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Peter Cook / Spacelab: William Tozer, ‘The Friendly Alien,’
Monument, issue 60
(April/May 2004): 46–52.
[Copyright image removed. Refer print version in UCL library.]
Visiting the Bartlett in London to interview Chair of the School of Architecture
, Peter Cook about
the Kunsthaus project that he and Spacelab collaborator Colin Fournier have recently
completed, it is immediately clear that Cook and his Archigram lineage have exerted a
fundamental and enduring influence upon the school. The lobby houses an exhibition of work in
progress from a current design unit, which the wall text explains, ‘investigates the hybrid realm
of design and making towards defining alternative modes of practising architecture’. The objects
that the students have installed in a derelict building suggest the persistence of a design
methodology of constructing fantastical mechanisms and devices, which has its origin in the
work of Archigram.
‘I’ve never seen any dividing line between exploratory architecture and mainstream
architecture’, says Cook when asked how he places the Graz Kunsthaus in relation to his un-
built projects with Archigram and the work he has carried out and overseen at the Bartlett and
elsewhere in the intervening decades. ‘It’s all stuff which is build-able … It’s all realisable … I’ve
only done about 30 competitions and I’ve won five of them, but this is the only one to come out
of the ground. I see it less as research than simply as a building’. Reflecting upon the lack of
immediacy of a building project by comparison to a design studio, Cook points out that the Graz
Kunsthaus ‘happened relatively fast for a building of its size’ and remarks that the necessary
planning and building consents came through quickly. Observing a contrast with the speed
required by one of his other more frequent activities, exhibition design, he asserts that the time
frame ‘doesn’t surprise me and can be useful’. Reinforcing his belief in the connectedness of
the teaching and practise of architecture,
Cook asserts, ‘When I have a good year design-wise,
I know I’m better at teaching’.
Cook uses his new digital camera to explain his view on the futuristic appearance of the Graz
Kunsthaus. ‘It has to look as if it’s technologic. It emphasises the lens, although it doesn’t really
need to. Otherwise you might mistake it for your mobile phone’. He points out that in the face of
increasing similarity of objects such as cameras, phones, shavers, and music players, each ‘has
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to somehow announce what it is … I think we [architects] are in the mannerist business’. By this
logic, the futuristic appearance of Spacelab’s Kunsthaus can be seen as announcing not only its
difference in function from the surrounding buildings and the technical innovations it
incorporates, but also the technological ambitions of the architecture. Moreover, just as the
Archigram projects of the ’60s presented a bleak, post-Armageddon futurism, Spacelab’s vision
of the future is not the utopian brightly-lit cocoon proposed by the likes of fellow British
architects Future Systems. ‘My view is that they are sort of abstract architects and I don’t think I
am’, says Cook, claiming that while the Future Systems building for Selfridges in Birmingham is
an abstract object entirely alien to its context, the Kunsthaus in Graz is a ‘friendly alien’. ‘It’s an
alien which has actually grown out of the site’.
Walking around the Graz Kunsthaus and viewing its relationship to the buildings that
it sits
amongst, it is difficult not to concur with the sentiment of the ‘friendly alien’ label. Although
geometrically in stark contrast to the built surroundings, the Kunsthaus is sympathetic to the
overall scale of the existing context; the seemingly abstract envelope defers deftly to its
neighbours, ground-floor views from the building are carefully framed, and it could be argued
that the form establishes new relationships between the built form of
the city and the
morphology of the mountains and river that frame the site. Furthermore, the inflections in the
‘roof’ surface of the main body of the building—the ‘nozzles’ and spikes—recall, with a shift of
scale, the traditional devices for preventing snow and ice falling into the street
in large pieces,
as seen on some of the neighbouring roofs.
‘I think Frampton’s very reactionary’, says Cook, admitting to a degree of satisfaction in
challenging with a building Kenneth Frampton’s assertion in
Modern Architecture, A Critical
History, that the work of Archigram was not ‘capable of being realised and appropriated by
society’ and possessed ‘no … concern [for] social and ecological consequences’. However,
says Cook wryly, ‘I’m pretty sure he sees it as highly suspect. We’re part of the bubble group
now. We often find ourselves on the next page from Future System’. Cook’s remarks hint at
dissatisfaction with the attempts of critics to find a single coherent line through architectural
history and contemporary practise. Just as the work of Archigram does not sit comfortably within
Frampton’s view of the progression of modern architecture, it is flawed to group buildings
together by their superficial geometric similarities. Similarly, while a visual likeness can be easily
identified between the Graz Kunsthaus and Ron Herron’s 1964 Walking City project for
Archigram, Cook points out that the two architectural devices that the Spacelab building draws
from Archigram’s work are the nozzles and the travelator. The respective origins of these
elements are the 1963 Living City exhibition at the ICA where a view of Piccadilly Circus was
‘trapped’ through a tube, and a blacked-out staircase at an Archigram exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art in Oxford.
The overwhelming feeling that one experiences upon seeing the Graz Kunsthaus in person is
incredulity that this simultaneously complex and whimsical building can exist in the face of the
many and varied forces of conservatism that act upon the practise of architecture. Perhaps
more remarkable than the adventurousness of the client, architect, consultants and regulatory
bodies that has made the project possible, is the fact that while the bulbous and contorted form
of the building pulsates on the side of the river, whether utilising or passing by the building, the
city’s inhabitants appear to have already accepted the ‘friendly alien’ and are seemingly
oblivious to its strangeness.
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