I sought out a condition that seemed to have no history, no loading: 'the LUMP'. Remember that the mere 'lump' has none of the dynamics of a 'heap' nor the deliberateness of a 'pile'. It's just a nothing - no physiognomy - just a lump! After I had made the project, a drawing was found by the English artist Hurst Walker entitled
I Love the Lump and when I visited the National Gallery in Oslo I found all sorts of Norwegian painters paying homage to selected lumps in the landscape of fjords. So one was unwittingly the child of a whole tradition of lump-lovers. In presenting my own lump I take you round from the first face where, if you look hard, you might see the odd insertion of 'constructed' objects...to the second face where there are more - and some of them surely skylights...to the third face which is the give-away: a path leading to an entrance. The thing was a building all the time! One has gone through a cycle, starting by saying, 'I'm going to take something that is totally abstract and has nothing to do with anything and make it into a building. I am too old and architectural to be totally 'lumpist'; in the end I make another architecture.
From this point on I became interested in the conjunction of lumpy, stuffed 'Slurrrp' architecture with normal architecture. The easiest example - from the breakfast table - is that of scrambled egg on toast. What's nice about it is that it is so imperfect. The scrambled egg soaks into part of the toast and lies awkwardly over another part. In this particular case the egg is the 'lump' architecture and the toast is a regular strip of office building. the result becomes a model for later conjunctions such as 'Way Out West - Berlin' [Peter Cook, 1988] and the Breitscheidplatz project for the same city.
Peter Cook, 'Peter Cook: Six Conversations',
Architectural Monographs, no. 28, (London: Academy Editions, 1993), p. 42.