Architecture is that which, through the distortion of time, creates socially beneficial conditions hitherto thought impossible. Cedric Price, 1964 1990 – a sunny spring afternoon in one of London’s finest Georgian squares. A small group of third-year architecture students, all studying at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, unceremoniously spring a leaflet-drop from one of their top-floor studio spaces, overlooking Chings Yard, a courtyard area sandwiched between the backs of the AA school buildings. Small pieces of white paper silently flutter to the ground, some landing on the terrace halfway down. No one seems to take much notice. That evening, one of the flyers finds its way into the bar – the beating heart of that most unique of learning establishments.
Photocopied in black and white (the preferred medium of the moment) are the bold letters “PRICE IS RIGHT”; and in smaller type beneath, “Cedric Price for Chairman” accompanied by a fuzzy portrait of the man himself, cigar in hand.
Alvin Boyarsky was the school’s chairman at the time, and had been since 1971, so was coming up for twenty years in the role. He had resolutely led the school out of near collapse in 1970, not only managing to uphold its rigorously independent principles but also elevating it as “a global concern” by inviting highly regarded national and international architects onto the teaching staff – a legacy that secured the school’s distinguished reputation for experimentation. There is no apparent reason why a quiet campaign for his removal had come about, and indeed there is no other register of a more organized offensive, so it is perhaps safe to say that the event was the work of students exercising their right—some might say obligation— to challenge the prevailing mood. If one had to characterize that mood, “deconstructivism” would be a distinguishing feature. This dominant “development” in postmodern architecture had been lauded for at least ten years by then – Boyarsky a champion of its cause.
Its advocates had sucked all the air out of the room – or rather, the lecture hall. What better cause to try to counter and what better figurehead to lead the counteraction than Price: self-appointed anti architect.1
Later that summer, and quite unexpectedly, Boyarsky died. Let us be very clear here, there is absolutely no suggestion that the students had been expecting this. It was merely a tragic coincidence. The school community was greatly traumatized by Boyarsky’s all-too-sudden demise. Even our leaflet dropping renegades felt bad, and perhaps worse once they came to discover that in fact Price and Boyarsky had been colleagues. Price had been instrumental, for instance, in devising the first AA Summer Sessions with Boyarsky in the 1970s, amongst many other ground-breaking pedagogic experiments. But, more importantly, he would never have put himself forward for chairman, being even more painstakingly driven by the need for autonomy than the AA. In 1991, a new chairman, Alan Balfour, was appointed, and the very first thing he did was to create the position of AA Senior Research Fellow. Autonomous both in mind and body, keeping all academic awards and distinctions at arm’s length, the AA had never entertained such conventional scholastic rankings. However, this was a shrewd move. The honour was awarded to Price, which he happily accepted for one developed the brief for the post: a distinct orbit that exemplified his unparalleled capacities as a virtuoso generalist (the best definition of a good architect). He would deliver some lectures (these took place at a lectern in the bar during lunch time), attend student juries, generally keep an eye on the place, act as a sounding board to some of the larger issues affecting the Association, and pursue his own projects with the aim of making an exhibition at the end of the year.2 By keeping Price close to the AA—his office was just around the corner in Alfred Place, so he could be seen regularly walking between the two premises, cutting a familiar figure in the neighbourhood—Balfour managed to retain a certain intellectual continuity in the school from the previous regime. He was also able to give some much-needed support to Price (in terms of time) to work that he was undertaking at that moment. Balfour affirms in his invitation letter, “I can think of no one else whose spirit and creativity embodies the ideals of the institution nor its courageous stand in the advancing of architectural culture.””3 This story brings to light a number of important aspects in helping to understand something of Price the architect and how he came to be regarded as the moral compass for his profession, the international academic community, and clients at large – highly regarded and rebuked in equal measure.
Price was the son of an architect and Major in the Royal Navy. Born in 1934 in Stone, Staffordshire—
the heart of the ceramics and potteries industry in England’s Midlands —he spent part of his childhood, during the early years of WWII, on the south coast near Southampton whilst his father, AJ Price, worked as an engineer for the British Power Boat Company. Having been trained in both technical and observational drawing (particularly the use of watercolour) by his father from a very young age childhood notebooks are testament to his drawing abilities— Price’s call to architecture seems to have gone without question. It was AJ who had given him his first book on the subject— FRS Yorke’s The Modern Houses in England (1937)—but unfortunately he lived only long enough to see young Cedric enter the architecture school at Cambridge University in 1952. Cedric took his degree there (1952–55) and completed his diploma at the Architectural Association (1955–57). On graduating, Price worked for a short period in the offices of his former Cambridge tutor, David Roberts, and then CB Pearson, followed by Fry, Drew, Drake, and Lasdun, at the same time as lecturing at University College London (delivering an extra-mural course on architectural history) and at the AA (at 24 years old, he was the youngest ever lecturer there), before setting up his own practice, Cedric Price Architects, in London in 1960, at the age of 26. He had already begun work on two of the major projects of his career: the NEW AVIARY at London Zoo (1960–64) designed with Anthony Armstrong- Jones and Frank Newby. The building still stands as a rare example of what was at the time a true experiment in tensegrity structural technology. The project cemented a life-long working relationship between Price and Newby— equally precocious as the head of FJ Samuely & Partners in 1959, at the age of only 32—and together they went on to establish the LIGHTWEIGHT ENCLOSURES UNIT in the 1970s,amongst many other projects.
