Peter Cook

Lecturing at MIT yesterday… A very animated Peter Cook (part of Archigram with Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Green, Ron Herron and Mike Webb) gave a presentation of his project, the Kunsthaus in Graz, Austria. In line with the experiments and claims of the group, the Kunsthaus explores the notion of skin. Beneath a first layer of plastic sheets, cheap bathrooms light (and this explains why Peter Cook calls this building “CRAP-tech” as of high-tech :) can be programmed by artists. It is an experiment I find very close to the one by Raphael Lozano-Hemmer – Vectorial Elevation, Relational Architecture 4 – although in the later, everyone – and not only artists – with an Internet connection could modify the face of architecture: people from anywhere in the world could log onto the project website, change in plan the configuration of spotlights, so the plaza would be illuminated differently every equal time span. Technology is changing the very skin of buildings. The Kunsthaus is kinetic, but not in a mechanical sense.

Some few quotes (and comments in [] and ()) of yesterday’s lecture:

“The Shadow House was a project against the “in-your-face” kind of architecture, like post-modern architecture.” (Isn’t the Kunsthaus in your face?)
“A primary aspect of the building is its theatricality. It is not quite what it looks like.” You’ll find “The mutant elements [2 in fact] of the skin” “Places where the skin melts”
“The SKIN and the PIN” (concept)
“The building sits like a slug in the city.”
“I also like the other aspect of nonchalance [showing people from a side street] discovering [the protuberance] like a bum hanging off a chair.”