The legendary architect Sir Peter Cook will deliver a lecture inviting us to rethink architecture as a space of imagination and transformation. His talk is framed under this year’s theme: “Castles in the Air, or How to Build Utopia Today”, directly connecting with his lifelong exploration of new ways of inhabiting and conceiving the city.
Sir Peter Cook (Southend-on-Sea, Essex, 1936) is one of the most influential thinkers in radical architecture of the second half of the twentieth century. As a co-founder of the Archigram collective in 1961, he revolutionized modern architecture with visionary projects such as Plug-In City, Walking City, and Instant City, which, although largely unbuilt, transformed the international debate on urbanism, technology, and urban life.
From his early experimental pamphlets to his utopian megastructures, Cook explored architecture as an ever-changing organism, where residential modules can be connected, replaced, or upgraded freely. In projects like Plug-In City, he envisioned modular and expandable cities with integrated transportation and urban systems, reflecting the “disposable” logic of pop culture and anticipating contemporary approaches to sustainability, flexibility, and urban adaptability.
His vision aligns with the theme of the Mugak/ Biennial: utopia not as an unattainable ideal, but as a field for architectural and social experimentation, where castles in the air become spaces for reflection and action on how we inhabit the world. With more than six decades of influence in teaching, practice, and architectural criticism, Sir Peter Cook continues to inspire generations of architects to imagine cities in constant transformation.