Mike Davies on CRAB Studio’s Drawing Studio at the Arts University Bournemouth

Words
Mike Davies
Photos
Richard Bryant (Arcaid)

Tucked into the campus of the Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) – with its varied collection of buildings each sporting the architectural style and detailing of its era – nestles a brand new, bright blue blob. Sitting on a lawn amongst birch trees, autonomous and unconnected to its neighbours. the blob represents a complete departure from the language of the campus as a whole. The commission – for a new Drawing Studio serving the needs of the university’s arts, architecture and design students – was awarded by an enlightened vice-chancellor to CRAB Studio, whose co-founder Peter Cook is Bournemouth’s best-known architect alumnus.

The building is a delight. While contrasting with its neighbours it is not an aggressive arrival. Rather, it is a cheerful presence – a grand froggy surprise that has just hopped onto the campus.

If the brief had asked for a building with no surface detail or relief whatsoever, with the same colour and texture all over, with hardly a straight line in sight and with one giant round window, it would have been ridiculed – but that is what has arrived, and it is a triumph. If Cook’s Kunsthaus Graz, designed with Colin Fournier in 2003, was a ‘friendly alien’, then this cheerful, enigmatic, wonderfully blue blob is its diminutive, extra-terrestrial progeny.

In contrast to the all-blue exterior of the Drawing Studio, the interior is seamlessly and spectacularly white. The free-flowing space is flooded with daylight from a grand northlight window which drinks in the external world of sky and trees, imbuing it with luminous neutrality, a perfectly smooth matt back-ground, with nothing to lure the eye away from a drawing in progress – a fitting background for Cook’s own favourite pastime.

More than half a century ago Cook co-founded Archigram, a group of like-minded radicals who carved out a unique identity through writing, drawing, modelling, publishing and exhibiting a fresh alternative to the prevailing architectural orthodoxy. From the capsules and pods of Plug-In City and Walking City to the Cushicle, the Suitaloon, Rock Plug-Log Plug and the well-serviced outdoor environment of architecture without buildings, Archigram ranged continuously across the built and non-built landscape, commenting, questioning, drawing and evoking alternative visions of the architectural world around us.

Bournemouth’s friendly alien seems to encapsulate these 50 years of ideas, polemic, sumptuous graphics and alternative architecture. These past roots have borne fruit in a new conceptual response to current student needs, and the Drawing Studio has a unique real-world presence as it sits, smiling, on the grass.

The language of free forms, with its unique ideological and technological challenges, has been most spectacularly manifested in the works of Zaha Hadid and her team. How does a free form sit on the ground? How does one enter or fenestrate such flowing volumes? What can the structure of a doubly-curved surface be like in a construction industry dominated by planar linearity? What skin finish gives supple continuity, with merged walls and roof? And with no columns, and no apparent structure as a discipline, how do you articulate a monocoque? CRAB’s job architect Jenna Al-Ali has made all this look easy, and the Drawing Studio resolves these issues comfortably within its own language.

Appropriately, Zaha Hadid – like myself a student and tutor at the Architectural Association during Peter Cook’s long tenure as a teacher there – was invited to open the new building, just a few days before we heard of the tragic loss from the architectural firmament of this supernova. She celebrated its arrival with warm words, understanding better than any other architect the challenges faced in its design.

So hats off to the Arts University Bournemouth for embracing difficulty and enabling Peter Cook’s first UK building – a splendid response to its brief and a noteworthy piece of architecture with a twinkle in its eye.

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