rogina rosa meeting cedric do over

MEETING CEDRIC, DO-OVERDiary by Rosa Rogina

'There is a place. Like no place on Earth. A land full of wonder, mystery, and danger! Some say to survive it: You need to be as

mad as a hatter. Which luckily I am.' ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

MEETING CEDRIC, DO-OVERDiary by Rosa Rogina

'Memory of Future Delight – An insight into the world of Cedric Price'

MA ArchitectureRoyal College of Art

9874 words

CONTENT

Illustrations 05

Chapter 01 - Introduction 07Chapter 02 - Capital of Cool 15Chapter 03 - The high summer of technological optimism 23Chapter 04 - Technology is the answer… but what was the question? 39Chapter 05 - Every English schoolboy is in love with trains 51Chapter 06 - Cherry soup, Wiener Schnitzel with egg on the top

and blueberry pudding 61 Chapter 07 - Pre-conclusion notes 68 Conclusion: What I have learnt from Cedric Price 73

Acknowledgements 85Bibliography 86

4 5

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 21: http://tectonicablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/130606_ London-Zoo-Aviary_Newby-Price.jpg

Figure 22: Author’s Own Image (2014)

Figure 23: http://georginabister.com/blog/?p=837

Figure 24: http://arqueologiadelfuturo.blogspot.co.uk/2011_02_01_archive.html

Figure 25: http://hacedordetrampas.blogspot.ca/2010/10/potteries-thinkbelt-de-cedric-price.html

Figure 26: http://hacedordetrampas.blogspot.ca/2010/10/potteries-thinkbelt- de-cedric-price.html

Figure 27: Hardingham, Samantha + Rattenbury, Kester. Supercrit#1 Cedric Price - Potteries Thinkbelt. (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), p.23

Figure 28: http://hacedordetrampas.blogspot.ca/2010/10/potteries-thinkbelt-de-cedric-price.html

Figure 29: http://www.tastingbritain.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/tasting-britain-gay-hussar-soho-001.jpg

Figure 30: http://now-here-this.timeout.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ elenas.jpg

Figure. 31: Author’s Own Image (2014)

Figure 32: Price, Cedric / edited by Hardingham, Samantha, Cedric Price: Opera. (Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley-Academy, 2003.), p.18

Figure 33: Author’s Own Image, from 14th International Architecture Exhibition: People meet in architecture, Venice (2010)

Figure 34: Price, Cedric / edited by Hardingham, Samantha, Cedric Price: Opera. (Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley-Academy, 2003.), p.19

Figure 35: http://sesquipedalist.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/ethics-versus-aesthetics-ad-1965-74.html

Figure 36: http://time.com/3318655/apple-watch-2/

Figure 37: Courtesy of Kresimir Rogina (2001)

Figure 38: http://mondo70.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/zabriskie-point-1970.html


Cover (L): Author’s Own Image (2014) , Image taken by Armor Gutierrez Rivas

Cover (R): http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/PUBLIC/WHATSON/exhibitions. php?item=206




Figure 05: http://angelasancartier.net/boutique

Figure 06: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/04/fashion-statement-lady-gaga

Figure 07: http://dom-ino.tumblr.com/

Figure 08: http://architecturewithoutarchitecture.blogspot.co.uk/

Figure 09: http://socks-studio.com/2011/10/31/francois-dallegret-and-reyner-banham-a-home-is-not-a-house-1965/

Figure 10: http://citiesaregoodforyou.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/the- problem-with-le-corbusier/

Figure 11: http://032c.com/wp-content/uploads/2001/07/Cedric-Price-008.jpg

Figure 12: Courtesy of the Cedric Price Estate, Londonhttp://grahamfoundation.org/grantees/4832-cedric-price-works-19582003-a-forward-minded-retrospective

Figure 13: Author’s Own Image, from: 14th International Architecture Exhibition: Fundamentals, Venice (2014)

Figure 14: Courtesy of Canadian Centre for Architecturehttp://www.cca.qc.ca/en/collection/283-cedric-price-fun-palace

Figure 15: http://8late.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/02-cedric-price.jpg




Figure 19: Author’s Own Image (2014) , Image taken by Andreas Lang

Figure 20: Author’s Own Image (2014) , Image taken by Andreas Lang

*Author edited sourced illustrations

6 7

01 INTRODUCTION

24th March 2001 8:54 am

It was my very first visit to London. While morning melancholy was still fusing with the traffic buzz from just around the corner, my father and I were already walking through Bloomsbury. Going for a short interview, so I had been told. Being just an 11-year-old child, I was quite disappointed when a chubby old man with a cigar in his hand appeared on the other side of the doorstep. Cedric who?

–

15th February 2014 8:59 am

Nervously walking up and down Alfred Place, I am trying to recognise one particular entrance, a spot that I once knew. Yes, after 13 years I am revisiting London. This familiar place suddenly begins to trigger a series of questions in my head. Where is that doorstep I once crossed? Where is that chubby old man that I have met long time ago? I need to speak to him. Oh I see it – it is there! But wait… the doors are closed. They are not opening. There is nobody. It is too late.

A wise man once said, 'At three o’clock every afternoon I get very tired so I go to this wonderful distorter of time and place called the British Museum. It distorts the climate because there’s a roof over it; it distorts my laziness so I don’t have to go to Egypt. The distortion of time and place, along with convenience and delight, introduces another element, a distortion of time future… there is something in there'.1

No, it is not too late. There is a way of meeting Cedric once again.

1 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cedric Price, The Conversation Series (Köln: Walther König, 2009), p.72

8 9

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

Fig. 01: Cedric Price, morning interview with Kresimir Rogina, 24th March 2001

01 Introduction

10 11


Fig. 02: Cedric Price, morning interview with Kresimir Rogina, 24th March 2001 Fig. 03: Author and Cedric Price, 24th March 2001

01 Introduction

12 13

Fig. 04: Kresimir Rogina and Rosa Rogina visiting Cedric Price Architects Polaroids taken by Cedric Price, 24th March 2001

Personal Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER 01 Introduction

'Right… but what was he really about?' I asked myself while finishing Stanley Mathew’s From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price, probably the most comprehensive book about Price currently in print. Although many articles and books have been published, it seems that slippery-enough Cedric Price continues to challenge authors and readers to get a real grip on him. I used this dissertation to knit my path towards understanding. To conjure an existing memory and evoke the presence of one of the most radical and influential thinkers2 of the twentieth century, I had to evolve my thesis research as a complex mixture of reading, interviewing, retracing steps and personal imagination. As a result, I found myself producing a fusion of analysis, evocation and an enthusiasm that exceeds the limits of a conventional 'academic' approach. Even if Price never fitted easily into the accepted category of the 'architect', I came across a rich realm of affection, memory and respect of the same, which has led me to another challenge. While the work of any other architect can, to a great extent, be smoothly categorised through a style epoch timeline, Price does not allow us to reconstruct a conventional direct narrative. Like an unresolved mind map, he leaves us a set of clues that flash up without any obvious correlation, priority or order. I equipped myself with oversized retro sunglasses, adjustable high-tech binoculars and 'geek chic' thick-rimmed wayfarers, which enabled me to utilise different observation angles and scales in an attempt to discover the unusual and excessive qualities of his time, work and life. It is important to understand that this dissertation is neither a conventional biography, nor another attempt to put things in order. Using transitory methods of cross-cutting, reframing, edits, long shots and zooms, it more closely resembles a cinematic project that reveals my pilgrimage towards comprehension. The story begins 14 years ago as an accidental encounter and re-starts eight-month ago as a research journey that unfurls a little glimpse of what I have learnt from and about Cedric Price.

2 Author intentionally does not use term ‘architect’ because of its possible limitations in understanding.

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02 CAPITAL OF COOL3

'Dirty old river, must you keep rollingFlowing into the nightPeople so busy, makes me feel dizzyTaxi light shines so brightBut I don’t need no friendsAs long as I gaze on Waterloo sunsetI am in paradise'4

'Swinging sixties' they say, a time when London was a Mecca for the avant-garde of any kind. It was an Era of a youth-led Cultural Revolution, transforming London’s austere, grimy post-war streets into a flourishing, shiny nucleus of culture. 'What say, you, we go out on the town and swing, baby? Yeah!'5 whooped the city’s kitschy caricature Austin Powers 40 years later. Yet, newly established bohemian movements were not another variable of collective escapism. On the contrary, they were a continuous search for change – a search for a new and better reality. It was a moment in time where young and new intriguingly fused with, and slowly took over archaic and traditional, where working-class talent slightly abrasively blended with upper-class attitude. 'This spring, as never before in modern times, London is switched on. Ancient elegance and new opulence are all tangled up in a dazzling blur of op and pop. The city is alive with birds and the Beatles, buzzing with mini cars and telly stars. The guards now change at Buckingham Palace to a Lennon and McCartney tune, and Prince Charles in firmly in the longhair set. In a decade dominated by youth, London has burst into bloom. It swings; it is the scene'6 wrote Piri Halasz for Time Magazine in April 1966.3 ‘Swinging 60s - Capital of Cool‘, http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/swinging-60s-capital-of-cool (Accessed July 2014)4 Lyrics extract from The Kinks song ‘Waterloo Sunset’ (1967)5 Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, dir: Jay Roach, 19976 Piri Halasz for Time magazine, 1966 quoted in Jerry White, Social and Cultural Change in 1960s London (2007), http://www.british60scinema.net/swinging-london/ (Accessed July 2014)

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Fig. 05, 06: Lady Jane boutique at its peak, Carnaby Street 1966

02 Capital of Cool

Not far away from the glossy lights of Carnaby Street – live showcase of its time – brilliant young renegades were already banishing what was then considered to be 'old and secure', causing a universal cultural stir. From architects to the next generation of politicians, informal salons of bohemian cafés in Soho became the places to be. As I could almost feel the smoke of cigars diffusing over 49 Dean Street parlours, colloquially known as The French House,7 while regular discussion among the young cultural spectra was taking part. Exactly at this point, one specific restless architectural voice was being heard. Regardless of whether the discussion took place within the radical left, the counter-cultural avant-garde or by any chance the Royal family, it didn’t matter.8 He was equally admired and will be remembered until nowadays. Intelligence and wit wrapped up in a package adorned with a simple striped shirt with a detachable collar, hush puppies on his feet, holding a cigar in one hand and glass of cognac in the other hand,9 it was definitely young Cedric provoking and acquiring admiration, not only from his like-minded architecture fellows.

