Rogina Rosa Meeting Cedric Do Over

MEETING CEDRIC, DO-OVER
Diary 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.'
ALICES ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
MEETING CEDRIC, DO-OVER

Diary by Rosa Rogina
'Memory of Future Delight An insight into the world of Cedric Price'
MA Architecture
Royal College of Art
9874 words
CONTENT
Illustrations
05
Chapter 01 - Introduction
07
Chapter 02 - Capital of Cool 15
Chapter 03 - The high summer of technological optimism
23
Chapter 04 - Technology is the answer but what was the question? 39
Chapter 05 - Every English schoolboy is in love with trains
51
Chapter 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 85
Bibliography 86
ILLUSTRATIONS
Cover (L):
Authors Own Image (2014) , Image taken by Armor Gutierrez Rivas
Cover (R):
http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/PUBLIC/WHATSON/exhibitions.
php?item=206
Figure 01:
Authors Own Image (2001)
Figure 03:
Figure 04:
Figure 05:
http://angelasancartier.net/boutique
Figure 06:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/feb/04/fashionstatement-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-reynerbanham-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, London
http://grahamfoundation.org/grantees/4832-cedric-price-works19582003-a-forward-minded-retrospective
Figure 13:
Authors Own Image, from: 14th International Architecture
Exhibition: Fundamentals, Venice (2014)
Figure 14:
Courtesy of Canadian Centre for Architecture
http://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 16:
Figure 17:
Figure 18:
Figure 19:
Authors Own Image (2014) , Image taken by Andreas Lang
Figure 20:
Authors Own Image (2014) , Image taken by Andreas Lang
*Author edited sourced illustrations
4
Figure 21:
http://tectonicablog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/130606_
London-Zoo-Aviary_Newby-Price.jpg
Figure 22:
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-thinkbeltde-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-thinkbeltde-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:
Figure 32:
Figure 33:
Figure 34:
Figure 35:
Figure 36:
Figure 37:
Figure 38:
Figure 39:
Price, Cedric / edited by Hardingham, Samantha, Cedric Price:

Opera. (Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley-Academy, 2003.),
p.18
Authors Own Image, from 14th International Architecture
Exhibition: People meet in architecture, Venice (2010)
Price, Cedric / edited by Hardingham, Samantha, Cedric Price:
Opera. (Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley-Academy, 2003.),
p.19
http://sesquipedalist.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/ethics-versusaesthetics-ad-1965-74.html
http://time.com/3318655/apple-watch-2/
Courtesy of Kresimir Rogina (2001)
http://mondo70.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/zabriskie-point-1970.html
5
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 oclock 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 theres a roof over it; it distorts my laziness
so I dont 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 (Kln: Walther Knig, 2009), p.72
Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER
01 Introduction
Fig. 01: Cedric Price, morning interview with Kresimir Rogina, 24th March 2001
8
Fig. 02: Cedric Price, morning interview with Kresimir Rogina, 24th March 2001
10
01 Introduction
Fig. 03: Author and Cedric Price, 24th March 2001

11
Personal Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER
01 Introduction
'Right but what was he really about?' I asked myself while finishing
Stanley Mathews 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.
Fig. 04: Kresimir Rogina and Rosa Rogina visiting Cedric Price Architects
Polaroids taken by Cedric Price, 24th March 2001
12
Author intentionally does not use term architect because of its possible limitations in understanding.
13
02 CAPITAL OF COOL3
'Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night
People so busy, makes me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright
But I dont need no friends
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I 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 Londons 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 citys 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.
Swinging 60s - Capital of Cool, http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/swinging-60s-capitalof-cool (Accessed July 2014)
4
Lyrics extract from The Kinks song Waterloo Sunset (1967)
5
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, dir: Jay Roach, 1997
6
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)
3
14
15
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
cafs 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 didnt 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 leftwing 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
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.19
9
Ibid. p.42
10
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
7
Fig. 05, 06: Lady Jane boutique at its peak, Carnaby Street 1966
16
17
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 Lvi-Strauss,
Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellinis 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.
Fig. 07: Le Corbusiers studio, Paris in 1950s
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
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 Hitlers 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.11
13
http://designmuseum.org/design/archigram (Accessed July 2014)
14
Reyner Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984),
p.19
15
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
11
Fig. 08: Archigram office, Covent Garden, London in 1970s