The FUN PALACE (1960–66) had also begun to take shape on paper, a project that glints in the architectural history books as one of the most radical, albeit unbuilt, propositions of the post-war era. Indeed, FUN PALACE continues to grow in stature as more and more information is uncovered about the full extent of the ambition and work undertaken on that project through increasing accessibility to Price’s archive, now held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. The FUN PALACE’s most potent attributes can be found both in the content of the brief and in those who wrote that brief. Again, lifelong working friendships were formed between client and theatre impresario, Joan Littlewood, Price and the other key players in the project, including Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg (who was responsible for introducing Price and Littlewood) and subsequently cybernetician Gordon Pask, who became head of the project’s Cybernetics Committee. The cast of characters involved eventually ran to the hundreds. Littlewood’s idea for a “university of the streets” was the catalyst for exploring the full potential of the new postwar condition of increased leisure time, free-time, and learning time, and the potential for new types of public space responsive to the “physical and organizational change in urban life”. This flexible capacity was fundamental to Price’s architectural response, both with respect to the artefact—which he describes as “a mobile”—and that artefact’s ability to change and adapt to the user’s desires. The new science of cybernetics played a critical role in developing such a design attitude, engaged specifically to “determine an attitude, a philosophy, and a manner of control for the Fun Palace”.4 The 4 From The Cybernetics Committee – Introductory document, circulation list and basic plans, CCA archive, DR1995:0188:525:001. “extraordinary principled pursuit of the Dynamics of Time in optimizing action in the built environment” was to become Price’s meta-theme for the next forty years of his architectural practice.5 It would be an imbalanced picture if two other projects from that first career-defining decade were not mentioned here. Firstly, POTTERIES THINKBELT (1965) – an entirely self-motivated polemical project for, as Price put it, “a city caused by learning”. It was conceived in response to the failure of the design of new universities to respond to rapid developments in communications technologies. Describing a new environment for higher education, it aimed to reinvigorate an area of England that was suffering all the negative consequences of a decline in industry by re-using the redundant infrastructures—in this instance, the railway network—and indigenous skills base for new industry and manufacturing. The primary architectural byproduct was in fact a variety of types of short-life housing.
“NON-PLAN: an Experiment in Freedom” (1969) was also a critique, this time of British planning regulations. Price, along with co-authors Reyner Banham, planner Peter Hall and magazine editor Peter Barker, described a vision that suspended virtually all planning laws, with the aim of at least finding out “what people want; and at most … the hidden style of mid- 20th century Britain”. They were fully prepared not to like what they found, but proposed it as a vital exercise in order to question entrenched preservationist attitudes. What is important to point out here is that both THINKBELT and NONPLAN first appeared in the pages of New Society magazine, that is to say, not in an architectural magazine, but in one dedicated to an enquiry into the social sciences. This appealed to Price’s design enablement and life-conditioning, and ultimately a more “humane and effective built environment”.6 Together, these early projects exemplify just a few of the different aspects of Price’s modus operandi, which were then developed simultaneously in any one of the 250 projects that are recorded on the office job list – their sizes varying from a single folly in a garden in Cornwall
(PORTHOLE, 1988), to a cattle pen in Hampshire (WESTPEN, 1977), to a city master plan for Strasbourg (STRATTON, 1990) or London (MAGNET, 1995). Inherent in each and every one is the formulation of the brief; this was where the real design work lay, and Price was the past master. The preparation—often starting out with the devising of a questionnaire —was then exercised through a distinct hierarchy of drawing types devised to reflect that practice. “In-head” drawings— quick-witted cartoon annotations in pocket-sized notebooks— are the catalyst for “in-house” drawings developed in more detail in the office and culminating in “in-forward-minded retrospective” drawings, collages and diagrams produced for publication, often revised and annotated with self-critical afterthoughts.7 The use, and the tangible beauty, of the first and last “types” is in their quite deliberate incompleteness. Each one raises a question and demands that the thought be re-thought – their generosity then and now is in the economy of line.8 With countless lectures delivered, workshops conducted, articles written and conferences attended nationally and internationally on a weekly basis, we can begin to see why Price was such a strong candidate for that Senior Research Fellowship. During that period in the 1990s he was contracted as an architectural adviser to British Rail to undertake a number of studies of the vast incoherent railway interchange at Stratford, East London, and its potential as a major new metropolitan junction for the Channel Tunnel Rail link. Much of Price’s strategic planning work went on to support Newham Borough Council’s case for securing East London’s stake in the future, in providing vital high-speed connections to the rest of Europe that put it in the position to host the Olympic Games in 2012. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why Price accepted the fellowship even if the work—although it pleased him immensely—was heavily bureaucratic, during a time when the railways were undergoing transference from public to private ownership. The need to exercise an academic dialogue must have been more vital than ever.9 Thus, the seamless sequence of transitions from architectural education to practice to discourse through talks and magazine articles, were for Price nonlinear interdependencies, a life and work in continuum. For him, it was never a matter of whether the price is right, but rather whether the time is right.