Soft Homage for Cedric Price

Perhaps, no figure in the history of architecture deserves relief from the sentimentality and nostalgia of an “homage” than Cedric Price who, by his own admission, was an “anti-architect”. So instead of exalting the endurance of his provocations, we should take him up on some of them.

For the past six years my studio, along with David Rockwell and a diverse team of collaborators that include city government, have been working on the conception and realization of a new, brand-neutral, cultural start-up for New York that merges the visual arts, the performing arts, and creative industries.

Culture Shed comprises a base building with a stack of flexible galleries and a telescoping outer shell that deploys to double its footprint. The building’s scalability and its agility to adapt to an
intricate programming calendar prompt a new paradigm of financial self-sustainability and cultural entrepreneurship.

Fifty years after the Fun Palace, the lineage is as obvious as it is elusive. Price’s seminal “anti-building” produced an ethos within the architecture community without which Culture Shed
would never have been conceived. The new project uses the strategy of architecture as infrastructure and adds to the genetic mix, the industrial history of New York and a set of real-time urban, socio-economic conditions. The main organizing principle is flexibility for an unknowable future.

Culture Shed offers shelter, conditioned space of different sizes, power, light, and equipment to enable endless possibilities of artistic engagement. With its variable program and spatial elasticity, the building is spontaneous and responsive to multiple and simultaneous desires. It exists in a
perpetual state of change.

Cedric Price’s determination to find freedom from fixed systems is more plausible today than half a century ago. Perhaps, the most respectful homage an architect can pay to Price is to interpret
his unfinished intellectual project through the filter of new political, social, economic, and technical logics.

Then: technology was the answer.
Now: the speed of obsolescence makes technology a liability. Dumber is better than smarter.
Then: systems theory, game theory and cybernetic control systems were tools to democratize culture.
Now: digital technologies enable culture to be open-source, dispersed, and on-demand, however, in a ubiquitous condition of being monitored.
Then: kit-of-parts and kinetic systems produced flexibility.
Now: flexibility is a paradox: the more mechanical flexibility is built-in, the more is pre-determined, leaving nothing more flexible than empty space.
Then: disciplinary borders had to be broken.
Now: academia has managed to parse and classify the richly indeterminate contours of inter-disciplinarity into the intra-disciplinary, the multi-disciplinary, the trans-disciplinary, and the crossdisciplinary.
Then: government support for culture was a given.
Now: the elimination of state support and reduction of private philanthropy post-2008 requires a new paradigm of financial independence.
Then: the architect is a generalist who gathers research from sub-committees.
Now: the new culture of professionalization turns the architect into a director- producer that relies on a growing cadre of sub-consultants who bring an ever-widening depth of expertise to ever more adventurous problems.