Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Oslo Patch
Peter Cook
The historical trail blazed by the Archigram group (Peter Cook,
Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, David Green and Warren
Chalk, plus Michael Webb) through the 1960s and 1970s was
duly recognised and honoured in 2004 by the award of the
RIBA Gold Medal of that year. However, Peter Cook has also
pursued, perhaps as a separate vein of intellectual therapy or
maybe of inspiration, his own trail of engagement with
buildings in the landscape, running parallel to the great
Archigram arc in the sky. Though extremely interesting, this
work has seldom been exposed to a public dazzled by the
instant Walking Cities, such as Ron Herron’s Cities Moving
and Cook’s Plug-in City (both 1964), as well as Dennis
Crompton’s Computer City (1965). But where was the actual
landscape, Cook seems uniquely, and privately, to have asked?
Somewhat hidden from posterity, there emerged from Cook
a project simply entitled Mound (1964). Cook here followed a
clear brief, to sink the building into the ground, as a multi-use
centre, covered with grass banks. The brief included ‘open
space’, designated external high-up recreational space with a
coffee shop, plaza, shopping malls, a cinema/auditorium, ad
infinitum as the grass grew overhead. It was, of course, plugged
into a monorail, with a station on level 5, and was inherently
as inward looking as the Archigram projects had been
extrovert and attention seeking. But this was not the mood of
the time, however advanced and prescient of contemporary
trends the scheme has turned out to be.
His Sponge City project (1974) was another attempt at the
philosophy of the building as landscape, or the building as
enveloped by natural site coverage. This was presented more
dramatically, and exhibited at the privately sponsored ‘Art
Net’ centre (1975) in central London, which Cook developed
largely due to his chagrin at not being appointed director of
the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Six panels, each 5 metres
(16 feet) long and 2 metres (6.5 feet) high were conjoined in a
blaze of coloured relief. Sponge City was, of course, influenced
by Cook’s teachings during the 1970s at the Architectural
Association, where students such as Will Alsop, influenced by
Cedric Price, and later by Alvin Boyarsky, were beginning to
search out a more ‘organic’ community than had been
portrayed by the mechanistic Archigram dreams now of a
decade earlier.
Sponge City represented a dramatic new intervention by
Cook in contemporary thinking about cities and their
fragments. However prescient and predictive of the directions
that land–site–building might follow over the next 30 years, it
was constructed in the realisation of Cook’s own theories,
anticipating first and foremost community living, up to seven
storeys high, nestling in a lush and accommodating
earthscape. What Cook defined as ‘the Sponge condition’ was
clearly articulated in plan, with a skin, orifices, ‘gunge’
openings, areas of elasticity and an articulate inner core
structure with elevators and a ‘latch-on’ arrangement
between hard-core elements and soft sponge surrounds
designed to incorporate ‘nests’ with the latch-on. Two high
mounds were integrated within the ‘Sponge’, overlapping and
incorporating remnant arched colonnades (possibly for
historical memory traces) and quasi-classical fenestration. The
elevation also included a collage, descriptive of ‘lifestyles’ and
realised electronically in billboard form.
No other late 20th-century design exercise better opened
up the potential of ‘site/non-site’ – by then a main area of
interest for artists such as Robert Smithson. Sponge City was
an environmental projection that was also quite clearly
divergent from conventional thinking – even tangential
beyond the pure Archigram mode – in which Cook was
exploring and forecasting the many possible ways in which
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