Jeffrey Ross
Cook, Architect
1934-2003
Friends of
Kebyar Advisory Board
Jeffrey Ross
Cook, architect: born Lunenburg, Nova Scotia 26 June 1934; Assistant Professor, College of
Architecture and Environmental Design, Arizona State University 1962-66, Associate
Professor 1966-72, Professor 1972-1988, Regents Professor 1988-2003; married 1967
Agnese Udinotti (one daughter; marriage dissolved 1974); died Paradise Valley, Arizona 24
march 2003.
Professor
Jeffrey Cook, 1934 - 2003
Architect who
pioneered solar and bio-climatic design
He
was also well known for his interest in organic architecture and wrote the first monograph
on the Oklahoma-based organic architect Bruce Goff (The Architecture of Bruce
Goff, 1978) in a series that I edited for Granada. This was later followed, after years of
on-site work in Hungary, by Seeking Structure from Nature: the organic architecture of
Hungary (1996), a major study of the Makona school and Imre Macovecz, one of the
Prince of Waless favorite architects. He also wrote a number of standard works on
passive solar buildings, and was the founder-editor of the Passive Solar Journal.
Jeff
Cook was born in 1934 in the fishing port of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, now a World Heritage
site. He studied at the small and rather exclusive Manitoba University School of
Architecture, Winnipeg, graduating in 1957. It was a school that had produced such
architectural luminaries as William Allen, the architect and building scientist and former
head of the Architectural Association School in London, and Harry Seidler, who introduced
modern architecture to Australia. Cook completed his architectural training at the Pratt
Institute, Brooklyn, where Sybil Moholy-Nagy was one of his tutors, introducing him to her
work on native and anonymous vernacular architecture which was to have a
profound influence on his later interests.
During
a long career in architectural education and one he vowed to continue as long as he
was able he lectured in many parts of the world including Mexico, India, and the Far
East. His first appointment in the UK was at the Manchester Polytechnic School of
Architecture (now part of the Manchester Metropolitan University). More recently he was a
Visiting Professor at the University of Westminster. He served for many years as a guest
tutor and examiner in energy design at the AA School. He was closely associated with the
founding, and the running of PLEA (Passive Low Energy Architecture) and its annual
international conferences. He was for a time an adviser on energy matters for the US
government.
Among
Cooks publications was an early photographic study of the homes and habitats of the
Anasazi people, a tribe that preceded the Hopi in Arizona. Anasazi places: the
photographic vision of William Current (1992) reinforced Cooks own interest in the
rock-carved and climatically controlled structures of the native Indians and such examples
as the Mesa Verde in Northern Arizona.
This
interest in bio-climatic design was to take him to many parts of the world. He was an
adventurous, inveterate and intrepid traveler searching out examples of humanistic,
well-designed and climatically controlled buildings. His studies which were
carefully written up and photographed were broadly based and ranged from the homes
of the Hopi and Navaho Indians to Palladios villas in Vicenza.
Living
just down the road from Frank Lloyd Wrights Taliesin West and virtually next door to
Paolo Soleris Cosanti Foundation, Cook was well acquainted with the demands of an
architecture that responded to nature and to the wider environment. His own house, begun
in 1968, was one of the first examples of solar passive energy in Arizona and its
subsequent wide publicity catapulted him into prominence as the solar energy and design
guru in the state.
For
inexplicable reasons Arizona had never been strong on solar energy, although it probably
has more sunlight than anywhere else does in the world. The house sits on a two-acre plot
surrounded by rough desert land, much to the embarrassment of those neighbours who live in
expensive villas with immaculate cut lawns. Its seemingly unkempt appearance reflected
Cooks own interest in the wild Arizona landscape while his elegant house with its
double-story living room and sheltered external terraces exhibited his commitment to an
organic architecture.
Jeff
Cook was elected a member of CICA (International Committee of Architectural Critics) and
he wrote extensively in professional and academic journals. A recently completed study was
of the early Arcology ideas and projects of his friend Paolo Soleri. Now his life has been
so curtly shortened by cancer it may not be published, and his recent desire to go back to
his Canadian roots can never be fulfilled. He died at his house in his beloved Arizona
desert.
DENNIS
SHARP
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