The Royal Gold Medal for Architecture was awarded this year to
the historic 1970s’ architectural group survivors, led by Professor
Peter Cook of the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College,
London. However Peter Cook (together with Colin Fournier) has himself
been reborn in practice as ‘Spacelab’. They have dramatically now
enriched the Austrian skyline of the city of Graz, with a new
Kunsthaus, which proudly sports its Archigram antecedents and
pedigree. The Kunsthaus sets aside an entire floor in provision
for new media. Screens are in, as is a travelator, a linking and
harmonising element which, as Cook says, may, ‘fascinate ten per
cent of the people going through, and bore the other 90 per cent’.
Externally, the building seems to offer a positive response to the
listed buildings surrounding the site. The site allows the new Kunsthaus
to nestle up cosily to two of these – an embrace they cannot possibly
resist, or so it seems. After all, the Kunsthaus itself will doubtless
soon be listed, given its prestigious authorship. Cook claims that
this embrace, ‘locks the thing in urbanistically’.
The travelator, known as ‘The Pin’ (really a hairpin
shape) provides access to the mysterious, darkened environment on
the first floor, and continues ultimately up to second floor level.
Here Cook has inserted some 15 nozzles – looking if anything
like the ventilator ducts that provide air above airliner seats
– which allow light to filter through from the roofline. One
such nozzle angles playfully, rather than provocatively, to the
Castle.
This building is a lighthearted comment on fading ‘high-tech’
architecture, bringing a sense of fun to the otherwise monumental
aspirations of ‘crap-tech’ as Peter Cook dubs it. There
is an Architectural Association confraternity among the alumni which
links this building to Future Systems’ own Selfridges ‘blob’
in Birmingham. One can almost imagine the late, great Cedric Price
smiling knowingly at his progeny as they score.