18
19
02: Capital of Cool
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.
So if Archigram was architectures 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 wasnt 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
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 cant
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
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, 11.08.2014
17
Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005), Book
overview http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/archigram (Accessed July 2014)
18
19
Cedric Price, Interview with the author, 1999 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The
20
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-afterall-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.29
22
Cedric Price On safety pins and other magnificent designs, 1972 quoted in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural
Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.51
16
20
Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2005), p.44
25
26
Author interview with Samantha Hardingham, architectural writer and editor; worked on several books and
publications on Cedric Price, 13.07.2014
27
Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the Canadian Centre for
Architecture, 08.08.2014
23
24
21
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 dmod 1950s, post-war
Britain did not only wholeheartedly greet a revolutionary period of deindustrialisation, 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 Hefners
Playboy magazine, with several characteristic glossy spreads dedicated to
the latest dream machine held by the worlds 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
S TEVEN MULLIN
Reyner Banham, Rank Values, 1972 quoted in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate
Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.382
29
30
Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.25
31
Author interview with Steven Mullin, architect; chief assistant in Cedric Prices office 1964-1969, 17.09.2014
28
22
23
03 The high summer of technological optimism
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.
aesthetic and symbolic levels, excluding the possession of any technological

or functional relevance. Consequently, the disillusionedarchitectural 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 its 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
'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.Marinettis 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
The Labour Party, Leisure for Living, 1959 quoted in Stanley Mathews, The Fun Palace: Cedric Prices
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.329-330
34
35
Reyner Banham Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960), p.132
36
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
32
24
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 Britains 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

Reyner Banham Machine Aesthetic, Architectural Review, 117 (April 1955), p.225
Ibid. p.228
39
Ibid. p.228
40
41
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
37
38
25
Second Machine Age youth took the first steps over Buckminster Fullers
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-tothe-minute objects of desire, to produce
his epoch-makingcollage manifesto challenging 'What is it that makes
todays 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
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.154
44
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.12
46
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.12
48
Reyner Banham, A Home is Not a House, Art in America, 53 (2) (April 1965), p.70
43
26
Fig. 09: Anatomy of a dwelling, 'A Home is Not a House' by Reyner Banham, 1965
27
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 Barbarellas '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
Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey, Banham hailed the final 'triumph of
the software'.50 In relation to Heideggers 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!
Fig. 10, 11: Le Corbusier and Cedric Price - eyewear comparison
JL: 'Can it be clean?'

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

CEDRIC PRICE & JOAN LITTLEWOOD
Reyner Banham, A Home is Not a House, Art in America, 53 (2) (April 1965), p.70
Reyner Banham, The Triumph of Software, New Society 12 (138) (October 1968), p.629
51
52
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.203
53
Joan Littlewood, Joans Book, 1994 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The
49
50
28
Fig. 12: Prices cigar box containing inspirational tech toys

29
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. Littlewoods 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 summertoy EVERYBODY what is it?'57
Fig. 13: Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price
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
55
56
Reyner Banham, Peoples Palaces, 1964 in Reyner Banham, A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham
(University of California Press, 1999), p.108
57
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.135
58
Mathews, Stanley, The Fun Palace: Cedric Prices 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 Hardinghams talk at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition:
Fundamentals, Venice (June 2014)
60
Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.11
54
30
Fig. 14: Helicopter view of the Fun Palace, c. 1964

31
unidentified personal needs and desires.

'What time is it? Any time of day or night, winter or summer it really
doesnt matter. If its 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 Fullers 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: its 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
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.136-137
62
Price always refered to Buckminster Fuller as Bucky
63
James Meller, Interview with the author, 1999 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The
64
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:
Birkhuser 2003), p.30
Fig. 15, 16: Plan of structural system & cross-section through the Fun Palace, 1963-1964
61
32
Fig. 17: the Fun Palace on Lea River site, Mill Meads, c. 1964
33
Fig. 18: Interior perspective of the Fun Palace, c. 1964

