Dates: 6 March – 21 May 2026
Location: TheGallery, AUB Campus
Moves On from the Beach to City and Landscape traces the career of Professor Sir Peter Cook RA, highlighting the intersections of imagination, experimentation, and architectural making across more than seven decades and passing through the years of the Drawing Studio and Innovation Studio built at Arts University Bournemouth (AUB).
The story begins at the “beach kiosk corner” in 1954, where Cook worked from a small mobile cabin at Durley Chine, Bournemouth, selling fruit. This modest early project functioned as a capsule, foreshadowing his lifelong interest in modularity and adaptability concepts that would underpin his visionary “Plug-in City”, inform the radical ethos of Archigram, and influence architects across Japan and Europe.
In 2010, the Crab by the Sea exhibition coincided with Bournemouth’s bicentenary, celebrating connections between experimental architecture and the seaside. Curated as a launch event for the opening of the new gallery extension at AUB, it highlighted Cook’s ongoing work through his CRAB (Cook Robotham Architectural Bureau) studio. The exhibition emphasised the vital link between thinking and making, reflecting on the city’s heritage through the lens of Cook’s career.
2026 marks the 10th anniversary of the Drawing Studio, a landmark building designed and completed by Cook and CRAB. As the first purpose-built drawing studio at an art school in over a century and Cook’s first completed building in the UK, the Drawing Studio secured a place in architectural and design history, exemplifying innovation in both form and function.
From the seaside kiosk to speculative cities, and from Crab by the Sea to the Drawing Studio and innovation, Moves On from the Beach to City and Landscape celebrates Peter Cook’s enduring creativity, his transformative contributions to architecture, and his continuing relationship with AUB.
Peter Cook: Moves On from the Beach to City and Landscape – formal opening and private view
Join us for the formal opening of our exhibition Peter Cook: Moves On from the Beach to City and Landscape.
