and the the letters and I suppose it's also something to do with a taste for the expressionist stream of European architecture rather than the rational stream and those guys were similarly crazy they were in a difficult point in history I think 1920 and they weren't being given any work they just had ideas and they exchanged ideas there was a certain camaraderie I think there's as soon as we I think one of the strengths maybe it's not answering your question though is that the group dippered over 10 years in age no two from the same architecture school no two with the same taste in this set and the next thing but I think there was that so there was that as a memory there was a sort of now defunct tradition of the avant-garde that if you could make a pronouncement and you had to publish it yourself you had to draw it yourself and staple it together yourself on somebody's bicycle yourself there was a fact there's always a way of communicating I was of course one of those spotty children who used to make sort of magazines when I was a school kid I used to invent magazines I believe Peter Eisenin did the same thing about football okay let's not go down the route but I think there will always be a medium we wanted to have colour in Archeagram 1 so we made a potato print which was the cheapest way of getting a red dot there's always a way there's always a way you know I think that had we now the Japanese make Archeagram knickers and t-shirts had we known how to print onto knickers we would have done it there's always some sort of way you can do it by baking a cake writing a placard or making a movie or wearing funny shoes I think it's just that most of us I think the architectural professionals trade you only do things in a certain sort of way you only speak when you're spoken to kind of attitude yeah but my point is that you invent the goals that you're trying to achieve and trying to fulfill some requirements that has been determined by quote-quote society or the profession you invent it as you go along and that's what I thought was fascinating in your in your talk is that you even go to the point that you do a drawing and you don't quite know where you're going as you're going within it they're the most interesting ones that end up looking like you thought they would you're probably bored by them halfway through because you're actually drawing in order to find out you're not necessarily drawing in order to demonstrate I think that's an essential difference so can I ask do you choose the title of the drawing before or after or it all depends very often before because that tells you a direction but doesn't tell you how how it tells you what you're trying to do and then do you change the title when the building is it has been known it has been known it has been known also for one to do a drawing and then think of a very smart title about 20 years later there is actually a caption on something I changed the title of something yesterday morning in tweaking the slate considerably tweaking the later I decided I thought why haven't I ever called it that and that was the the Tel Aviv Tower with the kites on it I wanted something to explain and I've never called it that now it will take that title but only since yesterday because suddenly there's kite that picture of the kites explains what those things were inside that I'd be niching to try and describe you see? Yeah do you know what I find interesting is that everyone is going to get to the third question but we've we already addressed it on the first and the second one which is drawing you draw by hand what a strange thing to do right you know I could have people raise their hand how many of you draw with their hand right? not too bad could be better tell me how do you do the cover I still use the airbrush sometimes I use they've stopped selling Prismacolor in the United Kingdom I have to raid college shops or whatever I have to buy them and I'm here each time I use watercolor more and more watercolor I find increasingly controllable I'm much better at watercoloring now than I was when I was a student or even 25 years ago I'm much more confident but it's quite quick and then occasionally I get somebody to color it for me but very very rarely and occasionally something gets put onto a computer in this color but that's very very very rare is that the sort of balance you wanted? oh that's exactly me I mean it seems to me very very obvious you use a crane sometimes you use watercolor sometimes you use an airbrush and sometimes you use a different crane I can discuss paper types with you it does actually make a big difference yeah that's not tonight it'll come well there's an aspect which I can't resist which is the business of the Heatho I remember he finally admitted that he could use a computer which is when we were working on a competition Christina and I and CJ and I said I wish somebody could just knock that up in that wireframe just so we could see what it's doing he said I'll go upstairs and do it and I never knew he could use a computer and there are times when but on the other hand I think the F I do not I was not a great drawer at school I draw I drew with difficulty I found tricks gradually get and there are things I can't draw can't draw trees and dogs and all that stuff but there is a business of having to fight the drawing that makes you really have to think about what you're drawing particularly turning corners things like turning corners bits where there's a lot of twisting going on or something you have to how the hell can I sweat over it and in the process of the sweating you've really given it a lot of thought whereas if you just press a button it goes there it is okay now let me tell you why I asked you about camera what fascinated me today because I saw many more photographs of your actual buildings than I had seen before that they are buildings which you would not do in that way if you were using the computer I think that you know when you add a certain number of rods in front of the windows in different directions you use a device and a technique which is the one that comes from your drawings when you use colors in the buildings you also do it in a way that you wouldn't do it if you were using a software and that's what interests me in other words the extent to which the mode of representation that you use has actually a major effect on the building you did and I'd like you to talk more about that yeah I mean there was a and you will remember this too there was a period at the AA when they sort of the Dalable Vasily people would draw everything very soft but they couldn't actually quite touch the edge of things I on the other hand have always been fascinated by the actual edge and therefore I still quite like the fact that if I do an ink drawing I fill the color to the edge of the ink rather than making the edge of the color though strictly speaking if you have a kind of plastic or whatever you don't have a line at the edge but I'm interested in the contained containment I wonder if that's the difference I'd say the building has a line at the edge yes