Nooks and Crannies Become Architecture: A Reflection

On the evening of the 7th of October 2012, the esteemed Sir Peter Cook conducted a lecture at the Double Tree, Hilton Kuala Lumpur.  Entitled Nooks and Crannies become Architecture, Sir Peter shared his history as a architect as well as his sources of inspiration throughout his career.  The talk was visually arresting, due to Sir Peter's generosity in sharing his collection of photographs and his design works; and his anecdotal delivery of the content.

To the uninitiated, Sir Peter Cook founded the design group Archigram with Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, David Greene, Michael Webb and Dennis Crompton.  Archigram were interested in hypothetical projects which drew inspirations from technology and consumerism.  They were also largely influenced by the Futurist ideology promoted by Antonio Sant'Elia in the 1910's - 1920's.  This lecture covered a lot of the ideas and designs Sir Peter did with Archigram and the reasoning behind them.  For more of Archigram,  you can go to www.archigram.net to view their original sketches and works, or go look them up at wikipedia.  If you are interested to read the Futurist manifesto in English, you can go to http://masi.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html.

Anyway, back to Sir Peter Cook's lecture.  It has taken me some time to post this, for the reason that I wanted some time to think about the things I saw and heard during the lecture.  Of course, not everything stuck with me, nor do I claim to understand all the things that were presented.  This reflection is purely personal and the issues that resonated with me will be discussed here.  Again, this reflection is NOT a review of the entire lecture, but bits and bobs of things that stuck out for me.

One of the first things that really caught my attention wasn't so much the content of the lecture but of the person giving the lecture.  It is truly amazing to see Sir Peter Cook, after decades of being in architecture and design, talk so passionately about his works and works of others.  This passion could be seen in both his commissioned works and works which he did as a form of intellectual exercises.  His enthusiasm for anything design appears undiminished and his energy could be felt by those sitting in the crowd.  I guess it requires a great amount of love and dedication to architecture and design to still be so heavily involved in it after so many years.  His enthusiasm was clear to all when you see him talk so openly and candidly about the slides that were shown; so to his generosity in sharing his ideas and opinions.  His ability to draw ideas and inspiration from diverse and eclectic sources (one of which was Valparaiso in Chile; the other key one was nature) is also worth mentioning as you can see how these sources inform his works.  It gave me a vague picture to as how his mind works - which is akin to a web whereby he will pull in various ideas from all sorts of places and weave something together for his designs.

In terms of the content of the lecture, the one underlining idea that stuck with me is his embrace of technology.  Technology played an important part during Sir Peter's time in Archigram and continues to be one of the factors that drive his design today.  It is clear that he has a high regard for how technology has shaped us as humans and how it has shaped the urbanscape; and I feel that technology is what makes us who we are.  We should attempt to understand the technology that surrounds us, and drive it away because of ignorance or pride; which is something a lot of people do due to the fear of the new and unknown, and the denial of change.  People are afraid of change, and technology is the symbol of change.  Whether technology affects architecture or our daily life, our need to understand it and shape is is what makes us evolve.  The search for new and innovative ways to do things is what keeps us moving forward.  If we refuse and decide to just stand still, we would go extinct, like so many species who are unable to adapt.  Anyway, back to Sir Peter's works: most of his conceptual and theoretical works (which I refer to as his intellectual exercises) who a certain amount of what technology CAN be, either left on its own, or being pushed to their boundaries by humanity.  This is certainly an interesting point for me due to the fact that I feel a lot of technology available to us IS NOT truly understood, and therefore underutilised - especially in the design field - either in terms of conceptualisation or construction.

And despite his embrace of technology, he also has a great reverence for nature.  As he mentioned in his lecture, this could be due to his upbringing in England.  His recent works, especially the conceptual ones, appear to show how nature is more powerful than any built environment.  One of the slides that stand out in may mind was the one where he shows a progression of nature taking over a landscape.  As much as humans have the ability to control his/her surroundings and environment, nature always finds a way back.  This is important, not only due to the recent fervour for designs to be environmentally friendly, but because understanding Nature's nature is truly the only way to create a built environment that is a harmonious balance between man-made and natural.  There are a lot of resources today that talk about Green and environmental friendly design so I won't go too much into it here - but just to share how Sir Peter Cook looks at nature; at nature's idiosyncratic beauty, at its power and potential.

Another key theme that I picked up during the lecture was the theme of eclecticism.  From the slide presentation, I saw a diverse array of places, people and architecture.  Some quite quaint, some expressive and colourful and some that did not work so well.  But all of this gave a lot of soul to Sir Peter's lecture and it made me realise that diversity is truly the key.  I mentioned in my previous post of plurality and diversity in Malaysian architecture; and I would like to re-emphasise it here again.  The strength of design and architecture is diversity.  Similar to nature, diversity ensures growth and survival.  In this globalised world that we live in today, the opportunity to adopt and adapt diversity into our designs is virtually limitless.  Design after all, must be a representation of people and culture, and with today's global culture, it is only fitting that our designs must exhibit diversity and eclecticism.  The lecture made me realise that the way forward for Malaysian architecture is the path of plurality and diversity.  We cannot just accept and embrace ONE architectural identity but to embrace and exhibit an eclectic approach to design.  I know this idea is still rather vague and I hope to be able to crystallise it somewhere in the near future, but for those who are talking about Malaysian architectural identity, the lecture made me realise that architecture can no longer have a singular worldview (as what the Modernist approach was) but it needs to be made up of our eclectic surroundings and culture.

There were a lot more themes that were discussed in the lecture, which I won't really get into - perhaps some of my students who attended the lecture can also voice out what they took away from the talk.  But to wrap it up, the lecture was indeed long, but it was inspirational and thought provoking.