'Each morning, for many years, Cedric Price and I would take breakfast together. Starting at seven or seven-thirty we would argue, he was a left-wing Socialist, I a right-wing Conservative. Some people go each morning to a gymnasium in order to limber up. I used to argue with Cedric Price to get my mind in shape.'10

ALLISTAR MCALPINE

Around the same time, under the roof of the Institute of Contemporary Art, a group of young and ambitious architectural rebels began to gather within a wider cultural circle of painters, sculptors, writers and critics. Nearly like Herman Goering while uttering 'When I hear the word culture, I reach for my

7 It is said that the ‘French House’, officially known as ‘The York Minster Pub’, opened in 1910, was the place where artists like Eduardo Paolozzi, Toni del Renzio and Francis Bacon used to share one table while architure figures like James Stirling and the Smithsons’ shared another.. 8 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.199 Ibid. p.4210 Allistar McAlpine, ‘Once a Jolly Bagman’, 1998 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.43

1918


Fig. 08: Archigram office, Covent Garden, London in 1970s

Fig. 07: Le Corbusier’s studio, Paris in 1950s

02: Capital of Cool

Browning!',11 they were frustrated with the monotony of the predominant, yet outdated, architecture movements that were still trying to revitalize post-war societies with functionalism. What Peter Cook later described as: '[...] the crap going up in London, against the attitude of a continuing European tradition of well-mannered, but gutless architecture that had absorbed the label 'modern' but had betrayed most of the philosophies of the earliest 'modern'.12 Highly aware of their time, this ambitious group recognised the sense of new possibilities. It was a decade of global change. From new theories established by Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini’s films that ignited the film industry, to the new wave of British art with young David Hockney, Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi on its front. Not to forget, it was the decade of the first man in space and continuous human race to the moon,13 but somehow British architecture had chosen to set back.

There are two ways of exploiting wood, argued Reyner Banham in his book Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment: to construct a wooden hut or to build a fire.14 While the call for a radical change of the status quo in architecture remained unanswered, this profound youth chose to set the fire and amplified a cultural ramification.

In 1961, recent graduates of the Architectural Association that witnessed the cultural 'chaos' of post-war Britain – Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, Dennis Crompton, David Greene, Ron Herron and Michael Webb – formed a group of young architects under the name Archigram. If one considers that any revolution or upheaval in the art establishment, must of some historical necessity, be followed by an equivalent shift in architecture,15 then young 11 Herman Goering (1893-1946) was a Nazi founder of the Gestapo and Head of the Luftwaffe. Although the quotation is mostly associated with him, there are ongoing polemics about actual misattribution. Other theory attributes the quote to the Hanns Johst ‘s play Schlageter which was performed on Hitler’s 44th birthday, on 20 April 1933, as an expression of Nazi ideology.12 Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005), p.1113 http://designmuseum.org/design/archigram (Accessed July 2014)14 Reyner Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p.1915 Reyner Banham, ‘On Trial 5. The Spec Builders: Towards a Pop Architecture’, 1962 quoted in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.166

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Archigram was undoubtedly following the steps of Eduardo Paolozzi and its other 'uncles' from the Independent Group.16 Inspired by Apollo missions, constructivism, biology, Italian futurism, manufacturing, electronics and pop culture, they used the media of psychedelic, science fiction images to express their playful, pop-inspired, pro-consumerist visions of a technocratic future,17 one that through its fetishisation of technology rejects any continuity of current conventions and predominant trends.

Equally unconvinced by the warmed-over preoccupation with the symbolic and aesthetic was young enfant terrible Cedric Price. Arrogant and widely accepted proclamations of the late 'White Gods' never seemed out of his interest. In his final year at the Architectural Association, while his colleagues were still drawing grandiose and monumental forms as a response to 'a building of spirit' design brief, Price made a clean-cut break and designed a pub.18 'I thought this was a school of architecture, not a bloody advertising agency. Fuck all this'19 commented Peter Smithson while furiously leaving a building, an ambience that was still filled with the most moribund elements of English culture.20 Despite being dismissed as a 'gentleman who can’t design',21 young Cedric was not discouraged. Conscious of the constantly changing social, political and economic conditions, he early relinquished black and white values of permanence and monumentality. 'No one should be interested in building bridges – they should be interested in how to get to the other side' claimed Price.22

16 ‘The Independent Group were like our uncles. In his workshop, Palozzi was doing exactly as us - he was picking up some pieces and putting them together so it makes some sense.’Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group, 11.08.201417 Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005), Book overview http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/archigram (Accessed July 2014)18 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.2619 Cedric Price, Interview with the author, 1999 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.2920 Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Lynne Cooke, ’Architecture and the Sixties: still radical after all these years’ (September 2004), http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/architecture-and-sixties-still-radical-after-all-these-years (Accessed September 2014)21 Peter Smithson, Interview with the author, 1999 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.2922 Cedric Price ‘On safety pins and other magnificent designs’, 1972 quoted in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.51

02: Capital of Cool

So if Archigram was architecture’s answer to The Beatles, Cedric was, as Dennis Crompton immediately finished my sentence, David Bowie of architecture milieu in the 1960s.23 Despite similarities in age, shared interests in emerging technologies and social circles they were all part of, Price always retained autonomy. He established an 'avuncular', guru-alike relationship with the fledgling group but never became part of it.24 'In a way Cedric was part of the group, and we were part of Cedric, but it was a real personal relationship, it wasn’t a particularly professional one.'25 In contrast to his numerous personal relationships with other architects, Price associated with the architectural establishment of the time with extreme caution26 'One of the things that kept him away from a lot of people was the fact that he actually totally disagreed with them.'27

23 Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group, 11.08.201424 Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005), p.4425 Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group, 11.08.201426 Author interview with Samantha Hardingham, architectural writer and editor; worked on several books and publications on Cedric Price, 13.07.201427 Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 08.08.2014

22 23

03 THE HIGH SUMMER OF TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIMISM28

'In the fifties, children were playing with wooden toys, which I found strange. I had a Meccano set; I had technology toys.'29

DENNIS CROMPTON

While drawing the curtains over the drab and démodé 1950s, post-war Britain did not only wholeheartedly greet a revolutionary period of de-industrialisation, new education policies and an age of the common man and woman, it also faced the sudden blossoming of a yet undiscovered technological promised land – one that was empowering the ordinary individual to participate in the romantic fascination with science and technology. Ideally, this was done while reading still-warm copy of Hefner’s Playboy magazine, with several characteristic glossy spreads dedicated to the latest dream machine held by the world’s most famous secret agent; yet, it did not take long for the term 'technology' to transcribe from 'Bondmania' like fantasies to everyday living. Freshly produced gadgets and gizmos soon became a real embodiment of the hard-hitting mass consumerism phenomena that rocked the boat of the decade. Socially, politically and culturally liberating effects of the latter fostered a new type of relationship between human being and machine,30 turning the focus of the production industry towards the pleasure of the non-exclusive technological youth.

'Looking back it was a very fresh period – there was a ground of opportunities – an introduction to the world where everything seemed possible. You could go to the moon, you could build a Concorde, you could do all this things just you had to push technology and eventually make it happen.'31

STEVEN MULLIN28 Reyner Banham, ‘Rank Values’, 1972 quoted in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.38229 Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group, 11.08.201430 Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.2531 Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office 1964-1969, 17.09.2014

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In 1959, as workplace automation was spreading throughout the country, the post-war Labour Government predicted a decrease in the number of hours that most people would have to work.32 Commodified leisure time and how to use it 'wisely' soon emerged as a major issue across Britain. It became evident that, in order to keep up the pace with a new leisure-based society and technology that could provide opportunities for daily fulfilment, the 'holy profession' of architecture would need a rapid shift.

'The architect who proposes to run with technology knows that he will be in fast company… if, on the other hand, he decides not to do this, he may find that a technological culture has decided to go on without him.'33 REYNER BANHAM

That is not to say that it was the first attempt for terms such as 'machine' and 'technology' to infiltrate into the architectural sphere, nor that it was entirely the consequence of the post-war progressive belief. In the early 1920s, a heroic age of modern architecture gave birth to what was to be defined as the Machine Aesthetic movement, placing a cornerstone of qualitative change in the relationship between society and technology.34 It was a decade underlined by the proliferation of automobiles, telephones, radios and moving pictures in everyday lives, although still exclusively for the elite. Testifying the revolutionary reduction of the machinery to the human scale, the machine-driven Modern Movement was soon glorifying 'the promise of a machine-made future'. Yet, their (only apparently) radical slogans, such as 'a house is a machine for living', did not seem to pursue anything similar to F.T.Marinetti’s futurist pronouncements of the machines as a source of personal fulfilment and gratification.35 Rather than multiplying the man by the motor,36 their relationship with the 'machine' was retained purely on

32 The Labour Party, ‘Leisure for Living’, 1959 quoted in Stanley Mathews, The Fun Palace: Cedric Price’s experiment in architecture and technology, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 3 (2) (2005), http://www.bcchang.com/transfer/articles/2/18346584.pdf (Accessed August 2014)33 Reyner Banham ‘Theory and Design in the First Machine Age’ (London: Architectural Press, 1960), p.329-33034 Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.5335 Reyner Banham ‘Theory and Design in the First Machine Age’ (London: Architectural Press, 1960), p.13236 F.T. Marinetti, ‘Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine’, 1911 in Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, Futurism: An Anthology (Yale University Press, 2009), p.89-92

03 The high summer of technological optimism

aesthetic and symbolic levels, excluding the possession of any technological or functional relevance. Consequently, the disillusioned architectural prophet – or in words of Alan Colquhoun 'historian of the immediate future' – Reyner Banham accused the pioneering Masters of the Modern Movement of being 'selective and classicising', not really grasping the essence of technology which got them 'nowhere near an acceptance of the machines on their own terms or for their own sakes'.37 In 1955, despite his great admiration towards the movement, Banham declared: 'The Machine Aesthetic is dead, and we salute its grave because of the magnificent architecture it produced, but we cannot afford to be sentimental over it’s passing'.38 Ironically, he concluded the same paragraph with the words of Le Corbusier, to whom it was partially addressed: 'We have no right to waste our strength on worn out tackle, we must scrap, and re-quip'.39

If one considers the 1920s to have encapsulated the First Machine Age, then it is indubitable that the young technological 'architecture autre'40 of the 1960s was already fearlessly marching towards the Second. Abolishing existing collectivism, universality and notions of common good, the Second Machine Age was celebrating rising individualism and freedom of choice. As recent and old-enough witnesses of the War and Britain’s later elevation to a world leader in aircraft technology, these architectural youngsters evidently drew their early inspiration from engineering projects of wartime.41

'It was about how do you design components so they reassemble in a different way like my Meccano set.'42

