Peter Cook – Island City (2011-2012)

Exhibition poster with the work, Island City (2011-2012), by architect, Sir Peter Cook (b. 1936), from the exhibition, City Landscapes, at Louisiana in 2022. For six decades, Peter Cook has inspired and shaped both architecture and the very thinking about the role of architecture with its visionary ideas about new urban and life forms.

Island City has been created in intermittent drawing sessions—often only 10-15 minutes, occasionally other tasks. Here, Peter Cook has taken the conditions along the water as his starting point and tested fragments of ideas from a starting point in the middle of the drawing.

Drawing has always been the most important tool for the British avant-garde architect and professor. Peter Cook's drawings lie somewhere between the architect's classic drawing and the wildly fabulous sketch of the vision—and the drawings are the main product of his work as an architect.

It is in the drawing that the vision of the city and way of life of the future becomes clearest and can best be discussed, Peter Cook believes: In the drawing there is the greatest chance to shake up familiar ideas about our cities and ways of life, without being bound by thoughts of concrete materials and traditional solutions.

Peter Cook has had a few buildings erected—including the art museum in Graz, Austria. On the other hand, Cook is one of the most significant architects of the time when it comes to architecture's visions and theoretical field: the question of what architecture can and must do.

Peter Cook - Island City (2011-2012) is shown as part of the Louisiana on Paper exhibition series.