The City, Seen as a Garden of Ideas

Peter Cook is a founder of Archigram, a collaboration of six architects known for architecture through drawing. The first public forum for Archigram was the "Living City" exhibition of 1963, in which their ideas were initially directed against formal convention and toward loose and free associations. Subjects of inquiry were pop culture and new and advanced technology. Some of the most important projects were Plug-In City, Walking City, Cushicle, and Instant City. In more recent projects on his own, such as the Green, Yellow, Red, and Blue Houses, Cook transformed his theoretical concerns into more pragmatic building projects. Yet Archigram's concerns, especially the romance of high technology, remain inherent. The City, Seen As a Garden of Ideas is a survey of Cook's career-long project to reinvigorate the city as we know it. A series of meditations on contemporary urban conditions in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Edinburgh, and Santa Monica, this volume also functions as an informal memoir, at once lyrical and trenchant, in which Cook reveals the influences and motivations behind his seminal works and recent projects. Included among the projects are housing at Lutzowplatz, Berlin; the winning competition design for the museum at Bad Deutsches Altenberg, Austria (both in collaboration with Christine Hawley); and the winning competition design for the Kunsthaus, a museum in Graz, Austria (in collaboration with Colin Fournier). Finally, a collection of projects and texts created especially for this monograph completes this compelling presentation of Cook's work.