DENNIS CROMPTON

By readopting terms such as 'instant' and 'made-out-of-components', the

37 Reyner Banham ‘Machine Aesthetic’, Architectural Review, 117 (April 1955), p.22538 Ibid. p.22839 Ibid. p.22840 Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.15741 Archigram devoted a whole magazine issue to the engineering projects of wartime such as instant cities of huts and airstrips constructed in a few days. Barry Curtis, Email message to author (Sempember 2014)42 Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group, 11.08.2014

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Second Machine Age youth took the first steps over Buckminster Fuller’s 15-years-old intact 'trail of barely exploited possibilities [waiting] for other people to develop'.43 One that contained a real 'technological essence' Banham was still searching for.44

‘A housewife alone often disposes of more horsepower today than an industrial worker did at the beginning of the century'45 explained Reyner Banham, who previously trained as an aeronautical engineer, in his theoretical treatise Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. And yes, the glorification of heavy, noisy and lethal machinery that marked the period of Victorian industry was suddenly swept aside by an absolute boost of clean, quiet, fun and extensively available gadgets.46 Assets like mixers, grinders, automatic cookers, washing machines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, shavers and hair-dryers designated a real domestic revolution.47

For the exhibition This is Tomorrow in 1956, Richard Hamilton used the same domestic goodies or up-to-the-minute objects of desire, to produce his epoch-making collage manifesto challenging 'What is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?' A decade later, Reyner Banham gave his counter-response. While the three little pigs were still discussing whether to build a house from straws, sticks or bricks, Banham had different concerns. By declaring 'A Home is Not a House',48 he did not answer what a contemporary home is; rather, he proclaimed what it should be.

'When your house contains such a complex of piping, flues, ducts, wires, lights, inlets, outlets, ovens, sinks, refuse disposers, hi-fi reverberators, antennae, conduits, freezers, heaters – when it contains so many services

43 Reyner Banham, 'On Trial 6. Mies van der Rohe: Almost Nothing Is Too Much', 1969 quoted in Nigel Whiteley, ‘Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future’ (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.15444 In the conclusion of Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, in 1960, Banham characterized Buckminster Fuller as a ‘messiah who will finally take British architects into a technological promised land’.45 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960), p.1246 Previewing Cedric Price, Strange Harvest http://strangeharvest.com/previewing-cedric-price (Accessed August 2014)47 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960), p.1248 Reyner Banham, ‘A Home is Not a House’, Art in America, 53 (2) (April 1965), p.70 Fig. 09: Anatomy of a dwelling, 'A Home is Not a House' by Reyner Banham, 1965


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that the hardware could stand up by itself without any assistance from the house, why have a house to hold it up?'49

REYNER BANHAM

Finally, by juxtaposing Barbarella’s 'ambience of curved, pliable, continuous, breathing, adaptable surfaces' with 'all that grey plastic and crackle-finish metal, and knobs and switches, all that… yech… hardware!' in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Banham hailed the final 'triumph of the software'.50 In relation to Heidegger’s concept of architecture as the space of human activity rather than as a structure of enclosure, he made a call for architecture of 'fit environments for human activities' in which the aforementioned 'hardware' of form is nothing more than a mere subservience to the 'software' of activities.51

At this point, one might ask: where is Cedric here? Undeniably, he is present. If Banham was writing and polemicising about technology that could determine a 'home' without any allusions to a roof or a fireplace, by simply defining it as a complex of interpersonal relationships and mechanical services,52 then Price was certainly doing it!

JL: 'Can it be clean?'CP: 'It’s a self washing giant'JL: 'And those things?'CP: 'Moving walkways and catwalks. No, you’re pointing at the radial escalators, they can be steered.'JL: 'It is not easy to read.'CP: 'It’s a mobile, not a watercolour. And I am rather busy.'53

CEDRIC PRICE & JOAN LITTLEWOOD

49 Reyner Banham, ‘A Home is Not a House’, Art in America, 53 (2) (April 1965), p.7050 Reyner Banham, ‘The Triumph of Software’, New Society 12 (138) (October 1968), p.62951 Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.18952 Reyner Banham, ‘1960 1: Stocktaking – Tradition and Technology’, 1960 quoted in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.20353 Joan Littlewood, ‘Joan’s Book’, 1994 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.67


Fig. 12: Price’s cigar box containing inspirational tech toys

Fig. 10, 11: Le Corbusier and Cedric Price - eyewear comparison

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Even if the late avant-garde theatre producer, Joan Littlewood, showed hardly any interest in architecture, and Price detested the theatre for its own sake,54 the early 1960s did not only mark the beginning of their lifelong friendship, but more importantly, gave birth to one of the most innovative and revolutionary projects of its time: the Fun Palace. Littlewood’s vision of a theatre simply as a 'space, light and shelter; a place that would change with the seasons, where all knowledge would be available and new discovery made clear'55 soon became a brief which Price used to develop his design of the mechanically operated environment, responsive to the needs of a new leisure society. What Banham later described as 'a gigantic junk-playground for sophisticated grown-up people to whom the handling of mechanical tackle is nowadays as natural as breathing.'56

'Joan Littlewood presents the FIRST GIANT SPACE MOBILE IN THE WORLD it moves in light turns winter into summer…toy… EVERYBODY what is it?'57

It was not a conventional theatre, nor a school, or a fun fair, and yet it could be all of these things simultaneously or at different times.58 'Sufficiently incomplete'59 Price teamed up with a lengthy list of various collaborators and consultants, and conceived an unenclosed steel frame structure in which two overhead travelling gantry cranes would fully service prefabricated modular elements such as hanging screens, auditoriums, mobile walls, ceilings, decks, walkways or even floors,60 directly in a response to a range of yet

54 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.6355 Joan Littlewood, ‘Joan’s Book’, 1994 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.4656 Reyner Banham, ‘People’s Palaces’, 1964 in Reyner Banham, ‘A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham’ (University of California Press, 1999), p.10857 Fun palace brochure draft quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.13558 Mathews, Stanley, ‘The Fun Palace: Cedric Price’s experiment in architecture and technology’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 3 (2) (2005), http://www.bcchang.com/transfer/articles/2/18346584.pdf (Accessed August 2014)59 Price often said it was important to know when one was ‘sufficiently incomplete’. Modestly aware of his knowledge boundaries, he would regurarly invite various experts to work on his projects, which would later often result in a great personal relationship.Term taken from the transcript of Samanta Hardingham’s talk at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition: Fundamentals, Venice (June 2014)60 Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.11 Fig. 14: Helicopter view of the Fun Palace, c. 1964

Fig. 13: Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price


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unidentified personal needs and desires.

'What time is it? Any time of day or night, winter or summer – it really doesn’t matter. If it’s too wet that roof will stop the rain but not the light. The artificial cloud will keep you cool or make rainbows for you. Your feet will be warm as you watch the stars – the atmosphere clear as you join in the chorus. Why not have your favourite meal high up where you can watch the thunderstorm?'61

With admiration towards his good friend Bucky,62 who was probably the only (non-) architect he had ever truly acknowledged, Price pushed Fuller’s idea of controlling an environment through a gigantic geodesic envelope even further. 'I think one of the early clues that Cedric was different from other architects was that he saw something in Bucky that none of the others did', admitted James Meller.63 By applying new technologies, Price successfully eliminated conventional physical barriers one by one. While adjustable sky blinds would cover this giant living toy, protecting it from the rain, the vapour and warm-air barriers would eliminate the need for external walls, waiting only for the users to start performing.64

'No need to look for an entrance – just walk in anywhere. No doors, foyers, queues or commissionaires: it’s up to you how you use it. Look around – take a lift, a ramp, an escalator to wherever or whatever looks interesting. Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune.'65

61 Fun palace brochure draft quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.136-13762 Price always refered to Buckminster Fuller as Bucky63 James Meller, Interview with the author, 1999 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.3464 Nicola Mongelli, ‘The Fun Palace, A Curtain That Never Rose’, http://www.n-plus.us/html2/fun1.html (Accessed September 2014)65 Text extract from original blueprints of the Fun Palace quoted in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), p.30 Fig. 17: the Fun Palace on Lea River site, Mill Meads, c. 1964

Fig. 15, 16: Plan of structural system & cross-section through the Fun Palace, 1963-1964


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Fig. 18: Interior perspective of the Fun Palace, c. 1964


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It didn’t take long for Price to realize that in order to predict and facilitate possible future events in the so-called 'laboratory of fun', the Fun Palace would not only require the ability to memorise to behavioural patterns of the users, but would also need to be built upon a self-regulated and self-correcting system without yet a defined end-state.66

Alice: 'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' Cheshire Cat: 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.'67

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND BY LEWIS CARROLL

In contrast to his personal working environment that was permanently stuffed with outdated technology,68 Price grounded the Fun Palace project on a unique synthesis of cybernetics, game theory, and cutting edge computer technologies. At the same time as Norbert Wiener’s principles in cybernetics contributed to the regulation of the unstable short-term behaviour of day-to-day activities, Price applied John von Neumann’s mathematical game theory to control a long-term performance of what he had already named the 'anti-building'.69 The content of the Fun Palace was, to a great extent, similar to what was understood as a computer program: 'an array of algorithmic functions and logical gateways that control temporal processes in a virtual device'.70 The result was a thrilling 'indeterminate participatory open-ended situation'71 in which anything could happen.

Well, almost anything: that is to say, anything apart from the Fun Palace actually being built. Even if the project was originally envisioned for East London, Price was open-minded regarding where it could be erected and had 66 Stanley Mathews, ‘The Fun Palace: Cedric Price’s experiment in architecture and technology’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 3 (2) (2005), http://www.bcchang.com/transfer/articles/2/18346584.pdf (Accessed August 2014)67 Lewis Carroll, ‘Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland’, (Cambridge: Penguin Classics, 2012)68 Will Alsop, ‘Flight of fancy’, The Guardian online (2005), http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jun/18/architecture (Accessed May 2014)69 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.7470 Stanley Mathews, ‘The Fun Palace: Cedric Price’s experiment in architecture and technology’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 3 (2) (2005), http://www.bcchang.com/transfer/articles/2/18346584.pdf (Accessed August 2014)71 Reyner Banham, ‘Software Hardware’, 1969 quoted in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.212

developed a smaller-scale pilot project for the London Borough of Camden along the way. Sadly, prevailing political and economical circumstances made their final foreclosure, soullessly leaving both projects as mere relics ready to be recycled.

