![]() He was unable to put it down, ‘thrilled by how readable it is. Six months ago, Peter picked up Forster’s biography of Schinkel ‘when moseying around the bookshop in the architectural association close to the cathedral in Barcelona’. Kurt W Forster’s Schinkel: A Meander through his Life and Word That led to teaching there and a professorship in the 80s at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. This was cemented by a comment from James Stirling at a New Year’s party in the late 60s, that: ‘you ought to look at Germany’. Since writing his AA history thesis on Rudolf Schwarz, Cook has had ‘heavy leanings towards the Germanic – an attraction towards everything German’. ‘Pehnt was in the audience and had gone off expressionism, strongly disassociating himself from the book he wrote 45 years ago.’ Cook, though, has used it assiduously since buying it in 1974 with over 400 illustrations, it compiles images of the work of all the major expressionist proponents, including Bruno Taut, Hans Poelzig and Hans Scharoun. He chose Banham and Reisner selected Pehnt’s Expressionist Architecture. ![]() ![]() Wolfgang Pehnt’s Expressionist ArchitectureĪs part of the 2017 CRAB Studio exhibition that toured Hamburg, Cologne and Munich, Cook and Yael Reisner were invited to the Munich Library to talk about their favourite books. There are monographs in the back living room and ‘everything recent’ in the front room, which is now used as a study, but was his son Alexander’s room before he left home to join the music industry, the soft toys of his childhood remaining among the books. The corridor houses series such as Architectural Design and theory books biographies live in the bedroom – Bertrand Russell, Salvador Dali, Augustus John and Frida Kahlo – with ‘standards you can’t throw away’, like Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, and a cluster of his wife Yael Reisner’s volumes in Hebrew. There is a loose ‘Cooky system’ in the flat for the shelving of books. He continues to delight in rereading Summerson’s Georgian London. At the AA, he was taught by John Summerson who brought renaissance history to life. He somehow got away with borrowing Banister Fletcher ( A History of Architecture) for the entire three years of his degree. His grant meant he could not afford to buy books, so the library was his only source for books. He read Le Corbusier and Nikolaus Pevsner when he was 14 or 15 at school, leaving at 16 to study architecture at Bournemouth College of Art. One volume sports a cover that seems to be a door mat, but is in fact bound in pigs’ bristle, coconut fibre and silicon, the spine forming the profile of Pesce’s face with his distinctive nose.Ĭook did not start acquiring books until he was in his 20s. He proudly pulls out a monograph by Toyo Ito with the dedication: ‘To Sir Peter, You are the architect that I respect most in the world.’ He also enjoys the quirky volumes that turn up from Gaetano Pesce. The books that get away and seep into his collection are the most treasured. He has become artful at giving books the slip, leaving them on top of hotel wardrobes and expanding the libraries of study hotels at Penn and Yale. When lecturing on his travels, he is the recipient of ‘lots of boring, heavy books’ – most often ‘school annuals by institutions that are 10 years behind the Bartlett and AA’. Having cut and pasted from Hans Hollein’s and Walter Pichler’s catalogue for Archigram 2, catalogues and books have kept on coming. The relentless flow of books in his direction started in the early 60s at the Architectural Association, when with Warren Chalk, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb he produced the first Archigram pamphlets. ![]() This is an accumulation of a lifetime in architecture and academia, which exists despite his concerted efforts to fend off constant book giving. Rotring pen in hand, he is drawing ‘a spoof of an Italian hill town’ for the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, enjoying the scurry of passers-by on a spring morning.Īll the rooms and the connecting corridor of his ground-floor flat are lined with books. From the street he is visible, seated at his drawing board in the bay window of a handsome, gabled brick Victorian house. Peter Cook is a native of jury panels and lecture platforms the world over, so it is a surprise to find him quite so at home in north London.
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