34
35
It didnt 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 selfcorrecting 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
ALICES ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND BY LEWIS CARROLL
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
Prices name Price had never seen technology as an end in itself.74
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 Wieners principles
in cybernetics contributed to the regulation of the unstable short-term
behaviour of day-to-day activities, Price applied John von Neumanns
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
Stanley Mathews, The Fun Palace: Cedric Prices experiment in architecture and technology, Technoetic
67
Lewis Carroll, Alices 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
70
Stanley Mathews, The Fun Palace: Cedric Prices experiment in architecture and technology, Technoetic
71
Reyner Banham, Software Hardware, 1969 quoted in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the
Immediate Future (London: The MIT Press, 2003), p.212
66
36
73
74
72
37
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 DICKENS
77
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 Ive changed a few times since then.'80
ALICES 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
Title from Cedric Price Technology Is The Answer But What Was The Question? lecture, 1979
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, 05.03.200126.3.2001
77
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.
78
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.92
80
Lewis Carroll, Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, http://www.alice-inwonderland.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
75
76
38
39
04 Technology is the answer... but what was the question?
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. Its not just roundabout
and swing. Its 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, isnt it?' commented
Steven Mullin in answer to the same argument.87 By implementing selfregulating 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
Fig. 18
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, Joans Book, 1994 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space:
The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), p.84
85
2014)
86
I dont 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, 13.08.2014
87
88
Homo Ludens (Man the Player) is a book written by Dutch historian and cultural theoristJohan Huizinga in
1938. It discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society, suggesting that playing is primary
and necessary condition.
89
Lavinia Scaletti and Rosa Rogina with assistance of Zarya Vrabcheva, Rodrigo Garca Gonzlez 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.
40
41
82
83
Fig. 19, 20: Participation say what ? performance, Royal College of Art WIP Show, 13.02.2014
In contrast to Vitruviuss ideal of 'a harmonious design that requires nothing

be added or taken away', Prices 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 wont 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
92
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
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/heritagecentenary/landmark-listings/penguin-pool)
Fig. 21: Model of the Snowdon Aviary, London Zoo, c.1961
90
91
42
Fig. 22: Author visiting the Snowdon Aviary, London Zoo, 2014
43
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
Prices 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 didnt mean you wouldnt have to make up your
mind, it meant you were about to take sensible risks.'101
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 Prices great interest in fields such as oceanography, deepsea mining and transport undoubtedly aroused his interest in the precision
of timing.104 In 1914, Antonio SantElia 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
STEVEN MULLIN
For that reason, the most enjoyable thing for Price about a caf 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
caf would be proven as irrelevant.102 Evidently time played an essential role
Cedric Price, Snacks by Cedric Price in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhuser 2003), Snack n.09
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 Virtual
Architecture, 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
102
96
97
44
'Burn what you love, love what you burn.'109

In his initial scheme for the Inter-Action Centre in Kentish Town,110 a vastly
Cedric Price, Fun Palace, 1965 quoted in Arata Isozaki, Erasing Architecture into the System, 1975 in Cedric
Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhuser 2003), p.33-34
104
Author interview with Samantha Hardingham, architectural writer and editor, worked on several books and
105
Antonio SantElia Manifesto of futurist Architecture, 1914 in Umbro Apollonio Futurist Manifestos (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1973), p.172
106
Cedric Price, Snacks by Cedric Price in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhuser 2003), Snack
n.07
107
David Allford, The creative Iconoclast in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London:
Architectural Association, 1984), p.7
108
Cedric Price, Anticipating the future, 1981 in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London:
109
The slogan was originally derived from Friedrich Nietzsches You must be ready to burn yourself in your own
flame. How could you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?
110
Prices 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.
103
45
Fig. 23: Aerial view of the Inter-Action Centre, Kentish Town, 1977
scaled-down and simplified version of the Fun Palace project, Price produced
a clients 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 shortterm 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 Prices
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
Rowan Wilken, Teletechnologies, Place, and Community (New York, Oxon: Routledge 2011), p.103
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
114
115
Arata Isozaki, Erasing Architecture into the System, 1975 in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin:
Birkhuser 2003), p.25
116
Ibid. p.45
117
Rem Koolhaas in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhuser 2003), p.45
111
112
Fig. 24: Main hall with electric doorway half opened, Inter-Action Centre, 1977
46
47
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 designers first query, was Prices 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, Prices work has to be observed as a continuous problemunderstanding 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 Prices architectural
approach?
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-Nagys 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 wasnt
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 architects duty
to society through 'Designing for Doubt, Delight and Demolition',125 with
emphasis on delight!
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
119
Cedric Price, Snacks by Cedric Price in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhuser 2003), Snack
n.14
120
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
122
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: Birkhuser 2003), p.27
118
48
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.57
124
Cedric Price, Interview with the author, 2000 quoted in Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The
125
Term taken from Cedric Price, Designing for Doubt, Delight and Demolition - the architects duty to the
society lecture, Architectural Association (3 June 1994)
123
49
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 Prices most remarkable projects.
The Potteries Thinkbelt was a call for the conversion of a deprived wasteland
127
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.11
128
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.71
129
Cedric Price, Life-Conditioning, Architectural Design No 36 (October 1966), p.483
130
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
126
50
51
into a 'High Tech think-tank'.131 Unlike other architects, Prices 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 Cedrics 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 Staffordshires pottery suddenly diminished.
Knowing the area from his earliest age, Price didnt 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
132
Cedric Price, Live-conditioning, Architectural Design 36 (October 1966), p.483
133
Author interview with Samantha Hardingham, architectural writer and editor; worked on several books and
134
131
52
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 wasnt 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 Prices 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
Architecture 08.08.2014
136
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 Hardinghams talk at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition: Fundamentals, Venice
(June 2014)
137
Ibid.
138
Ibid.
139
140
Samantha Hardingham, Preview in Samantha Hardingham and Kester Rattenbury, Supercrit#1 Cedric Price Potteries Thinkbelt (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), p.12
141
Passage from one of the Lord Aberdares 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
135
53
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 Prices leftist upbringing,
fuelled by a strong sense of political activism and concerns for working class
issues.
Fig. 25: the North Staffordshire Potteries, c. 1963
Fig. 26: Site Plan of the Potteries Thinkbelt, showing main routes and areas, 1965
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 Prices 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.
Cedric Price, Live-conditioning, 1966 in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London:
143
Royston Landau, A Philosophy of Enabling in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London:
144
From authors title, Royston Landau A Philosophy of Enabling in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural
Association (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.9-15
145
142
Fig. 27: Overleaf photomontage of Madeley transfer area, Potteries Thinkbelt, 1966
54
55
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 didnt 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.