it doesn't fade away so easily but it doesn't have a articulation of that it just does stop and I think I've been fast I have tried doing sort of soft edged drawings but they always irritate me afterwards another funny thing about drawings not quite about the color but I was a very grubby pencil drawer as a student in Bournemouth where everything was done in pencil I had to buy harder and harder and harder pencils I was buying 980s not because I liked them but because I got so grubby with anything softer not to the A it was ink and that was great because then I could stop so maybe my satisfaction with the ink drawing that suddenly I'd discover something where I could be I could get what I wanted that then becomes a post-rationalization I mean there's a very funny thing about color and the pompadou center the the plug-in city drawings originally were colored in those green and yellow and red and so on for a kind of color coding the shops are in yellow the tubes are in green that is in red but it became subconsciously it became preferred palette that started off as a coding palette that's a funny one and there are other things about color that are very personal I love using orange now but I couldn't use orange for about 35 years because the generation ahead of me my teachers, my provincial teachers all used a certain kind of gray military gray and orange it was very fashionable in the 50s or something and therefore me as the next generation would rather be seen dead than using their colors there are all sorts of funny layers about color and you get bored with certain colors and you appropriate colors that other people traded it's a subject because it's been so what really saddens me is that so many really good architects are scared of color I mean Enrique Marias who I think is one of the most genius people I've ever known but he didn't have a color sense at all actually crappy color sense absolutely fantastic architect it makes me sad I wonder why I didn't like because I think it's not considered proper to like you're kind of immediately thought of sort of flimflam I'll continue with the mode of representation and the way one thinks you probably remember very well when in London two groups of people you were not part of either of them there was a distinction between a group that called themselves the Nine Age and the other one called themselves the 6B I don't know if you all know the difference in terms of the type of lead that a pencil can do and they were ideologically extremely opposed to one another and would not talk to one another I can't remember the 6B people okay I don't know I had to invent it to make my argument so the although I know who they were you know Dalibor would have been a 6B right we have there are a few sort of heroes this person we mentioned Dalibor Vasily was a called a Czech surrealist right we arrived in London at a time when major political changes were happening in his place where he lived the point that the next point I was going to ask you about but I think we've somehow touched upon was indeed the media one of the things that I remember you the big thing about media is distribution how do you actually get to disseminate all those fantastic things you've printed and how do we today we have you can have a blog you can have Facebook but I remember you walking with dozens of magazines under your arm and distributing them to bookstores or to friends or to schools and bringing a sort of somehow it was like belonging to a secret society those who had the last issue of Archigram and that was incredibly desirable I heard about you in a Berlin bookstore that was it looked different from your average architectural magazine which by the way after so many years haven't changed they do the same thing over and over again okay so any comments on that yes I have a comment from this morning I observing my lovely wife doing Facebook so well like natural Facebooker and I watched her so long I thought fuck it I only joined in two weeks ago and this morning I wanted to put some stuff on and I realised that I'm instinctively wanting to use it like a magazine so I tried to put in a kind of large red letters and various things and it wouldn't I don't know maybe I'm not good enough I wouldn't do it and it only has this boring sort of standard lettering you're meant to make a comment then you're going to make a comment but you know remembering that really interesting things you look at picture merged into the words big words, red words a bleep words balloon words like I wanted to use it I guess there are tricks of doing it basically making an artwork and then calling it a photograph in other words it forces you down a rather commonplace means of communication you have the photo, the friendly comment or the bit of text which is pretty limited so although the medium is amazing it's out there the actual quality of the thing what you are looking at tends to be homogeneity, tends to be banal everybody does photos of their friends everybody does a sort of four line a six line or whatever it's a bit boring if it was a magazine it would go out of business but that's not the point I know it's not the point but my answer is based on this morning I'm sitting after I've done the last I've got done enough tweaking of this lecture so I thought right let's go back on the Facebook and it's very boring I mean I'll go on with it but it doesn't it's not a joy to look at and I think that's terribly sad does that sort of answer well it does sort of answer a question you'll have to do it last point last point you have been involved with architectural education for forever and you know there's a statement that says that if you want to learn about something you teach if you were to try to say what have you learned over these years architecturally in terms of what you got through teaching what would it be I think I've learned more about people about architecture I have a horrible suspicion that I probably could if I'd been privileged enough to spend the same amount of time now I would have earned money I don't know just looking at buildings I would know more about architecture but I was looking about people because a lot of the processes that you go through with students is not about where you put the staircase on which book you should read it's actually about how you can get that poor bugger to stop being neurotic or whatever it might be stop drawing with their foot or whatever I think I've learned a lot about people but they happen to be mostly student people faculty people and then do you learn about a year it's a relatively small handful who have been fascinating people I've watched become very interesting architects but they are tiny number tiny number sorry to be a bit down on that one I should be saying you're all marvelous and of course you all have great architecture in your soul and body but it's not true what I've watched you to be able to do is to get an incredible amount of work from your students yeah but you have to know the student you have to know the student the trick is to get to know the student I loved one of the