Re: Cedric Price

ETH. Zurich. 1966 or ’67. As one of the architectural school’s student representatives, I was asked to suggest names for the lecture series. I proposed Cedric Price. “No,” was the response, “it’s not architecture.” (Eventually, I was successful in having Cedric speak some two years later at Heidi Weber’s Le Corbusier Pavilion by Lake Zurich.) My own “Diplomarbeit”, done reluctantly in fall 1968 after spending twelve months in Paris and while still under the spell of the May events, was heavily influenced by Cedric’s Fun Palace. Inserted into the “Innenhof” of an existing building by the river Sihl, it featured a strange hybrid of preservation together with a steel space-frame and mobile gantries. While I had been considered a good student until then, I think both Professors Jacques Schader and Bernhard Hoesli needed all the help they could get to help me pass.

I still remember Cedric’s phone number by heart. Then I met him a few times at his office on Alfred Place, London WC1. Immaculately clean, a thin screen covering each of the three or four drafting tables, as if hiding the work-inprogress. (I once asked him what he was working on; he responded that he preferred not to talk about it, as it might dissipate the energy and his concentration.)

I seem to have always met him in the mornings, a cigar in one hand and a glass of brandy in the other, but perhaps I fantasize. I offered my services. (I don’t think anyone was working for him at the time.) He said he was waiting for a commission, and I could start when the commission materialized. After one meeting, I headed down one block to Bedford Square, to the Architectural Association, and sat down in the members’ “room” with three or four Peter Cook Diploma School students, showing my
21 × 21 cm portfolio. Peter came by, heard his students’ interests, invited me to his jury, and so on. Cedric’s commission materialized two or three years later, but by then the AA had made me autonomous, and I was already a step ahead.

Now, to the important things: Cedric had done something that is still, to this day, unprecedented. He challenged thought by conceptualizing it with the most diagrammatic of all diagrams. The relationship between the drawn thought —not a sketch, but rather a notation— either as a plan, a section, or a perspective couldn’t have been more minimal, in the sense of minimal means with maximal effect. The notations for Fun Palace, Inter-Action Centre, Potteries Thinkbelt, or the Surface Oil Containment inflatable strategy are still, today, a model of architecture as a form of knowledge. Later on, as the chief architect of the Parc de la Villette, I invited Cedric to design a greenhouse. He prepared a project filled with clarity and intelligence but, for lack of funding, it was never built. My recently inaugurated tropical greenhouse at the Parc Zoologique de Paris should be seen as a modest homage to Cedric’s immense presence.

Re: Lucius Burckhardt

I knew Lucius Burckhardt much less.
He taught a sociology course at ETH that I attended attentively. In 1981 in New York I received an invitation from him to participate in the “Documenta Urbana” that he started in Kassel, Germany as a socially and politically conscious urban counterpart to the by then well-known international exhibition of the same name. I prepared a set of drawings that extended experimental works I was making in New York at the time, the Twentieth-Century Follies. They were exhibited in Kassel and are on view in my retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris as I write these words.

At times, Lucius seemed as if he was on another planet, yet he was still right here, having understood, like Cedric, that the immediacy of social interaction is what architecture, at its core, is all about.