sir peter cook deconstructs his 'cities' at richard saltoun gallery

a new ‘hybrid’: cities exhibition at richard saltoun gallery

London-based Cook Haffner Architecture Platform (CHAP) has designed the new pieces for the Cities exhibition at the Richard Saltoun Gallery, inviting visitors to peek into the continuously evolving world of Sir Peter Cook, the visionary British architect and co-founder of the 60s avant-garde group, Archigram. Drawing on the architect’s work over the past six decades, the exhibition features a site-specific architectural environment and immersive Virtual Reality (VR) experience produced especially for the gallery, together with a selection of drawings and paintings that trace his radical vision. Visitors are therefore ’embraced’ by a new ‘hybrid’, whereby interiors are created from deliberately drawn and image-loaded fragments to evoke reimagined and dismembered cities; cities that climb over themselves to become new forms. This extends a theme recently introduced into Cook’s exhibit at the Beijing Biennale, where drawings of an architectural composition move towards real scale.

Coinciding with the 60th anniversary of Archigram’s Living City show at the Insititute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), the Cities exhibition is ‘a continuous attempt to extend the vocabulary of my work,’ as Cook explained to designboom in a recent interview.

installation view: Peter Cook, Cities, Richard Saltoun Gallery London, 2023 | © the artist

all images courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery London and Rome

sir peter cook’s exploration of a new architectural language

The journey at the Cities exhibition — designed by the British visionary’s studio, Cook Haffner Architecture Platform (CHAP) — starts from an architectural moment, of the living wall from the world of Peter Cook as a portal. Richard Saltoun Gallery (see more here) gives us an overview of that experience: ‘The exhibition hits the eye as you enter and are almost ’embraced’ by a 2023 drawing that has been enlarged, cut, dismembered, and interwoven with elements from other drawings, as one of a series of improvisations on the possible components of cities, such as ‘inhabited wall’, ‘concealed building’, ‘layered space’, etc. Common to these are intersections of ‘capsules’, ‘skins’, partial megastructures.‘ The design of the exhibition eventually attempts to explore a hybrid architecture with drawn worlds — forming a unique interior view of the space to-scale that transcends viewers from distanced observers to participants.

integrating a VR experience

an explosive meshing of fragments & colors, powered by VR

Columns and color blocks that act as partitions and directional paths are extracted from Peter Cook’s drawn works on a real-life scale, overlapping with, and invading the spatial sequence of the white-wall gallery, inviting Peter’s worlds into the real. The gallery’s corners are rendered softly by color patches shaped as reverse silhouettes of elements and artifacts. The hybrid integration of the drawn and real worlds is further enhanced by creatures and artifacts, experiences, and moments, open for interpretation: it is the essence of conglomeration, of confrontation of the unlike with the unlike, of the potential of unexpected mixtures. ‘I call it Cities because, in a way, all of the examples are fragments of cities — either reflecting upon known cities or suggestions of parts of cities,‘ Cook shared with designboom.

color blocks that act as directional paths

In the main axis of the three galleries, one of the architect’s most popular drawings is activated by a Virtual Reality (VR) layer, probing visitors to ‘enter’ a speculative world. ‘So suddenly, the drawing, which was previously static, has some of its elements coming to life: they open up, they drift, then they move through the space,’ Cook told designboom. As for other exhibited works, many go as far back as the 70s, moving through the 80s and 90s, before concluding with a recent one from earlier this year. Some of these samples from different periods involve

a ‘kind of mysterious conditions such as dreaming up spacious spacelessness. Some look at substance, alternative types of material from which we might make architecture. Some are actually projects for cities. All of them involve an observation of city form, really,’ the architect commented during the interview.

Unlike his previous show at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, which displayed 120 items — big and small — the Cities show at Richard Saltoun Gallery reflects a more intimate scale, with about 20 works on show. This exhibition is running until September 16, 2023 at London’s Richard Saltoun Gallery.

the Cities exhibition displays about 20 works by Sir Peter Cook