Although the colossal legacy of the Fun Palace has come to be predominantly correlated with the high-tech aesthetics and utilisation of technology72 – nailing, once again, 'oh what an interesting gadget'73 onto Price’s name – Price had never seen technology as an end in itself.74

72 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.17673 Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 08.08.201474 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.242


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04 TECHNOLOGY IS THE ANSWER… BUT WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?75

'Philosopher, sir?''An observer of human nature, sir', said Mr. Pickwick76

THE PICKWICK PAPERS BY CHARLES DICKENS77

The Oxford dictionary states that architecture is 'The art or practice of designing and constructing buildings',78 however Cedric Price seemed to disagree. For Price architecture 'should have little to do with problem solving – rather it should create desirable conditions and opportunities hitherto thought impossible'.79 This fundamental statement was a radical challenge to the narrow understanding of what architecture is and should be.

'I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then.'80

ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND BY LEWIS CARROLL

Believing in architecture that does not solely increase the amenity value of existing situations, but most importantly enables greater variety of choice and adjustment,81 relationship between entities of 'the built' and of 'the housed' was of a great importance to Price. One could not change without altering another. Therefore, to maintain a valid role in a constantly 75 Title from Cedric Price ‘Technology Is The Answer But What Was The Question? lecture, 1979 76 Charles Dickens, ‘The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club’ (also known as The Pickwick Papers), 1836 quoted in Wish We Were Here - Cedric Price: mental notes, Architecture Association, London, 05.03.2001-26.3.200177 Price held 16 copies of The Pickwick Papers at home, with one copy especially reserved for traveling ’Cedric Price endlessly made his life partner Eleanor Bron read the Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens. He liked the way in which it expressed the idea of place, idea of traveling.’Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 08.08.201478 Oxford dictionaries online, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/architecture (Accessed March 2014)79 Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.9280 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/books/alice-in-wonderland-quotes.html (Accessed August 2014)81 Cedric Price, ‘Planning for pleasure’ in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.61

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changing society Price encouraged a continuous application of 'anticipatory architecture'.82 It was his call for architecture that liberates rather than restricts, that enables activities that were, as yet, socially undefined and could, at any moment, facilitate change.

As such, the Fun Palace should be observed as a large shipyard facilitating a constant flux of social activities,83 in which a role of the immediate ad hoc designer is given to its users. 'Better than I thought. It’s not just roundabout and swing. It’s the fun of learning',84 admitted labour politician Ian Mikardo. Price did design a mechanically operated environment fitting to whatever is going to play out next,85 but it was always about the latter and not the first. Although his passion for gantries, classes of space frames and escalators – probably none of which are as necessary as he makes them – will keep a valid argument of a completely consistent aesthetics still open.86 'If you are going for non aesthetic, that is already aesthetic, isn’t it?' commented Steven Mullin in answer to the same argument.87 By implementing self-regulating organic processes and computer codes, Price created a condition where newly established Homo ludens88 could break away from the everyday existence and start an ad lib journey of endless learning, creativity and fun, with freedom to withdraw at any moment. When the media began to request plans and details of the project, Price initially declared there were none, characterising the Fun Palace as only a 'kit of parts, not a building'.89 82 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cedric Price, The Conversation Series (Köln: Walther König, 2009), p.13683 Stanley Mathews, ‘The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture’, Journal of Architectural Education 59 (3) (2006), http://cast.b-ap.net/arc619f11/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2011/09/mathews-FunPalace.pdf (Acessed August 2014)84 Ian Mikardo in Joan Littlewood, ‘Joan’s Book’, 1994 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.8485 Stanley Mathews, ‘The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture’, Journal of Architectural Education 59 (3) (2006), http://cast.b-ap.net/arc619f11/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2011/09/mathews-FunPalace.pdf (Acessed August 2014)86 ‘I don’t think there is any refusal of aesthetics of Price, there is a very strong aesthetic. If you look at his archive all he did are publications. The aesthetic is kind of anti-aesthetic but it is completely consistent.’Author interview with Dr. Barnabas Calder, historian of architecture specializing in British architecture since 1945; curator of the ‘Cedric Price: Think the Unthinkable’ exhibition, 13.08.201487 Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office 1964-1969, 17.09.201488 Homo Ludens (Man the Player) is a book written by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga in 1938. It discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society, suggesting that playing is primary and necessary condition. 89 Joan Littlewood, ‘Joan’s Book’, 1994 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.75

Fig. 18

04 Technology is the answer... but what was the question?

Fig. 19, 20: ‘Participation say what ?’ performance, Royal College of Art WIP Show, 13.02.2014Lavinia Scaletti and Rosa Rogina with assistance of Zarya Vrabcheva, Rodrigo García González and Paul Boldeanu

The performance - scripted from existing quotations - imagined Cedric Price, Chantal Mouffe, Markus Miessen, Doina Petrescu and Jeanne van Heeswijk discussing alternative ways of participation.

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In contrast to Vitruvius’s ideal of 'a harmonious design that requires nothing be added or taken away', Price’s Fun Palace was a festival of the human spirit, fully tailored to suit the changing attitudes of a common man.

'The only way of proving you have a mind is by changing it occasionally.'90

'The problem was that people are used to looking at buildings and assessing them as objects rather than seeing their potential, wanting to know how the building might look. But it certainly won’t look like that tomorrow and not how it did yesterday. You have occupants that change and the building is designed to change with them, it might be one thing this month and a completely different thing next month. That was what Cedric was about', explaines Crompton.91

In his probably best-known realised project, Snowdon Aviary at the London Zoo,92 through usage of tension cables, point supports and moving joints, Price enabled the movement of the wind to completely alter the structure. Consequentially, this obstacle-free volume manifested what Price believed were dominant functions of architecture: spontaneity, change, joy and delight.93 As it was designed for a community of birds, Price imagined that once the community was established, the netting would have to be removed. He claimed it was only necessary to be there long enough for the birds to start feeling at home, and was sure once they do, they would not leave anyway.94 With the same anxiety, as of seeing the aviary completed, Price praised the newspaper announcement that 'unlike the Gorilla House and Penguin Pool95 which had gone through a public rethinking, the aviary 90 Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.21491 Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group, 11.08.201492 The London Aviary was designed by Cedric Price, engineer Frank Newby and Lord Snowdon in 1964.93 Cedric Price ‘Technology Is The Answer But What Was The Question?, 1979, lecture transcript http://architecture-blog.pidgeondigital.com/excerpt-from-a-talk-by-cedric-price-in-1979/ (Accessed July 2014)94 Will Alsop, ‘Flight of fancy’, The Guardian online (2005), http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jun/18/architecture (Accessed May 2014)95 The Gorilla House (1932-1934) and the Penguin Pool (1934-1936) at London Zoo were designed by the Russian architect Berthold Lubetkin. Soon the Penguin Pool became a landmark of early modern architecture in England. Those two realisations led Lubetkin to design a series of zoological projects at Regents Park, Whipsnade and Dudley over the 1930s. English Heritage website, http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/caring/listing/heritage-centenary/landmark-listings/penguin-pool) Fig. 22: Author visiting the Snowdon Aviary, London Zoo, 2014

Fig. 21: Model of the Snowdon Aviary, London Zoo, c.1961


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can no longer be filled with the birds for which it was designed'. 'Correction!' he gleefully added. 'The real users for whom it was designed have changed their viewing appetites'.96

'The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.'97

WERNER HEISENBERG

Price’s work was a continuous stand against over-determined normative architectural practice which, he argued, had resulted in 'the safe solution and the dull practitioner', by trying to 'get it right the first time.'98 To a great extent, he accepts chance as an essential element of human existence and believed in an architecture that gains from its failures and imperfections throughout the time.99 Through his Heraclitean view of post-industrial society, Price advocated the principle of 'calculated uncertainty', endorsing the creation of indeterminate structures that can be altered, transformed or demolished when socially irrelevant.100

'Calculated uncertainty didn’t mean you wouldn’t have to make up your mind, it meant you were about to take sensible risks.'101

STEVEN MULLIN

For that reason, the most enjoyable thing for Price about a café he designed for Blackpool Zoo, in 1970s, was not an idea of somebody having a coffee there, but the fact of its eventual transformation to a giraffe house after the café would be proven as irrelevant.102 Evidently time played an essential role

96 Cedric Price, ‘Snacks by Cedric Price’ in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), Snack n.09 97 Werner Heisenberg, ‘On the Perceptual Content of Quantum Theoretical Kinematics and Mechanics’, 1927 in Manolopoulou, Yeoryia. ‘The Active Voice of Architecture: An Introduction to the Idea of Chance’, Field: 1 (1) (2007), http://www.field-journal.org/uploads/file/2007_Volume_1/y%20manolopoulou.pdf (Accessed July 2014)98 Cedric Price, Works II, 1984 quoted in Stanley Mathews, ‘The Fun Palace as VirtualArchitecture’, Journal of Architectural Education (2006), http://cast.b-ap.net/arc619f11/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2011/09/mathews-FunPalace.pdf (Acessed August 2014)99 Manolopoulou, Yeoryia. ‘The Active Voice of Architecture: An Introduction to the Idea of Chance’, Field: 1 (1) (2007), http://www.field-journal.org/uploads/file/2007_Volume_1/y%20manolopoulou.pdf (Accessed July 2014)100 Cedric Price in Rowan Wilken, ‘Calculated Uncertainty: Computers, Chance Encounters, and ‘Community’ in the Work of Cedric Price’, Transformations journal 14 (2007)101 Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office 1964-1969, 17.09.2014102 Will Alsop, ‘Flight of fancy’, The Guardian online (2005), http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jun/18/architecture (Accessed May 2014)


in his work: 'Inbuilt flexibility or its alternative, planned obsolescence, can be satisfactorily achieved only if the time factor is included as an absolute design factor'.103 Price’s great interest in fields such as oceanography, deep-sea mining and transport undoubtedly aroused his interest in the precision of timing.104 In 1914, Antonio Sant’Elia made a revolutionary statement that 'things will endure less than us' and therefore 'every generation must build its own city'.105 Yet Price went one step further. By the term 'time', he did not refer to decades or years; it was about months, weeks or even hours. He was a firm believer that buildings, as with any other tool in our daily use, have a finite life span, solely serving the need of their time: 'The possession of a mobile phone is as useful as an abacus in a rocking boat – neither has a use for a wrong number'.106 Furthermore, Price paid great attention to prevent architecture of being fossilised and rejected preservation or the value of 'heritage' for its own sake. When asked in one radio interview what he would do about the medieval landmark, York Minster, his response was 'Flatten it'.107 It is important to understand that his paradoxical answer was not a throwaway one-liner with an aim of provoking. It was about eliciting a response and his remark that buildings should not outlive their own social relevance.108

'Burn what you love, love what you burn.'109

In his initial scheme for the Inter-Action Centre in Kentish Town,110 a vastly

103 Cedric Price, Fun Palace, 1965 quoted in Arata Isozaki, ‘Erasing Architecture into the System’, 1975 in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), p.33-34104 Author interview with Samantha Hardingham, architectural writer and editor, worked on several books and publications on Cedric Price, 13.07.2014105 Antonio Sant’Elia ‘Manifesto of futurist Architecture’, 1914 in Umbro Apollonio ‘Futurist Manifestos’ (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p.172106 Cedric Price, ‘Snacks by Cedric Price’ in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), Snack n.07107 David Allford, ‘The creative Iconoclast’ in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.7108 Cedric Price, ‘Anticipating the future’, 1981 in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.67109 The slogan was originally derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?’ 110 Price’s Inter-Action Centre, erected in Kentish Town, dates from 1977. It was a multi-purpose community resource center with the construction based on an open framework of modular elements that could be easily altered or replaced whenever it would necessary.

