This monograph of "The Jeffrey Cook House - Pioneering Sustainable Architecture" (ISBN: 979-8-218-07970-3) by Klaus Dunker, a Principal of Dunker Associates, Architects, Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, Canada was published by the Trustees of the Jeffery Cook Charitable Trust in 2022.
The Cook House, at 3627 El Camino Sin Nombre in Paradise Valley, Arizona, U.S.A, stood in a prosperous neighbourhood where the value of the land is typically much higher than that of the building on it. The house was designed by its owner, an architect, and was a pioneering work of bioclimatic and passive solar design. Well-known by the solar-design community, it was also a carefully considered, didactic example of residential design that was, first and foremost, a good place to live and work.
People may ask why present a house that was designed and built 50 years ago, doesn't exist anymore, and is now all but forgotten? The author answers twofold: first, it was designed and owned by Jeffrey Cook, whose legacy trust fund still exists, having sponsored many projects and scholarships over the last 20 years. Past and future recipients may be interested to learn about the trust's founder, his way of life, and the tenets of his work.
Second, the Cook House was architecturally and culturally an iconic house, designed and lived in as a didactic statement. Jeffrey Cook compared it with well-known mid-20th-century houses and explained his ideas with clarity and purpose. Jeff was a pioneer of passive solar and low-energy design and clearly wanted his house to be a model, not only of technical proficiency in solar design but, just as importantly, of an architectural approach that made daily life the center of concern. Architecture is, after all, the art of the everyday.
Determining influences for the house's design were personality, family, work and interests, the environment, context, and the desire for harmony and beauty. Several of these determinants stand out, and it is the combination of these values that prompted the trustees to revive here this extraordinary and beautiful house.
The Jeffery Cook house was unique and should be better known for its significance as the work of a gifted architect and for the pioneering ideas it was built upon. Buildings are often, if not always, shown in books and magazines without any representation of context, and with the interior depicted as a stage set of arranged views with few signs of the life that unfolds within. The attempt here is to show how a rich intellect lives in his self-created environment: an environment that was consciously designed as a teaching tool. We cannot resurrect the building, so instead a resurrection of a different kind - in pictures and words instead of mortar and wood – is presented here in the hope that Jeff Cook’s spirit will continue to live on.
