But there aren’t many people bold enough to nail their colours to the mast. RG So do you think there is a place for that today? Reading things like the Futurist Manifesto we saw that avant-garde movements in Europe from 1920 onwards had used publications and manifestos as a natural adjunct to having ideas about things. But it shouldn’t be a formal magazine it should be a gram - like a telegram or an aerogram or something. We somehow got to know each other, and at some point said we should put together some sort of broadsheet. There was the younger group and an older group, and we were part of a series of people who met in each other’s flats after graduating from a number of different schools. RG So what was your original mission, with the publication of Archigram Magazine? We never said who the ‘them’ were, but we knew who we meant in the sense it was the general plodding reactionaries. During the period of Archigram, I remember Ron Heron and I would do a scheme and say ‘this will upset them’. PC I think you can be stroppy through what you do, rather than being a stroppy person. RG And has that been true throughout your career, avoiding being stroppy, which is something that architects can often be? I wasn’t a stroppy student, I was quite well behaved. I was so keen on the subject that if they said copy that sheet of ornament, I might have thought ‘why are we doing this?’ But I still did it. I was a Modernist before I became an architecture student, and then had to back track. I got to Corbusier, and then suddenly went to this local school that was doing old churches, so that was a bit strange. Already from the age of about 14 I’d been going to the public library, taking out books about architecture. We went and measured up churches and used piece of lead to go around tracery. So we were taught to draw the five orders of architecture using dividers. We were the last school still doing an École des Beaux-Arts programme. Before I went to the AA, I studied at an architecture department which was a very tiny part of Bournemouth Art College. RG So those observations were essentially about a place, rather than an objectified view of architecture… And all that was repeated, so I realised there was a discernible kit of parts for a medium to large provincial British town. And then there would be a large municipal park, in which I would spend a lot of my time. And then there would be a dingy part of town which is where the gasworks was, to the east of the town due to the prevailing wind. Almost all provincial towns I lived in had a big road, a tree lined road with posh houses on it, which was usually the London road. Living in several towns, I became familiar with the idea of the town. I remember a little bit later, maybe when I was perhaps 10 or 12, hustling my parents to take me to see Roman towns, which were usually a heap of stones in the corner of a field. I mean I saw old castles and Italianate villas and cathedrals and Roman remains. RG What about contemporary architects at the time. But there was no architecture in the family. The other was with moving from town to town as we did, I was always fascinated by townscape etchings things like ‘York Prospect from the West’ that you still get in old pubs, and I started to copy or do my own versions of them. PC During the Second World War, because my father had been put in charge of requisitioning buildings for the army as a professional soldier, I saw all these Italianate villas in the British Midlands. Can you explain what was going on in 1944/45, when you were turning eight, that inspired you to become an architect? Rob Gregory When I was 8 years old I decided that I wanted to become an architect, when the Faber Dumas building was new and when the Pompidou being built. Whereas if you go and do mathematics or archaeology, you are more limited. There are not a lot of things that somehow don’t pertain, which I think appeals to a certain kind of kid. There is an endless list of things that are germane to architecture. You can dabble in social observation and logistics. You can dabble in sociology, you can dabble in art. Peter Cook Architecture as a pursuit is a very enjoyable pursuit. Video: Peter Cook is the subject of this month’s Innovators interview, produced in partnership with Hunter DouglasĪR Innovators - Peter Cook from The Architectural Review
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