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Fig. 23: Aerial view of the Inter-Action Centre, Kentish Town, 1977

Fig. 24: Main hall with electric doorway half opened, Inter-Action Centre, 1977


scaled-down and simplified version of the Fun Palace project, Price produced a client’s manual explaining how the building should be dismantled and its components recycled,111 what one critic later described as 'something like a euthanasia guide and donor card rolled into one'.112 To Price, it was indubitable that the process of demolition is of the same importance as the process of construction, and he was the only architect to be a fully qualified member of the National Institute of Demolition Contractors.113 Toward the very end of his career, when the Inter-Action Centre was in the process of being listed, Price did not only prevent English Heritage from preserving the building, he also steadfastly claimed that the centre was designed as a short-term facility, which had already outlived its planned life span, and should therefore be demolished and replaced with something of greater immediate relevance.114 The demolition was carried out in 2003, shortly after Price’s death.

With further reference to the aforementioned aviary project, one could argue that the sensitive treatment of the structure and its unique layout that envelops both the observers and the observed, grants Price status as a formative genius. However, Price was already for a long time driving along a different road, diverging in all directions away from what was then considered architectural terrain.115 It seems he always marched towards what could be interpreted as non-design.116 One that, in the words of Rem Koolhaas, 'dismantle[s] one by one the most holy ambitions of an unquestioned profession',117 making it disappear into an unconventional system more pertinent to up-to-date social demands. As a firm believer that building was not always the most appropriate antidote, Price virtuously

111 Rowan Wilken, Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (New York, Oxon: Routledge 2011), p.103112 Rowan Wilken, ‘Calculated Uncertainty: Computers, Chance Encounters, and “Community” in the Work of Cedric Price’, Transformations Journal (14), 2007. http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_14/article_04.shtml (Accessed August 2014)113 Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group, 11.08.2014114 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.191115 Arata Isozaki, ‘Erasing Architecture into the System’, 1975 in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), p.25116 Ibid. p.45117 Rem Koolhaas in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), p.45

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managed to propose non-architectural solutions to apparently architectural problems.118 On certain occasions, he would prefer to advise his clients to do nothing. In one of his conversations with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Price claimed that sometimes the best technical advice to the client might be, instead of building a house, to suggest a divorce. 'How little need to be done?' should be the designer’s first query, was Price’s view.119

'Cedric was involved in something better than building, because it involved challenging the idea of what it was you wanted to build and why.'120

PAUL FINCH

'Although I think the answers he provides are very often entirely unconvincing, the questions that he asks are extremely good, they can be absolutely first grade'121 explaines Professor Barnabas Calder. If it is to be understood, Price’s work has to be observed as a continuous problem-understanding and question-asking process, which results with possession of almost no arbitrary formal allegiances.122 His enduring influence was partially lying in his nature of questioning; after identifying a problem, he would formulate precise question to induce the right response. So if technology was the answer, what was the fundamental question behind Price’s architectural approach?

The relation between human and machine appeared to be widely examined throughout the 1960s, but what distinguished Price from Archigram or any other was his unique understanding of technology as an integral part of life. Unlike other architects, he was not trying to create a new reality or a futuristic solution for tomorrow. He was constantly thinking about the

118 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.41119 Cedric Price, ‘Snacks by Cedric Price’ in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), Snack n.14120 Paul Finch, editor of Architectural Review, talking at Supercrit#1 event, 2003 in Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Supercrit#1 Cedric Price - Potteries Thinkbelt (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), p.73 121 Author interview with Dr. Barnabas Calder, historian of architecture specializing in British architecture since 1945; curator of the ‘Cedric Price: Think the Unthinkable’ exhibition, 13.08.2014122 Royston Landau, New Directions in British Architecture, 1968 quoted in Arata Isozaki, ‘Erasing Architecture into the System’, 1975 in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), p.27


present, man of the 1960s, here and now. As a lifelong Socialist, Price was a firm believer in architecture as an instrument of social improvement and of an architect as an ethical mediator or a social engineer. Hence, both variables of a question and of a response were never about the building itself. Similarly to Moholy-Nagy’s ideology of 'Not the product, but man, is the end in view', it was about the potential of human well-being and the quality of life.123 Shortly before his death Price confessed to Stanley Mathews: 'It wasn’t about technology. It was about people'124 In the same manner in which Price opened one of his lectures at the Architectural Association, I would like to conclude this chapter by adding that: it was about an architect’s duty to society through 'Designing for Doubt, Delight and Demolition',125 with emphasis on delight!

123 Katarine Heron talking at Supercrit#1 event, 2003 in Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Supercrit#1 Cedric Price - Potteries Thinkbelt (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), p.57124Cedric Price, Interview with the author, 2000 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.257125 Term taken from Cedric Price, ‘Designing for Doubt, Delight and Demolition - the architect’s duty to the society’ lecture, Architectural Association (3 June 1994)

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05 EVERY ENGLISH SCHOOLBOY IS IN LOVE WITH TRAINS126

'What is the value of it now – what is useful about it now – what is useful about it now, for you?'127

'English architects are in love with universities' stated in the Introduction of the Architecture Review in January 1965. Sussex, Warwick, Essex, York, Keele; it was the decade of a real 'university boom'. If one says that English architects in the mid-1960s were in love with universities, we could easily argue that Cedric Price was simultaneously making a critique of what had become an imprisoned way of thinking about what a university is.128 Although dominantly described as groundbreaking, Price considered newly risen institutions solely as 'dressed up medieval colleges with power points',129 not taking in account social change that had occurred all over Britain. In his opinion, instead of following present trends and obsessions with physical monumentality and the symbolism of academia, architects should be more interested in challenging present premises of convention and tradition in education: 'When the next round of university building starts, perhaps we should treat education less as a polite cathedral-town amenity'.130 Consequentially, in the spirit of his long-lasting manifesto for education, 1966 brought one of Price’s most remarkable projects.

The Potteries Thinkbelt was a call for the conversion of a deprived wasteland

126 Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 08.08.2014127 Cedric Price answering the question if he would consider presenting Potteries Thinkbelt, around year 2002. Samantha Hardingham, ‘Preview’ in Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Supercrit#1 Cedric Price - Potteries Thinkbelt (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), p.11128 Paul Balker talking at Supercrit#1 event, 2003 in Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Supercrit#1 Cedric Price - Potteries Thinkbelt (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), p.71129 Cedric Price, ‘Life-Conditioning’, Architectural Design No 36 (October 1966), p.483130 Cedric Price and Paul Barker, ‘The Potteries Thinkbelt’, 1966 in Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Supercrit#1 Cedric Price - Potteries Thinkbelt (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), p.17

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into a 'High Tech think-tank'.131 Unlike other architects, Price’s vision of an appropriate site for a contemporary institute for education was not a city centre, nor a green edge of a desirable medieval town. 'I doubt the relevance of the concepts of town centre, town and balanced community. Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me.'132

'I met Cedric in 1988 as he was a critic on my final jury at the Architectural Association. I had only received a very classical training in architectural history and was not convinced that my design project for a theatre based on and around the disused railway network and stations near Oxford was in fact architecture. I had no idea about the Potteries Thinkbelt; my architecture history course stopped at 1900. He assured me it was architecture and so I never looked back.'133

SAMANTHA HARDINGHAM

Situated in North Staffordshire, not far away from Stone where he was born in 1934, the Potteries were definitely Cedric’s territory. Redundant rail infrastructure, deteriorated vacant factories and rusty machinery: it was hard to believe that this derelict industrial landscape was, for a long time, the heart of the English ceramics industry. After being heavily hit by the post-war economic crisis, North Staffordshire’s pottery suddenly diminished. Knowing the area from his earliest age, Price didn’t believe in the revival of Potteries dilapidated industries. Yet he found an underused rail network and a population of thousands of unemployed industrial workers to have great potential for establishing an alternative education system.134

'Unquestionably his most intimate project and it is not what it seems like. It is far more complex on a personal level. Once you realise Cedric Price came from just about three miles away from there, you kind of start to appreciate 131 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.195132 Cedric Price, ‘Live-conditioning’, Architectural Design 36 (October 1966), p.483133 Author interview with Samantha Hardingham, architectural writer and editor; worked on several books and publications on Cedric Price, 13.07.2014134 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.206

05 Every English schoolboy is in love with trains

the personal relationships with the landscape, and the desire to see that landscape breathe in a way that it wasn’t doing. Although he would have killed me for saying this.' 135

TIM ABRAHAMS

One might imagine that a person whose favourite book was Dickens’ Pickwick Papers would envision that same landscape through a set of warm and nostalgic scenes, but Price 'never used two lines when one would do'.136 Enriched only with self-critical afterthoughts,137 each of Price’s drawings was treated as a rhetoric device where joy and tangible beauty were exactly in 'their quite deliberate incompleteness'.138 'One thing about his projects is that they teach you to draw damn well!' admitted Steven Mullin.139

At the same time, the name of the project was scrupulously chosen: on the one hand to liberate the proposal from all generic preconceptions of building type or programme and on the other to emphasise the peculiarities of the design to be encountered.140 It was not intended to be a university but a scheme for a new regional educational network where technical education was to become a new prime industry, and technical knowledge a key production good. It was not by chance that the word 'university' was left out from the title as it was still mainly associated with elitism, prestige, and outdated education topics. In the words of one of his sympathisers: 'There still exists a kind of intellectual snobbery that pays greater respect to the man who misquotes Horace than the man who can repair his own car'.141 135 Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture 08.08.2014136 ‘His drawings always extend the prose – even when it was his own – rather than merely clarifying it. Never using two lines when one would do, the mere addition of two dots – eye pupils – could introduce the whole range of human reflexes into an otherwise natural pudding face.’ This was actually Cedric writing about friend and cartoonist Nicholas Bentley but I think that Cedric might have been proud to have his own talents recognized in this way.’Transcript of Samanta Hardingham’s talk at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition: Fundamentals, Venice (June 2014)137 Ibid.138 Ibid.139 Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office 1964-1969, 17.09.2014140 Samantha Hardingham, ‘Preview’ in Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Supercrit#1 Cedric Price - Potteries Thinkbelt (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), p.12141 Passage from one of the Lord Aberdare’s essays highlighted by Cedric Price, quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.198

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Fig. 27: Overleaf photomontage of Madeley transfer area, Potteries Thinkbelt, 1966

Fig. 25: the North Staffordshire Potteries, c. 1963

Fig. 26: Site Plan of the Potteries Thinkbelt, showing main routes and areas, 1965


Education in the Potteries Thinkbelt became part of everyday life, a lifelong activity and as much a real community asset as a reliable supply of drinking water.142 It was an idea that was deeply rooted in Price’s leftist upbringing, fuelled by a strong sense of political activism and concerns for working class issues.

