Housing, Madrid

Central to Peter Cook's work over many years is the idea that, somehow, buildings can, and should, be both infinitely particular and accommodatingly flexible; celebrating individual difference and freedom whilst still providing hints as to how a space might be occupied. One senses that this is recognized as being a sufficiently tantalizing and engaging chimera of an ideal of city life to make it worth a lifetime's quixotic pursuit. Until recently, this was done mostly through drawing and writing, but now Cook, who is 69 and as energetic and enthusiastic as ever ('Pessimism is death'), has embarked on a new period of building activity after 40 years as teacher and 'guru'.

Replete now with all the trappings of the British architectural establishment (RIBA Gold Medallist – with the rest of Archigram, Royal Academician, Stirling Prize finalist – for the Kunsthaus in Graz), but still at heart a rebel, he has formed a new practice that brings together two collaborators of recent years, Salvador Arroyo and Gavin Robotham with Juan Barrado – to be known as CRAB.

Of his new designs for a public housing project outside Madrid (for the City of Madrid, acting through its public-private agency EMV) he says he wants to evoke 'the tradition of the flaneur, of local identity and a positive desire to create the particular and the unlike within the system – rather than stick one or two neat shops under the apartments.'

This is familiar territory. Of his four solar houses with Christine Hawley back in 1979, he said then 'we have designed houses that absorb, as much as possible, the unknown factor.' A pre-occupation with living space that is loosely determined by mesh, pergolas and planting, with pockets of increased specificity for particular functions, pervades his thinking on housing, which he believes may derive from a peripatetic but comfortable childhood as the son of an army officer during which he became 'adaptable to whatever corner of a house, flat, mansion, holiday shack, outbuilding or hotel was assigned to me at that moment.'

The building, though blue ('shading from light to dark'), will be covered in a double-layer skin of mesh across which planting (species depending on orientation) will grow, creating, one imagines, in the hard light of the Spanish plains, a shimmering, refracting mirage of a structure that may yet at least hint at the elusive, essentially paradoxical, but greatly desired, bespoken indeterminacy.