Starting this Thursday, February 23rd 2017 (until March 10, 2017),  the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL) will celebrate the opening of its new building located at 22 Gordon Street with an exhibition commemorating the work by legendary architect Sir Peter Cook. Why, you ask? The school’s exhibition celebrates Sir Peter’s 80th year and will recognize 80 of his most inspiration and innovative design projects. Plus, he WAS the chair of the school from 1990 to 2005, so….there’s that; he DID put that institution on the map by making it a leader in creative design after bringing in staff and students from across the world…

Back in the 1960’s, Cook, a founder member of the group Archigram and now at CRAB Studio (Cook-Robotham Architecture Bureau), envisioned new possibilities for architecture in both his deisgn practice and his teachings. Some examples of this type of work includes the experimental (the Plug-In City) to the iconic blue buildings of Graz and Bournemouth to his drawings and projects now in the Permanent Collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Deutsches Architektur Museum, the Centre Pompidou and FRAC in Orléans AND a variety of archive films and videos dating back to the 1960s. The “80 at 80” exhibition is very likely to be the largest and most comprehensive of Sir Peter Cooks’s current exhibitions (which have before taken place in Berlin, Cologne and Munich) as it covers five themes: Architecture and Vegetation, Radical City Structures, Colour (fancy) and Invention, Line before Colour (double-fancy) & Satellite Ideas.

[Thanks UCL]