Material Tendencies: Sir Peter Cook

Would you say there is a building material for the 21st century?
The tendency of the 21st century is the controllability of the wall. Walls can be much more sophisticated than before. We can make a wall do and look like anything. We can really control its porosity and its density and its efficiency in a way that formally we couldn’t.

If you could create a super-material, what characteristics should it have?
It would have responsive characteristics. I am imagining this magical material that can come towards you and that could melt away. It would have a malleability and mobility.

What was the first thing you ever built?
I was fascinated by town-planning already at a young age. So I would go down the beach and make canals – not sandcastles, but towns – I described roads and canals and organization.

What do you feel when you move through one of your finished buildings?
I’ve been very interested in the effect of light and materiality in the presence of objects. The thing you don’t know until you have done a few buildings is the significance of objects that may not be central to the scheme. So you can have a good organizational concept of a roof, say, but suddenly there is an amount of light trapped by a beam or the prominence of a radiator or a dark reveal of a wall where the light doesn’t quite get through. These are things that even in a model you can’t fully understand. Architecture very much is a theatrical thing – you proceed through a building in a certain way. You are in a certain mood, and there is a certain kind of light coming through the window. That kind of stuff is tricky and fascinating.