Considering the ubiquitous concept of a centralised campus outdated, Cedric Price proposed an alternative: a network of mobile classrooms and laboratories. As a response to the rapid change and the unpredictability of future educational needs, the Potteries Thinkbelt was a flexible, indeterminate and infinitely extendable schooling infrastructure.143 That variability ceased the permanence of disciplines that might only have been relevant at the time of design and enabled adjustments to the continually evolving programme and curriculum. Furthermore, Price erased conventional boundaries between living and working. Using students as a prototype for the future living patterns of an increasingly mobile society, Price implemented a dispersed mesh of living units that could be easily deployed, moved or transformed whenever necessary. Even though most of Price’s earlier projects already utilised the idea of impermanence and 'architecture of enabling',144 they were still modest both in scope and scale. The Potteries Thinkbelt encompassed his broader understanding of architecture and what it might accomplish on a larger urban and social scale. According to Price, it was absolutely necessary for advanced education to be knitted into greater ethical, political and social issues, transforming not just the physical presence of the area but also every aspect of life.145 For that reason, young students, retraining workers, teachers and thousands of newly employed workers in the support industries became the main nodes in a constant flux between high education, existing industry and living.

142 Cedric Price, ‘Live-conditioning’, 1966 in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.20143 Royston Landau, ‘A Philosophy of Enabling’ in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.13144 From authors title, Royston Landau ‘A Philosophy of Enabling’ in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.9-15145 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.211

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Inspired and controlled by emergent computer and information technologies, the Thinkbelt project was an interactive network of both static and mobile components. Apart from the retained rail infrastructure, existing roads and few remaining factories, the proposal introduced only three additional fixed nodes within the network. 'Transfer Areas' were places for assembling, connecting and moving modular teaching and housing units with variable functions.146

'The drawings that came through to me, early as the morning, were immensely heroic and beautiful. But the passion for construction was evident. Quite a lot of the things, like Transfer Areas – which were basically big monsters – were lovely to design in detail, just a bit more than it was needed.'147

STEVEN MULLIN

Price readopted the method of shipping industries, treating architecture modules as industrial containers moved by massive cranes.148 However, Price didn’t think of the abandoned rail infrastructure as simply a rearrangement apparatus. On the contrary, using the technologies of prefabrication he designed mobile rail-mounted classrooms, laboratories, libraries and computer and data storage modules, which were intended to be continuously in motion. By constantly being on move, the Potteries Thinkbelt was environmental collage determined by 'events in time rather than objects in space'.149 Students could leave their homes in the morning, board the mobile classrooms, and learn while their classroom moved along the Potteries Thinkbelt rail circuit. They could easily travel between laboratories, factories and experimental stations spread around the area, returning to their modular homes by the end of the day.

146 Cedric Price, ‘Live-conditioning’, Architectural Design 36 (October 1966), p.483147 Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office 1964-1969, 17.09.2014148 Cedric Price, ‘Live-conditioning’, Architectural Design 36 (October 1966), p.483149 Stanley Mathews, ‘The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture’, Journal of Architectural Education 59 (3) (2006), http://cast.b-ap.net/arc619f11/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2011/09/mathews-FunPalace.pdf (Acessed August 2014)

Fig. 28: Photomontage of Madeley transfer area, Potteries Thinkbelt, 1966‘For transfer areas we photographed the actual site and I quite liked the idea of drawing over it so the building

appeared through the existing thing’ ,Steven Mullin in conversation with the author


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'There is another train coming along even if we missed this one.'150

In the above quote, Price created a clear juxtaposition between predictability and unpredictability. The predictability relates to there being another train approaching, contrasting with the unpredictability of where the first train was going to.151

Although the 1960s may have appeared to be an optimistic decade with an endless range of possibilities, not everything was accepted by those who were in power. With the Thinkbelt project Price was cautious not to make the same mistake as he had made with the Fun Palace, where the lack of a precise form or rigid definition meant the idea of a leisure 'palace' devoted to 'fun' was easily declined. Proposing not only an answer to in-demand educational reform, but also solutions to the widespread crisis of high unemployment and an underused, derelict industrial area, he was expecting to be taken more seriously this time.152 Well-connected Price wisely collaborated with the person who later ended up being the chairman of the Open University,153 a project that was devised at around the same time as the Potteries Thinkbelt. Also he was very good at picking clients; they did not pick him, instead he would pick them.154 Yet for the Thinkbelt project he refused to impose on himself one. By the end of the 1960s, when the Open University was already 'on air', Price got outweighed by less radical solutions for the seemingly same questions and was once again easily disposed of in the utopian dustbin.

'This is when it becomes a strange parallel where you see him actually working out how it will be built, which train lines were underused and when 150 Hans Ulrich Obrist, Cedric Price, The Conversation Series (Köln: Walther König, 2009), p.75151 Cedric Price in conversation with Hans Urlich Obrist, 2000 in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), p.75-76152 Stanley Mathews, From Agit Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.225153 ‘The Open University was the world’s first successful distance teaching university. Born in the 1960s, the ‘White Heat of Technology’ era, the Open University was founded on the belief that communications technology could bring high quality degree-level learning to people who had not had the opportunity to attend campus universities’, http://www.mcs.open.ac.uk/ (Accessed March 2014)154 Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office 1964-1969, 17.09.2014


they might be cut. To point where he’s got a quite reasonable proposal, but the stage between that and having something that you can actually start to build is completely missing.'155

DR. BARNABAS CALDER

'It was an accident of not going through as much as anything else. At no time did he ever think 'oh this is not going anywhere!' If he had thought that, he would have dropped it like a stone'156 explains Steven Mullin, who at that time worked for Price.

'Oh yes…but what you could do is this!' indubitably epitomizes Price. He always went beyond his briefs, at all times taking it too far and ultimately jeopardising his own projects.157 However, Price knew exactly where the wind was blowing and there was always a deeper social significance embedded. Something was about to happen.158

155 Author interview with Dr. Barnabas Calder, historian of architecture specializing in British architecture since 1945; curator of the ‘Cedric Price: Think the Unthinkable’ exhibition, 13.08.2014156 Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office 1964-1969, 17.09.2014157 Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture 08.08.2014158 Ibid.

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06 CHERRY SOUP, WIENER SCHNITZEL WITH EGG ON THE TOP AND BLUEBERRY PUDDING

'Most people came to work for Cedric by word of mouth, there was no official hiring and firing procedure, people sort of drifted in and drifted out when they had enough', remembers Steven Mullin. 'I was fairly hungry of smell of fresh concrete in my nose; I wasn’t getting bored, I was getting frustrated. It could be frustrating working for Cedric because you approach something you nearly got there and then – whoop – a second after, it is gone'. 159

'Excuse me, could I speak with Mr. Price?''Sorry, Mr. Price is in East Grinstead this morning.'160

Price was constantly meeting people – everybody whom he found interesting, from Princess Margaret down – which resulted in a very wide range of people constantly moving through his office.161 The White room, which Price for unknown reason named 'East Grinstead', occupied the top floor and was reserved for special guests or, even better, just himself.

'Incredible working style. He [Price] got up quite early and worked furiously until 1pm and then went to The Gay Hussar for a very large lunch followed by brandy and the rest of the day was gone – but that was how Cedric worked.'162

PETER HALL

'Table for one please.'My sentence was followed by a moment of silence with an almost soundless '…pardon?' accompanying it in the very end. The waiter standing in front of me slowly tilted his head. I had to repeat. 159 Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office 1964-1969, 17.09.2014160 Ibid.161 Ibid.162 Peter Hall, Interview with the author, Kieran Mahon, ‘Tracing the Quiet Anarchy’, p.49 http://www.academia.edu/1786887/Tracing_the_Quiet_Anarchy (Accessed May 2014)

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'Yes you heard correctly, it is a table for one tonight.' 'Oh yes, yes my apologies… Please follow me.'

Shortly afterwards, I was accompanied to my table on the first floor. Along the way many different familiar faces started to poke out. From Tony Blair to Karl Marx, every single corner of the restaurant’s hallway was plastered with old memories, gradually revealing a magnificent narrative embedded within the walls. Noisy wooden stairs, red tapestry, a dark jewel-hued atmosphere: was I revisiting the 1960s?

Not that long time ago, an article in The Telegraph had the words: 'Selling 'an important national institution', the Hungarian restaurant in Soho frequented for decades by Labour politicians and Left-wingers is up for sale – will its old-fashioned menu survive?'163 After going through numerous similar media headlines I was actually delighted to see the same shabby front entrance still in its place.

