The Extraordinary Gordon Pask
Peter Cook
The Bartlett
University College London
22 Gordon Street
London WC1H 0QB
578 words
Keywords Gordon Pask, Architecture
Abstract This is a short tribute statement about that extraordinary man, Gordon Pask, and his stimulating influence on architecture.
Gordon Pask was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met. First, as a critic of architecture and second as a most unusual and quizzical personality. One of the most revealing things that he ever said was that his decision to live in Richmond (for so many years) was because of the number of coffee bars that were there. Visits to his roof-top laboratory involved easing your way past the water powered computer, a large black dog peering through several roughly cut holes in partitions where eager (or even swooning) assistants would be twiddling with wires.
The fact that all the clocks in his house seemed to have different time settings and that all the pills in his pill box seemed to be different colours that the references he made seemed to be to different disciplines, traditions, value systems or phenomena of any kind, was in its own way perfectly consistent.
The fact that he and Elizabeth had toured the Northern sea-side with an early form of light show somehow attached to their car, that he had written musicals and painted surrealist paintings was again absolutely consistent.
The theatre of Gordon delivering a lecture was as much to do with his contrived (but in the end developed) appearance of the "nutty professor" as it was involved with his deliberate mis-pronunciation of certain words, laying the vowel stress oddly around the place in order to make you stop and think about the word.
Architects like to think that they are creative and exciting people and that they are concerned with all aspects of the world from which one can then reconstruct the environment. In fact, in the main, they are middle-brow, middle-thinking people who, perhaps, did not have the nerve to be real artists, nor the discipline to be real scientists. Pask was therefore a wonderful challenge because he was probably more architect than the rest of us - more able to understand, or at least to parry with the various aspects of culture and phenomena, real, imagined or somewhere out there if you could only grapple with them - that is my interpretation of the business of cybernetics.
The Pask robots at the ICA were as much theatrical and worryingly humanoid as they were to do with interactive mechanics and procedures.
There is now a whole generation of young architects, particularly in the Stephen Gage and Peter Silver unit at the Bartlett who are constructing and programming interactive robots, responsive floors, walls etc architectonically which go "bang in the night". They are, of course, the direct progeny of Gordon; not only through the fact that Peter was the student of John Fraser (who was the student of Gordon Pask), or via the other connecting line through Ranulph Glanville, but also through a whole spiritual connection that has existed in London, consistently, since the period of the war-time boffins and will hopefully continue uninhibited comfortably through to the 20th century. Without Gordon Pask we would have had a much more boring time in the last 30 years of this century and architects would have had to arrive at these interests through the study of basic principles and reading American magazines. Surely a much poorer route.