Peter Cook – City Landscapes

With his visionary ideas and fantastical, imaginative, and colorful drawings, British architect Peter Cook has profoundly influenced and helped shape architecture and architectural thinking for almost six decades.

Since the 1960s, British avant-garde architect and professor Sir Peter Cook (b. 1936) have used drawing as the primary medium to express his alternative and often fantastical ideas and visions.

Cook has seen but a relatively small number of his buildings actually erected – including the Kunsthaus Graz in Austria, inaugurated in 2003 and quickly nicknamed “the friendly alien.” However, it is first and foremost the theoretical field of architecture that has been of interest to him: the question of what architecture can and must do and thus also the potential that lies in what Cook himself describes as the architect’s most important tool, namely drawing.

The most precise expression for future visions and the best way to discuss these are through drawing, says Peter Cook. It is precisely here, on paper, that there is the most excellent chance of moving away from the prevailing notions of cities and ways of life – detached from the demands and obligations that lie in thinking of concrete solutions and materials.

He has thus, to a large extent, remained a so-called “Paper Architect” – a general term for the theoretical thinkers, who from their studio desk have managed to influence architecture and institute new directions.

Outcrop House by Peter Cook