148
149
2014)
146
147
56
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
57
'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 indemand 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.
they might be cut. To point where hes 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 yesbut 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
'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
Cedric Price in conversation with Hans Urlich Obrist, 2000 in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin:
Birkhuser 2003), p.75-76
152
Stanley Mathews, From Agit Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog
153
The Open University was the worlds 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
150
151
58
156
157
Architecture 08.08.2014
158
Ibid.
155
59
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 wasnt 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.
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)
159
160
60
61
06 Cherry soup, Wiener Schnitzel with egg on the top, and blueberry pudding
'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 restaurants 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 Englands only Hungarian restaurant, The Gay Hussar
was not merely another Sohos 'place to be', nor was its culinary excellence
the restaurants raison dtre. From its opening in 1953, The Gay Hussar
was particularly known as the left-leanings 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 Londons 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 restaurants 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
Tom Rowley, Can the conservatives save the Gay Hussar, Labours canteen?, The Telegraph online (2013)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/restaurants/10508426/Can-the-conservatives-save-the-Gay-HussarLabours-canteen.html?mobile=basic (Accessed May 2014)
164
Barry Curtis, Email message to author (July 2014)
163
62
Fig. 29: The Gay Hussar restaurant - front entrance, 2 Greek Street, London
63
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 didnt 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?
Fig. 30: Interior of the restaurant, first floor saloon
'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 likeminded architecture fellows or late drinks with various individuals that had
Tom Rowley, Can the conservatives save the Gay Hussar, Labours canteen?, The Telegraph online (2013)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/restaurants/10508426/Can-the-conservatives-save-the-Gay-HussarLabours-canteen.html?mobile=basic (Accessed May 2014)
166
Author interview with Shelim, waiter in The Gay Hussar restaurant, 30.05.2014
167
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 Prices 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.
165
Fig. 31: The Gay Hussar menu
64
65
gained his respect throughout the time, it didnt 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 couldnt 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.
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 didnt matter; the
principle was the same.
It was getting late. It was time to go. Walking throughout the restaurants
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.
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 Prices life and work. To which degree did his gourmand nature
influence his architectural approach? Were his most radical ideas of constant
change and of buildings 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
Frank Jacobs, The Eggs of Price: An Ovo-Urban Analogy (2011), http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/534-theeggs-of-price-an-ovo-urban-analogy (Accessed May 2014)
170
171
66
Cedric Price, The importance of food to architecture lecture, 2001 in Cedric Price, Re:CP (Basel, Boston,
Berlin: Birkhuser 2003), Snack n.01
172
67
07 Pre-conclusion notes
'Architectural historians can and will argue for the coming centuries over the
quality and intent of Cedrics 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
'I would love there to be more Cedric