Declaring itself as England’s only Hungarian restaurant, The Gay Hussar was not merely another Soho’s 'place to be', nor was its culinary excellence the restaurant’s raison d’être. From its opening in 1953, The Gay Hussar was particularly known as the left-leaning’s London canteen. Located not far away from Wardour Street, where, prior to the Second World War, Hungarians had established a very creative presence in the British Film Industry,164 the restaurant never solely sheltered the uprising Hungarian film circles or war refugees from the troubled world of Eastern Europe. It was, and remains, a real shrine to London’s political scene of the last 60 years. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, which made a significant impact on the British Left, the restaurant’s daily tittle-tattles accompanied the initiation of what was to be called 'The New Left'. With a stage of endless pacts and backstabbing, throughout decades, The Gay Hussar was

163 Tom Rowley, ‘Can the conservatives save the Gay Hussar, Labour’s canteen?’, The Telegraph online (2013) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/restaurants/10508426/Can-the-conservatives-save-the-Gay-Hussar-Labours-canteen.html?mobile=basic (Accessed May 2014)164 Barry Curtis, Email message to author (July 2014) Fig. 29: The Gay Hussar restaurant - front entrance, 2 Greek Street, London

06 Cherry soup, Wiener Schnitzel with egg on the top, and blueberry pudding

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Fig. 31: The Gay Hussar menu

Fig. 30: Interior of the restaurant, first floor saloon


a hotbed of intellectual plotting and up-to-the-minute rumours. Its cuisine was famously enjoyed by the custom of figures such as Roy Hattersley and Barbara Castle.165 However, a 'reserved' note on the second table from the window didn’t just mean somebody was coming; it meant Cedric Price is on his way to the restaurant.166

After ordering a glass of white house wine, I noticed that the staples of The Guy Hussar menu have not altered since the early 1950s. Goulash, crispy roast duck with cabbage, poppy seed strudel and vanilla ice cream: everything seemed to be in its place. Regardless, it was time to order what Cedric would go for. But is there anybody here who was there all those decades ago? Is there anybody who still remembers him?

'Of course I remember Mr. Price, he was our favourite customer. We loved him and miss him. Each time he would order cherry soup, Wiener Schnitzel with egg on the top and blueberry pudding.'167

SHELIM

I closed the menu.'The same please.'

Cedric Price often used food metaphors when speaking about architecture, analogising both processes in terms of consumption. But more importantly and beyond everything, Cedric was a pure food enthusiast. In 2003, The Independent characterized his lifestyle as 'modest, food and drink apart'.168 Saturday lunch with his life partner Eleanor Bron,169 early dinner with his like-minded architecture fellows or late drinks with various individuals that had 165 Tom Rowley, ‘Can the conservatives save the Gay Hussar, Labour’s canteen?’, The Telegraph online (2013) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/restaurants/10508426/Can-the-conservatives-save-the-Gay-Hussar-Labours-canteen.html?mobile=basic (Accessed May 2014)166 Author interview with Shelim, waiter in The Gay Hussar restaurant, 30.05.2014167 Ibid.168 ‘Cedric Price: Architect-thinker who built little but whose influence was talismanic’, The Independent online (2003), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/cedric-price-36932.html (Accessed March 2014)169 Eleanor Bron is an English stage, film and television actress and was Price’s life partner. ‘Eleanor is still most loyal fan of him [Price]’ commented Tim Abrahams.‘Cedric found in Eleanor somebody who was his bench in every sense of the word.’Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office 1964-1969, 17.09.2014

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gained his respect throughout the time, it didn’t matter, as long as there was a delectable meal followed by a substantial discussion and few brandies – preferably doubled.

In the 1970s, Price accompanied Archigram and James Stirling for a workshop in Delft. As the university did not have great tutoring fees, in the purely Dutch spirit, they all received bikes. At the airport, on his way back, Price couldn’t put his bike with the rest of the luggage and was told to carry the bike himself. Trying to find his way out of the duty-free shop, with the bike in one hand and a bottle of brandy in another, he accidentally spilled the bottle. 'I would prefer if it had been the bike!' he shouted furiously.170 'I was surprised Cedric accepted the bike in the first place' remembers Dennis Crompton.

While I was enjoying my first bites of the Hungarian blueberry pudding, I suddenly started to understand Cedric. It was just delicious! Gradually, it made me think about the relationship between architecture and food embedded in Price’s life and work. To which degree did his gourmand nature influence his architectural approach? Were his most radical ideas of constant change and of building’s life span supported by his deep understanding of the food consumption cycle?

'If genius is the ability to convey complex information in simple images, then Price had me at the egg',171 admitted Frank Jacobs. Through the prism of an egg Cedric Price virtuously condensed the whole urban evolution into three epochs: boiled, poached and scrambled, exactly in that chronological order. Furthermore, his idea of food as an architectural tool went beyond simple architectural commentary. Price argued that principles taken from food consumption, as a time-determined action that also anticipates processes of prior preparation and later evacuation, should be an integral part of every

170 Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group, 11.08.2014171 Frank Jacobs, ‘The Eggs of Price: An Ovo-Urban Analogy’ (2011), http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/534-the-eggs-of-price-an-ovo-urban-analogy (Accessed May 2014)


architectural project.172 In which, architectural design and construction were to be understood as the process of preparation, occupation of the building as of consumption, and its eventual destruction and replacement were equalised with the processes of evacuation. It was about architecture that must be consumed, but at the same time integrated into a real production cycle, never outliving its relevance. Medieval landmark, York Minster, or his favourite meal, Wiener Schnitzel with egg on the top, it didn’t matter; the principle was the same.

It was getting late. It was time to go. Walking throughout the restaurant’s front door, back to the bustling streets of Soho, I could not stop wondering: what was the life span of The Gay Hussar for Price? Did it have one at all? 'Why bother?' I answered myself in the pure spirit of Cedric Price and continued walking.

172 Cedric Price, ’The importance of food to architecture’ lecture, 2001 in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003), Snack n.01

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Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER 07 Pre-conclusion notes

'Architectural historians can – and will - argue for the coming centuries over the quality and intent of Cedric’s drawings, about his desire to build, about his unfathomably paradoxical nature, so puzzling and improbable at times that are we sure he is not just a marvelous figment of our imaginations…? Well, hell no! – You just have to smell the drawings and you know he was the real deal.'173

SAMANTHA HARDINGHAM

173 Regardless what he was doing, Cedric Price always had a cigar in his hand leaving a recognizable smoky flavour all around him. In her speech Samantha Hardingham recalled her visit to Canadian Centre for Architecture: ‘[…]some time later up came a crisp, clean beige folder. I opened it up (now wearing the obligatory white gloves) to see what I’d got. But before I saw anything, a wonderful, knock-out waft of cigar smoke came drifting out. All was well’. Transcript of Samanta Hardingham’s talk at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition: Fundamentals, Venice (June 2014)

'I would love there to be more CedricPrices, although whether the world could stand more Cedric Prices I don’t know.'172

REYNER BANHAM

172 Reyner Banham, BBC Radio 4, 1976 quoted in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.107

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Fig. 33: Sketch of Turtlan support system enveloping hilltown site Turtlan project for Groznjan, Croatia 1990

Fig. 34: Price’s certificate of attendance‘The 2nd International Symposium of Theory and Design in the Third Machine Age’

Groznjan , Croatia, Summer 1990

07 Pre-conclusion notes

Fig. 32: Sketch section of halo with indication od function and scale Turtlan project for Groznjan, Croatia 1990

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07 CONCLUSION: WHAT I HAVE LEARNT FROM CEDRIC PRICE

In 1990, during his first visit to Croatia, Price produced a proposal for a city-scale electronic halo enveloping the medieval hilltop town of Groznjan.173 'Where and when the house needs me?' asked a mobile fragment while travelling around Turtlan’s technological support circuit. Prior to the development of pervasive Wi-Fi Internet access, ever-prophetical Price introduced a new typology of communications network, a force-field wireless system that would eliminate the necessity to build new physical infrastructure or to dismantle any existing, yet keeping the inhabitants tuned-up with the rest of the world.174

‘Such a progressive thinker, he saw what was going to happen to architecture, to architects. Unfortunately all the things he foresaw that architects would have to be challenged in, architects did not come up to that and in many ways they are playing catch up.' 175

TIM ABRAHAMS

One could argue that despite the time gap of nearly six decades, Price and a young architect of today do have something in common, as they are both children of a technological revolution. Whereas the technological promised land youthful Price had experienced was celebrating a freshly established relationship between human and machine, the technological revolution that we are confronted with seems to be slowly erasing boundaries between the same.

173 In 1990 Price attended ‘The 2nd International Symposium of Theory and Design in the Third Machine Age’ in Groznjan, Croatia (author’s country of birth), where he spent 10 days tutoring ‘Work Games’ architectural workshop. During his stay, Price designed Turtlan project for which he was later awarded on Shinkenchiku ‘Electronic House’ competition in Tokyo, Japan.174 Cedric Price / edited by Samantha Hardingham, Cedric Price: Opera (Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley-Academy, 2003), p.18175 Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 08.08.2014

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Fig. 36: Time Magazine photo-illustration, September 2014

07 Conclusion: What I have learnt from Cedric Price

Fig. 35: Mock-up of a futuristic video watch 'What about Learning?', Architectural Design; guest edited issue by Cedric Price, May 1968

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In his extensively acclaimed book The Age of Spiritual Machine, Ray Kurzweil envisioned the twenty-first century without any disparity between technology and mankind, where entities of human souls and computer chips were to be fused into one. Using a premise of artificial intelligence surpassing our brain capacity by the year 2020, Kurzweil did not simply sheathe his vague fictional predictions; rather, he drafted a grounded vision of what was inevitably flickering on the horizon.

'Apple is attempting to put technology somewhere where it’s never been particularly welcome. Like a pushy date, the Apple Watch wants to get intimate with us in a way we’re not entirely used to or prepared for. This isn’t just a new product, this is technology attempting to colonise our bodies.'176 In an age where technology tends to shift its role from the creation of pleasing human prosthesis towards conquering our own bodies, Homo ludens – that Price was designing his Fun Palace for – indubitably no longer exists. Blurring the once sharp edge of what was traditionally considered to be reality, his successor seems to migrate towards different terrains, ones of digital and virtual natures.

I was prompted to once again recall that rainy morning in the spring of 2001. I am slowly starting to revive a piece of paper that Price gave to my father. Entitled 'Cedric Price & Kresimir Rogina doing their best for the improvement of architecture', it was a drawing displaying two of them manoeuvring an old-fashioned tank. Nearly in the same manner of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point slow-motion finale, which saluted the end of consumer culture, Price and my father were hailing the last dance of run-out-of-steam architecture. Although at that point it was unquestionable that the cracked pieces penetrating through a grey dusty cloud represented broken parts of monumental relics, imposed by never-questioned conventional architecture wisdom, I begin to wonder whether it is to be read as pieces of any physical instance that architecture had to offer so far? 176 Lev Grossman, ‘How Apple Is Invading Our Bodies’, Time Magazine online (2014) http://time.com/3318655/apple-watch-2/ (Acessed September 2014) Fig. 38: Explosion, final sequence in Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1968)

Fig. 37: 'Cedric Price & Kresimir Rogina doing their best for the improvement of architecture'by Cedric Price, 24th March 2001


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fully responded to the new potentials and demands of the period he was wholeheartedly living in and envisioning for. However, I suspect that Price himself would have joined me in concluding that, fifty years later, his work is 'interesting, but slightly outdated!'177 Whilst I believe that his radical and profound contribution to reconceptualising architecture might best be understood in terms of Zhou En Lai’s comment when asked to estimate the influence of the French Revolution – 'I don’t know yet, it is too soon to tell',178 what I have actually learnt from Cedric Price is almost to forget about him, continue to live in the present and confront its timely issues, always with one eye looking forward to what is yet to come. To survive in a world regulated by new, unforeseeable and dematerialised rules of play, I need to roll up my sleeves and react to the fundamental problem of an obsolescent twenty-first-century man living in the environment that he has, himself, created. This is a tribute to one obsolescent man who attempted to respond to his own anticipated environment and may still sparkle, from time to time, with a few guardian hints about how I can proceed in mine.