processes I loved doing particularly at the bar was interviewing looking at portfolios and the trick was not it's like when you go in an apartment and you know they're an architect so you know there's going to be a copy of SMXL on the shelf in fact be odd if there wasn't just be odd if there wasn't a refrigerator so you don't even look at it but then there's suddenly a funny book about toads or something in the corner and I've been fascinated in portfolios you know yeah they've done Germans all built the same and if they English there's lots of scruffy things at the back just look at the somewhere there will be something that's a bit odd even if it's the way they tie the portfolio together or they've used some funny clip or there are photographs of mushrooms or something and you get in on it and say you're into mushrooms and then where did you grow up and they say I grew up in Zagreb and then you start talking to them about mushrooms in Zagreb and then you're getting a little bit of a story okay this is this sort of person and I love that I love that because then you can work with it and I think when I was doing the GSD a couple of years ago it was my students told me I was the first person that had actually talked to them about them maybe it's that kind of a place where nobody talks about them about them but I was really interested not only because I mean it was more boring than not knowing about them but then four weeks down the line you know something's having boyfriend trouble somebody's trying to get an Australian passport somebody else has likes a particular kind of coffee and then you find that you can sort of talk about how I turn a corner or sort of on the back of it I really think it's integral it's integral with that to do with the people I could go on forever but just listening to you I may also try remind the audience that Peter is a fantastic writer and that's another part of your activity but we won't touch upon that but you just write about the thing is to write as if you were talking I can't research I can't keep notes on things that's why I always get I have a lovely time with my publisher changing the date of things but you said it was 1992 in that I said why I was around 1990 why does it say 1993 on the drawing I said well yeah okay that'll do like the thing this morning the kite tower now it's the kite tower I shall pretend that it was always the kite tower I don't care about it before I conclude with a serious conclusion I'm sure there are plenty of questions in the audience for Peter Hi, thank you one of the first drawings you talked about it wasn't about the technology on Archeagram drawings but it was about romanticism and for nowadays generation as we are starting what do you think it should be what should we look at and think about more in a romantic way what should we look at nowadays I think where I use romantic is very close to the sort of dreaming thing you say okay the obvious thing to do with this is that but what else could it be and what else could that be if it was that it's like playing it's like speculating it's like dreaming but when I applied it to the plug-in city drawing the point I was making was that in our day job at Taylor Woodrow we were actually working on precast concrete for housing they didn't do any but we were working on it and I wanted to be brought up as a child of ethos of prefabrication extremely valid now but it always ended up looking boring you felt well you know repeat units don't have to be they can be folded and massaged and turned on themselves and picked in and picked out they still would have the logic of the components and it started as that so it became plug-in city had kind of molehills and crevices and if you look at the drawing it's deliberately not there it goes but it's deliberately molding because the components could do that actually might seem like a random question but do you prefer drawing in the mornings or in the evenings I'm a morning person I'm married to a lady who's a night time person and if I'm writing or drawing my ideal time now I'm probably getting a bit slower I probably don't get up till about eight but my ideal time for writing or drawing would have been about seven six thirty seven in the morning and on competitions in the past I now have people sort of working all night and I merrily trot at home but I would be the person who would go to about eleven at night because I just I'm useless even as a student I did one all nighter in fifth year and I was out for about a week it was totally comfortable so I'm somebody who starts competitions very early I spend weeks and I hate the last minute rush but I'm best in the mornings I can write a thousand twelve hundred words before ten o'clock in the morning then it's downhill and I'm still this is a digression but I'm still I'm the generation to enjoy it having a proper lunch and nobody seems to have a proper lunch anymore it's terribly tragic a proper lunch would mean that you were not in a condition to anything very much till about four o'clock again but then you might have another burst you see so if you've done quite a lot by about eleven thirty in the morning twelve then you have proper lunch then you don't do anything till about four and you have about a two hour and then you watch TV or whatever the hell you do and then you might do one more hour and you still get to bed fairly early with a good scotch and then that that that I think that's quite a long working day actually it's hyper it's really intense when you're doing it there's none of this sort of which I notice in a lot of commercial offices everybody's in front of the screen they might be sort of God knows what they're watching and they they have their lunch in the office they have this terrible sandwich and the screen is still on and they look as if they're working in fact they're watching rubbish or they're mindless or watching football but the point is to be seen to be at work this is something that's grown up I think in the last twenty thirty years it's a terrible terrible thing to be seen to be at work but I think four really good hours proper lunch pissed or otherwise probably not pissed and then you know a proper another three hour go at it wow that's value for money and it's intense and you've got the energy to do it and your brain and lunch can be a proper lunch can be a marvelous time when you discuss ideas when you with a couple of cronies and you're having this idea and that idea and stupid ideas and stuff and then it molds and then and then wow back again you talking to the audience you wouldn't have thought that coming to Columbia would be a way to learn about what I told you at the beginning you are a social commentator thoughts even in your work and especially in the work and I think I was really fascinated by the consistency over the years in other words the theme that you bring the dreams are recurrent and they evolve and they evolve now from something that came probably from indeed the early avant-garde to build dreams which I think are extraordinarily beautiful and congratulations Peter thank you