Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
0l1}Jr. ·
lOlls
MONIQUE ELEB
SANDY ISENSTADT
Experimentation
REINHOLD MARTIN in
Postwar
FRANCESCA ROGIER
Architectural
Culture
TIMOTHY M. ROHAN
FELICITY SCOTT
JEAN-LOUIS VIOLEAU
CORNELIS WAGENAAR
CHERIE WENDELKEN
Senior Editor: Lesley Johnstone 9 Bernard Rudofsky: Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling
Production Manager: Oems Hunter FELICITY SCOTT 21 5
Translation: Barry Fifield, Neville Saulter
Editing: Edward Tingley, Marcia Rodriguez., 10 A Critique of Architecture:
Peter Smith The Bitter Victory of the Situationist International
Reproduction Rights: Jocelyne Gervais JEAN-LOUIS VIOLEAU
Index: Eva,Marie Neumann 239
Design: Glenn Goluska 11 Jaap Bakema and the for Freedom
CORNELIS WAGENAAR 261
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We just haven't learned how to enjoy our new freedom: how to tum
machinery, robots, computers, and buildings themselves into instruments
of pleasure and enjoyment.
CEDRIC PRICE
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5.3 Fun Palace; diagrams for pilot projoct, 1961-65. Cedrie Price, on:hilecl. Pen-onc>;nk with IeIHip pen an vellum.
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CCA Collection
5.2 Fun Palace; interior perspective ,ketch showing mickec!ion, 1961-65. Cedric Prico, orchiled and drafbmon.
P."","",nk on trocing vellum, CCA Collection
which added a new twist to Littlewood's idea activity,I7 The implicit consequence of the
of direct communication,l6 With the exper project: an institutional critique of Welfare
tise of an unusual interdisciplinary commit State-administered culture.
tee now in place, the goals of the project
were refocused: no longer merely the pro Representing Architectural Reality: From
vision of a barrier-free venue for experimen Image-Based Anti-Formalism 10 Technological
tal theater, the technological mandate Ephemerality
moved beyond the realm of mechanical Price's proposal for a technologically factual
mobility into the more ephemeral mobility system of assembly a mobile architecture
offered by new information media and mass that eschewed architectural image
communications, The discrete disciplinary recommends itself to Banham's ideas about
interests of the three protagonists - cybernet the true vocation of architecture as pro
ics, transient architecture, participatory the mulgated in Theory and Design in the First
ater and communications merged in the Machine Age (1960). Banham's revisionist
objectives of the Fun Palace project; to history of the modern movement was cou 5.4 Fun Palaeo; interior per>pe<:li... showing ..apended mezzanines and slairways, 1961-65. Cedric Price, arehiled.
facilitate the emergence of an ephemeral pled, in the book's last chapter, with a radical Pe!KInc>;nk on phologroph. CCA Collodion
subjectivity through the theatricality of com prognostication for the future of architec
munication, Thus began a working rela ture. In a polemic chastising architects of
tionship spanning more than a decade of the first machine age for their preoccupation
V.?"'.,,~;
central to understanding the context of on the relation of architecture to the visual:
British postwar architecture and the rejec
tion of International Modernism. In brief, The role of architecture as provider of visually
. the critique may be framed in a threefold recognizable symbols of identity, place, and
way. The perception that International Mod activity becomes an increasingly attractive excuse
ernism was elitist and overly pre-occupied for architects to revel in the immensity of their
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with formal issues was met with a response
that emphasized a visual approach (the
picturesque) couched in terms of national
personal visual dexterity, aesthetic sensibility, and
spatial awareness, demanding from both clients
and observers recognition of the very causations
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ism and traditional crafts. 11 These responses, of such
which included such movements as British 5.5 Fun Palace; skelch plans and inlerior perspective ,ketche" 1961-<>5. Cedric Priet>, an:hiled
Of1d drafts",on. Grop/lile with colored pencil on trocing YIIllum. CCA Collection
Townscape or the New Romanticism, were In his 1963 review of the Team 10 Primer,
in tum counter-critiqued by the British Price took the opportunity to inspect its
avant-garde. One of the strongest reactions rhetoric and dissociated himself from con
to the revaluation of modernism in postwar temporary theories of urbanism and architec
Britain was launched by the Independent ture. 2) With citations from texts by the
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modernists, which visualized mechaniza end, Price aimed to provide an environment .,-,
tion (real or imagined) rather than utilizing
new technologies?28 Taking existing form
that would both anticipate and accommo
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as evidence for their critique, Team Ten's leaming machine with the capacity to ~lJ;lL- ~. "-_-""""-r'
. reliance on "the found" as reality neglected enable humans to physically and mentally r:.r::-''nt" -~~"-
the complex ways in which cities really adapt to the intangible experiences and
worked "in spite of their physicallimil5."29 accelerated pace of technological culture. 16 i
For Price, both the group's criticism and its
theory of production failed to offer, in his
In one of his earliest musings on the project
Price stated:
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last points - mobility and an insistence that Is it not possible that with a little imagination
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is not necessarily visibly evident we can ourselves lind a new way of learning, new
are issues he has adhered to ever since and
things to Jearn, and enjoy our life, the space, 5.7 Fun Pala<:e; dioSlllmmotic plan, 1961-65. Cedric Price, orchilect. Graphite, colored pencil, perKlnd-ink, and balJ.poinl
pen on mylar. CCA Collec1ion
continues to develop to this day.
