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Peter Cook

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description Peter Cook Overview

Peter Cook is a British architect and academic who co-founded the avant-garde architecture group Archigram in 1961. Archigram became known for speculative, technology-driven projects that envisioned modular, mobile, and plug-in urban architecture. Cook's best-known conceptual work, Plug-In City, proposed a vast, continuously reconfigurable megastructure and was published in 1964. He has held teaching positions at institutions including the Bartlett School of Architecture, where he served as chair.

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What was Archigram, and when did Peter Cook join it?

Archigram was an avant-garde British architecture group formed around 1961, with Peter Cook as a founding member. It used drawings, magazines, and speculative projects to imagine technology-driven cities that were flexible, mobile, and constantly changing. [Royal Academy biography](https://shop.royalacademy.org.uk/ra-edition-peter-cook-ra)

What is Peter Cook's Plug-In City?

Plug-In City was a 1960s Archigram proposal for a large structural framework into which replaceable living and working capsules could be inserted. It was a speculative project rather than a completed city, and it treated buildings as changeable systems instead of permanent monuments. [German Architecture Museum archive](https://sammlungen.dam-online.de/detail/person/e8cee484-36ff-42cb-946d-08253587f750)

Did Peter Cook ever design a building that was actually built?

Yes. With Colin Fournier, he designed Kunsthaus Graz in Austria, known as the Friendly Alien, which opened in 2003. The building became a museum for modern and contemporary art and turned one of Archigram's speculative ideas into a real public structure. [Kunsthaus Graz history](https://www.hatjecantz.de/en/collections/archiv/products/15139-a-friendly-alien)

Where did Peter Cook teach architecture?

Cook taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London and served as its director for a period. He was also a lecturer, writer, Royal Academician, and former director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. [Peter Cook biography](https://www.petercookarchitecture.com/about-us)

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