Do it with an architect!

Architectural journal ACTA #01 (pp.4-6) (Mexico)

August 2015

This phrase can seem little suggestive at first sight, even innocent, a hybrid between the aggressive
campaigns of a famous brand of sportswear and a slogan of a powerful architectural firm with many
resources but little imagination.

However, the recommendation is found printed on a t-shirt that diligently, many years ago, Cedric
Price has embedded on a freshly ironed shirt with rounded collar adjusted by his usual dark tie, to
be photographed - we do not know exactly for what purpose - in defiance, cigar in mouth and infinite
gaze.
Perhaps now we find the intent of the message less evident and, knowing as we know the person that
adopt it, we will think it over, quickly looking for his provocative component.

The British architect still looks relatively young, probably had already completed its Aviary for London
Zoo (1961), take some years teaching as a professor at the AA (1958-1964) and discussing with Joan
Littlewood and Gordon Pask about the possibility of an hypothetical reprogrammable building,
intended as a definitive temple of entertainment (Fun Palace, 1961-72). Sure he was keep on thinking
on the concept of educational territory raised within the framework of the still only intuited third
industrialization as a possible regenerating tool for the damaged region of North Staffordshire
(Potteries Thinkbelt, 1965-1968), and also possibly he had already excited about the real opportunity
to implement his recurrent ideas on flexibility, adaptability, obsolescence, recycling, industrialization,
program hybridization and temporary nature opened with the recent commission for a building that
was not a building (Interaction Center, 1972-1977).

Forty years later we know that Price built relatively few - although this was his main goal - and never
reached a global success, that his projects were based on the belief that architecture should allow

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people to think the unthinkable, without determining their behavior a priori, promoting a kind of
calculated uncertainty with which cleverly he questioned the purpose of the construction activity,
and by extension the Establishment.

We also know that he defines himself as anti-architect in order to work from crossbreeding,
surrounding himself with new accomplices and opening discipline into new territories - hence the
paradox of the message printed on the t-shirt - and that all these experiences, not coincidentally,
were floating on that significant controversial commotion of the 60s and 70s with which many others
- from different fields - faced the crisis of modernity pushing the limits of research in areas such as
art, design, architecture and urbanism.

Forty years later, we also realize that all these promises have penetrated, but not that much.
The architecture as discipline, as practice and as discourse, remains worryingly slow to solve
problems, dangerously inflexible in their relative ability to react to pressure - whether occasional or
chronic - imposed by changes in contemporary culture. That anti-architect defended by Price still
claims today its ability to communicate architecturally, to enable interdisciplinary debate away from
the self-imposed specialization by a reactionary official activity that aims to reclaim their valuable
identity by converting the building into the medium with which consolidate its power.
We must therefore imitate that gesture, have on again that t-shirt as a symbolic act even if we
do gradually, overlapping it to our usual attire, as Price did - to be aware of the need to recover
and rebuild methodologies that should return to the discipline its capacity for critical dialogue,
simultaneously redesigning and upgrading the now abandoned skills of the, for many, dangerous
anti-architect.

Its peripheral vision, nonconformity and disposition to revolt, its anticipatory skills, lack of pedigree,
ability to trigger from within, to theorize while maintaining an unbreakable commitment to reality,
will help us to project an inclusive and reactive architecture that ultimately will lead to a suitable
design of our damaged built environment.