the light, the knowledge, and the inventiveness
Although the Fun Palace was never real we have in ourselves in a new way?l7
ized, Price achieved such notoriety with
this and other projects such as the Potteries
Thinkbelt as to secure for himself a seminal
.
media technologies for cultural and educa passive participant into thinking more
tional purposes in the belief that via the abstractly," or "scientific gadgets, new sys :from the middle
ailwaves, a classless and egalitarian society tems, knowledge locked away in research procedure
composed of literate and rational subjects stations can be brought to the street corner"), / Upper Level Prooedure
would emerge. However, by the late 19505 it what is one to make of Littlewood's state
was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a ment that "the 'fun arcade' will be full of
space of freedom outside the market was no
longer tenable. Between the paternalistic
games and tests that psychologists and elec
tronic engineers now devise for the service
1
educational policies adopted by BBe culture of war - knowledge will be piped
guardians and the imperatives of the com juke-boxes"?60 To understand this we must
mercial market there seemed to be little examine the contribution of the Fun Palace
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room for the kind of communication that
Williams thought essential for the growth of
Cybernetics Committee, specifically that
of Dr. Gordon Pasko
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a truly democratic society.5i Williams argued Pask's "Theatre Workshop and Systems To uppor
leval 1'"'_
that democracy depended on free, sponta Research: Proposals for a Cybernetic
neous communication and, significantly, Theatre" offers some insight into the degree
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that it had no predetermined form, for of his commitment to the project. After a few Preforence next
"when put into practice could it be felt to be introductory remarks - such as, "the crux of Valuation J,ptivity
Assertion scluotion
real."58 He called for a rethinking of British a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience
cultural institutions and proposed the forma
tion of new kinds of bodies, such as Commu
should genuinely participate in a play" and
that it should overcome "the restrictions in t F~Zj in sot ~I
nications Centers for research and analysis. entertainment media such as cinema and
However, more urgent was the need for a television" - Pask proceeds to outline, in
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where ordinary people could exercise rather opaque technical jargon, a cybernetic Lower Luvol Procodure - givon individual chOOSing rj,
choice and effectively exert control within an analysis of the problem (fig. 5.8).61 He then 8Jld.?\. (n) = r i (n}Zj(n)
uncensored network of communications. 59 provides some of the most initially baffling DLiGRAi1 1.
but fascinating diagrams of the entire pro
ject. It seems that in Pask's theater the seats 5.B Fun Palace; diagram lor a cybemelics theater from minule' of the Cybernefic> Commiliee, 27Jonuory 1965.
would be equipped with controls allowing Cedric Price and Gordon Pa.k. Pitolocapy en wove poper. CCA Collection
the audience to intervene in the action
of the play.62 A computing machine located
backstage would calculate audience input
tation of pennanent social values and also part of human experience, the built envi vanized the Fun Palace, of the conceptual promotional brochure for the Fun Palace, Canadian
as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein ronment. S) Ayear earlier Price's Potteries contrarieties that pose problems for the Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive].
unique authorship is overruled by the organi Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from claims underlying the project, the most 2 Document dated 18.2./4, Price Archive.