177 ‘His [Price’s] library came with his archive to Canadian Centre for Architecture. In the Archive library you would call one of the books and it would have CP on it; it would be one of Price’s books and you would go to the heading and there was always a comment in the front of it. On his copy of 'Being Digital' by Nicholas Negroponte, Price’s comment was ‘Good - but dated. CP.’Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 08.08.2014178 In 1972, when Zhou En Lai (Premier of China) was asked how he estimated the impact of French Revolution, he responded instantly: ‘I don’t know yet, it is too soon to tell’.Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 08.08.2014

For a long time, it has been the case that institutions are supported not only by their built enclosures or furniture-like equipment, but also with their telecommunication systems and computer software backgrounds. As William J. Mitchell stressed in his book City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn nearly 20 years ago; the digital, electronic and virtual peculiarities of the latter have been successfully competing with traditional properties of 'four walls keeping the roof up'. In that sense, classical facades are increasingly substituted with digital interfaces, art galleries with virtual museums, and theatres with computer operated infrastructures of fun. Hospitals are gradually losing their meaning with a rise of telemedicine, just as prisons face challenges due to CCTV surveillance. Multiplicities of current social, political, economic and cultural problems have greatly moved into cyberspace, a virtual arena in which the value of digital memory becomes treated as equal to the value of land. Yet why are we, architects, fortified within remaining walls of tangible environments, still participating in acrimonious discussions of whether the roof should be pitched or flat?

–

There is always something unsatisfactory about biographies; they generally don’t seem to give you a real flavour of a character observed. For that reason, I had decided to bypass a recognised scholastic approach and started an adventure of fusing recreated circumstances, people’s reminiscences and my own attempts to empathise while re-inhabiting parts of the script. Writing made me aware how difficult it is to transmit experience, thoughts and the joy I came across only through a silent and static piece of paper. It made me think how it would be to re-tell the story using a more active and affluent media. Eight months ago, when I started my journey of comprehension – surrounded by a vague cloud of images, memory and anecdotes on Cedric Price – I envisioned this conclusion celebrating the relevance and applicability of his projects to my ongoing work and future plans. Yet it didn’t turn out that way. Researching Price has shown me how his radical visions and revolutionary proposals confronted and


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Fig. 39: Author and Cedric Price, 24th March 2001

THANK YOU CEDRIC!

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Greatest thanks to barry curtis for his endless support, encouragement, inexhaustible source of knowledge and everlasting enthusiasm on the topic.

Many thanks to dennis crompton, steven mullin, samantha hardingham, tim abrahams, dr. barnabas calder and shelim for their time, memories and thoughts shared.

Finally, huge ‘thank you’ to my parents branka and kreso and my boyfriend armor for their enduring understanding, and for accepting Cedric’s presence in our lives during the last eight months.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

Apollonio, Umbro. Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.

Banham, Reyner / selected by Banham, Mary + Barker, Paul + Lyall, Sutherland + Price, Cedric. A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham. Berkley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.

Banham, Reyner. Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: Architectural Press, 1960.

Bron, Eleanor + Hardingham, Samantha editors. Cedric Price Retriever. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2006.

Hardingham, Samantha + Rattenbury, Kester. Supercrit#1 Cedric Price - Potteries Thinkbelt. London, New York: Routledge, 2007.

Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Penguin USA, 1999.

Mathews, Stanley. From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price. London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.

William J. Mitchell. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, new edition 1996.

Obrist ,Hans Ulrich + Price, Cedric. The Conversation Series. Köln: Walther König, 2009.

Price, Cedric / edited by Hardingham, Samantha. Cedric Price: Opera. Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley-Academy, 2003.

Price, Cedric / edited by Obrist, Hans Ulrich with contributions by Isozaki, Arata + Keiller, Patrick + Koolhaas, Rem. Re:CP. Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser 2003.

Price, Cedric. Works II, Architectural Association. London: Architectural Association, 1984.

Rainey, Lawrence + Poggi, Christine + Wittman, Laura. Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

Sadler, Simon. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005.

Schrijver, Lara. Radical Games: Popping the Bubble of 1960s’ Architecture. Rotterdam, New York: NAi Publishers, 2009.

Whiteley, Nigel. Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future. London: The MIT Press, 2003.

Wilken, Rowan. Teletechnologies, Place, and Community. New York, Oxon: Routlege 2011.

… and Cedric’s all time favorites:

Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd, 1906.

Dickens, Charles. The Pickwick Papers. Reissue edition, Cambridge: Penguin Classics, 2000.

ARTICLES / JOURNALS

Banham, Reyner. ‘A Home Is Not a House.’ Art in America, 53 (2) (April 1965), p.70–79.

Banham, Reyner. ‘Machine Aesthetic.’ Architectural Review, 117 (700) (April 1955), p.225-228.

Banham, Reyner. ‘The Triumph of Software.’ New Society 12 (138) (October 1968), p.629-630.

Price, Cedric. ‘Life-Conditioning’, Architectural Design 36 (October 1966), p.483-494.

ONLINE JOURNAL ARTICLES

Manolopoulou, Yeoryia. ‘The Active Voice of Architecture: An Introduction to the Idea of Chance’, Field: 1 (1) (2007), http://www.field-journal.org/uploads/file/2007_Volume_1/y%20manolopoulou.pdf (Accessed July 2014)

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Mathews, Stanley, ‘The Fun Palace: Cedric Price’s experiment in architecture and technology’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 3 (2) (2005), http://www.bcchang.com/transfer/articles/2/18346584.pdf (Accessed August 2014)

Mathews, Stanley. ‘The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture.’ Journal of Architectural Education 59 (3) (2006), p.39-48. http://cast.b-ap.net/arc619f11/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2011/09/mathews-FunPalace.pdf (Accessed August 2014)

Vodanovic, Lucia. ‘Obsolescence and Exchange in Cedric Price’s Dispensable Museum.’ Invisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture 11 (2007) https://www.rochester.edu/in_visible_culture/Issue_11/vodanovic/vodanovic.html (Accessed May 2014)

INTERVIEWS

Author interview with Dr. Barnabas Calder, historian of architecture specializing in British architecture since 1945; curator of the 'Cedric Price: Think the Unthinkable' exhibition, 13.08.2014

Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group, 11.08.2014

Author interview with Samantha Hardingham, architectural writer and editor; worked on several books and publications on Cedric Price, 13.07.2014

Author interview with Shelim, waiter in The Gay Hussar restaurant, 30.05.2014

Author interview with Steven Mullin; architect and former chief assistant in Cedric Price’s office (1964-1969), 17.09.2014

Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, 08.08.2014

EXHIBITIONS

14th International Architecture Exhibition: Fundamentals, Venice (7 June to 23 November 2014)

14th International Architecture Exhibition: People meet in architecture, Venice (29 August to 21 November 2010)

FILMS

2001: A Space Odyssey , Stanley Kubrick, 1968

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, dir: Jay Roach, 1997

Barbarella, dir: Roger Vadim, 1968

Blow-up, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966

Fathers of Pop, dir: Julian Cooper, 1979

Goldfinger, dir: Guy Hamilton, 1964

Zabriskie point, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970

INTERNET SOURCE

ONLINE NEWSPAPER ARTICLES

‘Cedric Price’, The Telegraph online (2003)http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1438827/Cedric-Price.html (Accessed March 2014)

‘Cedric Price: Architect-thinker who built little but whose influence was talismanic’, The Independent online (2003), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/cedric-price-36932.html (Accessed March 2014)

Tom Rowley, ‘Can the conservatives save the Gay Hussar, Labour’s canteen?’, The Telegraph online (2013) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/restaurants/10508426/Can-the-conservatives-save-the-Gay-Hussar-Labours-canteen.html?mobile=basic (Accessed May 2014)

Will Alsop, ‘Flight of fancy’, The Guardian online (2005)http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jun/18/architecture (Accessed May 2014)

OTHER

Archigramhttp://designmuseum.org/design/archigram (Accessed July 2014)

Cedric Price, ‘Technology Is The Answer But What Was The Question?’ lecture (1979), http://architecture-blog.pidgeondigital.com/excerpt-from-a-talk-by-cedric-price-

88

in-1979/ (Accessed July 2014)

Frank Jacobs, ‘The Eggs of Price: An Ovo-Urban Analogy’ (2011)http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/534-the-eggs-of-price-an-ovo-urban-analogy (Accessed May 2014)

Jerry White, ‘Social and Cultural Change in 1960s London’ (2007) http://www.british60scinema.net/swinging-london/ (Accessed July 2014)

Kieran Mahon, ‘Tracing the Quiet Anarchy’http://www.academia.edu/1786887/Tracing_the_Quiet_Anarchy (Accessed May 2014)

Lev Grossman ‘How Apple Is Invading Our Bodies’ (2014)http://time.com/3318655/apple-watch-2/ (Acessed September 2014)

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glasshttp://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/books/alice-in-wonderland-quotes.html (Accessed August 2014)

Nicola Mongelli, ‘The Fun Palace, A Curtain That Never Rose’http://www.n-plus.us/html2/fun1.html (Accessed September 2014)

Oxford dictionaries online http://www.oxforddictionaries.com (Accessed March 2014)

‘Previewing Cedric Price’, Strange Harvesthttp://strangeharvest.com/previewing-cedric-price (Accessed August 2014)

Rem Koolhaas in conversation with Lynne Cooke, Seattle (September 2004), http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/architecture-and-sixties-still-radical-after-all-these-years (A-ccessed September 2014)

Simon Sadler, ‘Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture’ book overview http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/archigram (Accessed July 2014)

‘Swinging 60s - Capital of Cool‘http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/swinging-60s-capital-of-cool (Accessed July 2014)

rogina rosa meeting cedric do over

Documents

cedric price estate

wonderlandmeeting cedric

west sussex

samantha rattenbury

rosa roginathere

conclusion notes

courtesy of kresimir

rosa roginamemory of