Prices, although whether the world could
stand more Cedric Prices I dont know.'172
REYNER BANHAM
SAMANTHA HARDINGHAM
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 Id got. But before I saw anything, a wonderful, knock-out waft of cigar smoke came drifting out. All was
well. Transcript of Samanta Hardinghams talk at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition: Fundamentals,
Venice (June 2014)
173
Reyner Banham, BBC Radio 4, 1976 quoted in Cedric Price, Works II, Architectural Association (London:
172
68
69
07 Pre-conclusion notes
Fig. 32: Sketch section of halo with indication od function and scale
Turtlan project for Groznjan, Croatia 1990
Fig. 33: Sketch of Turtlan support system enveloping hilltown site

Turtlan project for Groznjan, Croatia 1990
70
Fig. 34: Prices certificate of attendance
The 2nd International Symposium of Theory and Design in the Third Machine Age
Groznjan , Croatia, Summer 1990
71
07 CONCLUSION: WHAT I HAVE LEARNT FROM CEDRIC

PRICE
In 1990, during his first visit to Croatia, Price produced a proposal for a cityscale electronic halo enveloping the medieval hilltop town of Groznjan.173
'Where and when the house needs me?' asked a mobile fragment while
travelling around Turtlans 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 (authors 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: WileyAcademy, 2003), p.18
175
72
73
Fig. 35: Mock-up of a futuristic video watch

'What about Learning?', Architectural Design; guest edited issue by Cedric Price, May 1968
74
07 Conclusion: What I have learnt from Cedric Price
Fig. 36: Time Magazine photo-illustration, September 2014

75
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 its never been
particularly welcome. Like a pushy date, the Apple Watch wants to get
intimate with us in a way were not entirely used to or prepared for. This isnt
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.
Fig. 37: 'Cedric Price & Kresimir Rogina doing their best for the improvement of architecture'
by Cedric Price, 24th March 2001
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
Antonionis Zabriskie Point slow-motion finale, which saluted the end of
consumer culture, Price and my father were hailing the last dance of run-outof-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?
Lev Grossman, How Apple Is Invading Our Bodies, Time Magazine online (2014) http://time.com/3318655/
apple-watch-2/ (Acessed September 2014)
176
76
Fig. 38: Explosion, final sequence in Zabriskie Point (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1968)
77
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?
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 Lais comment when asked to estimate the
influence of the French Revolution 'I dont 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 twentyfirst-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.
There is always something unsatisfactory about biographies; they generally

dont 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, peoples 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 didnt turn out that way. Researching Price has shown
me how his radical visions and revolutionary proposals confronted and
78
His [Prices] 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 Prices 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, Prices comment was Good - but dated. CP.
178
In 1972, when Zhou En Lai (Premier of China) was asked how he estimated the impact of French Revolution,
he responded instantly: I dont know yet, it is too soon to tell.
177
79
THANK YOU CEDRIC!
Fig. 39: Author and Cedric Price, 24th March 2001

80
81
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
Cedrics presence in our lives during the last eight months.
82
83
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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.
BOOKS
Schrijver, Lara. Radical Games: Popping the Bubble of 1960s Architecture. Rotterdam,
New York: NAi Publishers, 2009.
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.
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.
Banham, Reyner. Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1984.
and Cedrics all time favorites:
Banham, Reyner. Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: Architectural
Press, 1960.
Carroll, Lewis. Alices Adventures in Wonderland. London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd,
1906.
Bron, Eleanor + Hardingham, Samantha editors. Cedric Price Retriever. London:

Institute of International Visual Arts, 2006.
Dickens, Charles. The Pickwick Papers. Reissue edition, Cambridge: Penguin Classics,
2000.
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.
ARTICLES / JOURNALS
Banham, Reyner. A Home Is Not a House. Art in America, 53 (2) (April 1965), p.70
79.
Mathews, Stanley. From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price.
London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007.
Banham, Reyner. Machine Aesthetic. Architectural Review, 117 (700) (April 1955),
p.225-228.
William J. Mitchell. City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, new edition 1996.
Banham, Reyner. The Triumph of Software. New Society 12 (138) (October 1968),
p.629-630.
Obrist ,Hans Ulrich + Price, Cedric. The Conversation Series. Kln: Walther Knig,
2009.
Price, Cedric. Life-Conditioning, Architectural Design 36 (October 1966), p.483-494.
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: Birkhuser 2003.
Price, Cedric. Works II, Architectural Association. London: Architectural Association,
1984.
84
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)
85
Mathews, Stanley, The Fun Palace: Cedric Prices 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)
FILMS
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)
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, dir: Jay Roach, 1997
Vodanovic, Lucia. Obsolescence and Exchange in Cedric Prices 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)
Blow-up, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966
2001: A Space Odyssey , Stanley Kubrick, 1968
Barbarella, dir: Roger Vadim, 1968
Fathers of Pop, dir: Julian Cooper, 1979

Goldfinger, dir: Guy Hamilton, 1964
Zabriskie point, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni, 1970
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
INTERNET SOURCE
Author interview with Dennis Crompton, architect and part of Archigram group,
11.08.2014
Cedric Price, The Telegraph online (2003)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1438827/Cedric-Price.html (Accessed
March 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
Prices office (1964-1969), 17.09.2014
ONLINE NEWSPAPER ARTICLES
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)
Author interview with Tim Abrahams, writer and critic; former Editor-in-Chief at the
Canadian Centre for Architecture, 08.08.2014
Tom Rowley, Can the conservatives save the Gay Hussar, Labours canteen?,
The Telegraph online (2013) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/
restaurants/10508426/Can-the-conservatives-save-the-Gay-Hussar-Labourscanteen.html?mobile=basic (Accessed May 2014)
EXHIBITIONS
Will Alsop, Flight of fancy, The Guardian online (2005)

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jun/18/architecture (Accessed May
2014)
14th International Architecture Exhibition: Fundamentals, Venice (7 June to 23

November 2014)
14th International Architecture Exhibition: People meet in architecture, Venice (29
Augustto 21 November 2010)
86
OTHER
Archigram
http://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-price87
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, Alices Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/books/alice-in-wonderland-quotes.html
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 Harvest
http://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-stillradical-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-ofcool (Accessed July 2014)
88

Rogina Rosa Meeting Cedric Do Over

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MEETING CEDRIC, DO-OVER

Diary by Rosa Rogina

'There is a place. Like no place on Earth. A land full of wonder,

MEETING CEDRIC, DO-OVER

Price, Cedric / edited by Hardingham, Samantha, Cedric Price:

24th March 2001 8:54 am

15th February 2014 8:59 am

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

Fig. 03: Author and Cedric Price, 24th March 2001

Personal Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

02: Capital of Cool

Browning!',11 they were frustrated with the monotony of the predominant,

Fig. 07: Le Corbusiers studio, Paris in 1950s

In 1961, recent graduates of the Architectural Association that witnessed

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

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

02: Capital of Cool

So if Archigram was architectures answer to The Beatles, Cedric was,

Equally unconvinced by the warmed-over preoccupation with the symbolic

03 THE HIGH SUMMER OF TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIMISM28

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

03 The high summer of technological optimism

In 1959, as workplace automation was spreading throughout the country, the

aesthetic and symbolic levels, excluding the possession of any technological

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

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

03 The high summer of technological optimism

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

03 The high summer of technological optimism

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

JL: 'Can it be clean?'

Fig. 12: Prices cigar box containing inspirational tech toys

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

03 The high summer of technological optimism

Even if the late avant-garde theatre producer, Joan Littlewood, showed

Fig. 13: Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price

Fig. 14: Helicopter view of the Fun Palace, c. 1964

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

03 The high summer of technological optimism

unidentified personal needs and desires.

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

03 The high summer of technological optimism

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

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

03 The high summer of technological optimism

developed a smaller-scale pilot project for the London Borough of Camden

In contrast to his personal working environment that was permanently

04 TECHNOLOGY IS THE ANSWER BUT WHAT WAS THE

The Oxford dictionary states that architecture is 'The art or practice of

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

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

changing society Price encouraged a continuous application of 'anticipatory

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

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

In contrast to Vitruviuss ideal of 'a harmonious design that requires nothing

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

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER

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

in his work: 'Inbuilt flexibility or its alternative, planned obsolescence, can

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

Diary by Rosa Rogina: MEETING CEDRIC DO-OVER