zational system. The project, conceived as within architecture when George Baird obvious is the idea that an architecture that DlU99S:0l88:,.6.
a diagram of possibilities, seemingly allayed argued that the apparently neutral, hands 3 On Littlewood', contribution In British radical
ning, since as a system ready at thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes tive in awakening the compliant subjects of Littlewood, Joan Littlewood', Peculiar History as
all times to be put into action, it refused of architectural language. Baird stated that the paternalistic Welfare State. This counter She Tells It (London: Methuen, '994). On her near
traditional notions of the architectural disci Price's refusal to provide "visually recogniz intuitive idea suggests that Price held out from Joan," 185. News clipping from The Observer
plining of space and time. able symbols of identity, place, and activity" for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepre ('0 July 1966), 9. Price Archive, box <;/5, Mareh
At the mention of control systems and the and his reduction of architecture to a neurialism against the bureaucracy of the 1965-September 11)66. "rve spent thirty years in the
lax behaviorist psychologizing to machine for "life-conditioning" displayed state. Within this ideological frame, spon theatre, and I never want m .ee it again. If, dead,
happiness, one is inclined to recoil in a gross misconception of architecture's taneity and consumption are not obverse and go, look at this or at that, have three rings
amused disdain. But this would misinterpret place in human experience.84 For Baird, sides of the coin. Despite the fact that this to cboose from or if. all compulsion. ThaI's why
and misrepresent the contribution of the pro Price's architecture-as-servicing mechanism optimistic vision of individual, active par I want the Fun Palace: Goome)" 11. Manifesto
ject. Certainl)" by the end of the 19605 an was equivalent to architecture as "a coffee ticipation within free enterprise implies
of Ar:tion i. limited by its dependence upon a
anti-technology bacldash was felt in both pop vending machine."s5 that enabled participants might somehow ,mall section of society which neither desires, nor
ular culture and architecture. For example, Beyond these humanist critiques there take hold of the market, one is compelled dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today.
Alvin TofRer's Future Shock (1970) saw tech are aspects of the Fun Palace that are pre to ask at what point spontaneity and choice The theatre, if it is to live, must of necessity rellect
nology as "spinning out of control" and scient of issues surrounding the use of infor passes over into pure consumption?86 As conflicts which dominate world history today-
argued that the accelerated rate of change mation technologies and analytical processes perceptive critics have already pointed out, the raOO of ;,000,000 unemployed, starving for
manifest in all facets of life was pushing associated with computational thought that within late capitalism the distance between bread while wheat is bumed for fuel.. .. This theatre
social processes to the brink of socio-psycho have been taken up in some current critical will perform, mainly in working.elass districts,
logical shock. SI Future Shock is not the most architectural practices. Despite the fact that market deternlination on the other is Politics in its fullest sense, means the affairs of
sober assessment available of the state of systems-design theory, as a non-hierarchial, uncomfortably narrow. the people ...:
society and technology, but its hyperbolic more democratic process of problem-solving 4 In conversation with Cedric Price, November ,<)96.
Conversation with Roy Landau. 2 March '999.
gloss is significant in that it captured popular and producing architecture, has been shown 5 Price Archive. box tl5·
sentiment and signaled a retreat from the to be patently false, the updating of its theo 6 'Fun Palace Project Report: March 1965. Price
optirnism that had welcomed the "dawn of retical premises and the recent interest in its Archive, box 5.
the second machine age."fll By 1970 the very means of analysis (particularly dia 7 Cedric Price, "Fun Palace for Camden Town:
'techniques which were to sponsor human gramming) has made a positive contribution On the scale of the development. see "Fun Palace
liberation, to facilitate the emergence of a to architectural theory. Many of these prac Project Report; 5, 9, where he refen m the first Mill
participatory democracy, to de-institutional tices share with Price a concern about the Meads site along the River Lea. lAter estimations
ize education and put scientific knowledge design process - that is, the desire for a gen It is quite ..mni,hing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechani
in the hands of the masses were viewed as erative aesthetic process as a means of usurp cal plinth. At the time ecology WlI.S not the issue it
instruments of social control. The hoped-for ing fomlalist predilections, as a means to would become by the early 19705.
transformation to new social configurations fully engage the potential of new technoltr 8 Reyner Banham. "A Clip on Architecture." Design
within mass communication and the cyber (such as computer software), and as a
1965),13·
netic dream of an evolved human perceptual kind of radical utilitarianism. In the 1960s, 9 Goomer,a.
awareness through human-machine inter as today, the Fun Palace offers architects a 10 Baz Kershaw, The Politics ofPer(ornu;.nce: Radical
face had succumbed to disillusionment. challenging conception of architecture that Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York:
Routledge. 1991), 103.
