Overview

Kreative Talk featuring Sir Peter Cook is a single-session speaker event organised by Artificial Kreativity, held at art’otel London Hoxton in East London. It falls within the Kreative Talks series — a curated programme dedicated to in-conversation formats with figures from the creative professions. This edition focuses on architecture, drawing on Sir Peter Cook’s career as a co-founder of the radical experimental group Archigram and his broader influence on architectural education and practice.

Focus

The talk centres on Sir Peter Cook’s trajectory through architecture — from his formative years and the Archigram movement to his positions as Director of the Bartlett School of Architecture and the ICA. Key themes include experimental design thinking, the role of drawing and creativity in architectural research and education, the influence of postwar technology on spatial imagination, and the legacy of radical utopian projects such as Plug-in City. The session also addresses Cook’s impact on subsequent generations of architects, including former students such as STUFISH and Rem Koolhaas.

Sir Peter Cook co-founded Archigram in the 1960s — a group whose speculative urban visions, including the Plug-in City, challenged conventional assumptions about permanence, structure, and the role of technology in the built environment. His influence on architectural education spans decades.

Program

The event runs for two hours on Saturday, 11 July 2026, and is structured in two parts.

Talk and Q&A Session

An exclusive in-conversation session with Sir Peter Cook RA covering his personal path into architecture, his work with Archigram, and his views on creativity, drawing, and the state of design education. The session includes an open question and answer exchange with the audience.

Networking Reception

Following the talk, an informal networking reception takes place in the art’otel gallery space, allowing attendees to engage directly with fellow creatives and professionals in an informal setting.

Audience

The event is open to architects, designers, students, educators, and anyone with a professional or academic interest in architectural history, theory, and experimental design thinking — ticket capacity is limited given the venue scale.

Event Details

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

A talk centred on Sir Peter Cook carries inherent significance for architectural discourse — Archigram’s speculative projects remain among the most cited references in discussions of technology, flexibility, and the limits of built form. However, the Kreative Talks format — intimate, conversational, held in a boutique hotel gallery — positions this as a cultural encounter rather than a critical academic forum. The value of such events lies in access to primary voice and personal narrative, which formal research rarely captures. The absence of published outcomes or structured documentation means the intellectual content remains largely confined to the room, which is a structural limitation of the format regardless of the speaker’s stature.

Closing Note

As a small-format architectural event in London’s creative calendar, this edition of Kreative Talks draws on a figure whose work sits at the intersection of postwar utopianism, design pedagogy, and speculative urbanism — making it relevant to professionals and students with an interest in the history and future of architectural imagination.