TofHer himself cites Price's Fun Palace privileges organization and idea over archi 11 Littlewood, 701.
as an instance of technocratic thought and tecture as built form. II Littlewood, 7""
Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin. Documents show .6 Cedric Price, "Reflections on the Team X Primer: Work of Cedric Price: AA Files 8 (january 1985). and Its IIIl<Ig" ed. Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman
that the Trust continued to meet well into the .9IIos. Architectural Design 32:5 (May 1¢3). ;zo8. 3-7. Landau convincingly argues that Price's (Cambridge, Mass" and Montreal: The"IT Press
The most recent engineering memo is dated .')85 l7 Price, "Reflections on the Team X Primer;;z08. position is devoted to enabling the individual and and Canadian Centre for Architecture, '989), '4".
inrormation for a high platform pivot "If in the mid-60's it matters little to a man whether is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point 44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document),
mecllanlsm. Frank Newby, a constant collaborator he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton, of view_ Price Archive.
with Price, was the structural engineer in the early the architectural problem is not to r<-establish urban 37 Price A:rchive, box 1/5. 45 "The Approach to Planning: Price Archive.
years. Price J\:rchive. identities. hut to enrich this new-scale localional 38 Cedric Price, "Fun Palace Project: The Architectur 46 Price Archive. The main problem faced by the
,8 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in tire First freedom. It is essential that architects. in determin al Review 815 (Janual)' 1<]65), 74. He estimated that Committee was to find. site. This is somewhat
Machine Age (1<}60; Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT ing and providing the scale of perceptual living, it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build. Note paradoxical given that the project is premised
Press, 1')891, 329-30. match or extend the multi-directional activities and Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist. This on a lack of site specincity.
'9 Sanham, Theory and Design, ¢'. Note that Price appetites of present.(lay man.' is ironic. as today the preservationists are attempting 47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price, "A Laboratory
was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published "Symbolic to have his Inter-Action Centre (197'-77) designated of Fun: Ne.. Scientist 38 (14 May 1<J64), 433. In
introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505. and Literal Aspects of Technology" in Architectural as historically valuable. the late '¢OS Price'gtlest..dited an issue of Architec
Price wrote Fuller's obituary for The Architectural Design 32'11 (November ,<]6,), 5~. Both 39 In articles from the later .¢OS Price refe.. to cyber tural D..ign on Learning. He claimed that "Learn
Review, in the cour.. of which he identified some Colquhoun's criticism ofthe symbolic use of tech netics and information theory but never so as to ing will soon become the major industry of every
of the concepts that align his thought with Fuller's, nology and Banham's critique of the symbolic use directly substantiate his work; he also does not use developing counlly, and those countries with estab
such as the idea of refom.ng the environment and of machine image I)' were probably influential. the term ·real-time.' See Cedric Price, "The indus lished educational systems will have to restructure
not men and the notion of anticipatory design as 29 Price. "Reflections on the Team X Primer." .wS. trial Designer: Architectural Design 39:> <February most drastically their existing facilities." "Learning;
the only design. See "Buckminster Fuller: 1~5- 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt. a project 1<]69), 6.-6•. Here he refers to time as the fourth Archirectural Design 38 (May '968), ,08. See Cedric
1')83: TIu! A:rchitectural Review .038 (August .')83),4 premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace, dimension in the design aesthetic. This is a vital Price, "National School Plan," Architectural Design
In this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was Price stated, "I doubt the relevance of the concepts and continuing point of departure ror Price, as 39 (March ,<]69), '54-55'
interested in alternative education and educational ofTown Centre, Town and Balanced Community. evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian 48 "Fun !':alace: Being an account of the necessity
rerorm. See Fuller. Education Automation: Freeing Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me: Centre for Architecture, Cedric Price; Mean Time. of the Fun Palace as a temporary 'valve' in a late