Cedric Price

En 1979, la tercera y última Operación Confraternidad
inauguró el Programa de Radicación y Erradicación que
se extendería durante la siguiente década sobre la ciudad
de Santiago. Ese mismo año, la nueva Política Nacional de
Desarrollo Urbano liberó los límites de la ciudad, mientras
el Estado prometía la entrega de 160.000 títulos de dominio
a pobladores a lo largo del país. Sólo dos años más tar de, en
1981, las 17 comunas existentes en Santiago se subdividieron
en 32, siguiendo una lógica de gobernabilidad en base a
unidades autónomas, extensión lógica de la regionalización
nacional implementada por la CONARA. Una delgada línea
entre planificación y desregulación cruzaba estos programas
y operaciones. Una tensión entre la libertad, como idea, y el
neoliberalismo, como sistema político económico, yacía en el
modo de conceptualizar la arquitectura habitacional en
la década de los ochenta en Chile. Esta c ontradicción
entre imposición y liberalización, entre intervención y
autorregulación, puede ser leída a través de políticas puntuales:
las erradicaciones y su plan piloto de relocalización (las
Operaciones Confraternidad de 1976-78-79), la tabula rasa
que implicó la entrega masiva de propiedad a lo largo del país
– siendo la más visible la del Estadio Nacional en 1979 – y ,
finalmente, la subdivisión comunal de 1981.

The essay intends to investigate the question of a new subjectivity in architecture. Form-driven design has become a taboo in contemporary architecture, and the new modernism seeks to shift to experiential and performative qualities in the formalization of architecture. Indeterminacy in Cedric Price’s works are to be investigated, as well as the role of the aesthetic in the Fun Palace.

Joan Littlewood blamed anti-socialist prejudice for Theatre Workshop’s hostile treatment by the Arts Council. Yet her failure to secure the Council’s backing for the Fun Palace – an open-ended project for an arts, entertainment, and education centre she developed with architect Cedric Price – may be better expressed as a collision between anarchy and bureaucracy. Following Nadine Holdsworth’s 1997 article for New Theatre Quarterly, ‘“They’d Have Pissed on My Grave”: the Arts Council and Theatre Workshop’, in this article Juliet Rufford argues that the project fell victim to a form of programme censorship because it broke the rules of culture and professionalism as defined by the major funding body for the arts. The concept of ‘fun’ is seen as vital to understanding the cynicism of the policy makers towards Price and Littlewood’s proposals, but also as driving explorations of intermediality, interactive performance, and performative architecture that have since been taken up successfully by artists working within and beyond the subsidized sector.

La significación crítica del Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) de Montreal es decisiva en la interpretación y sistematización de proyectos clave de la arquitectura del
s. XX. Uno de estos casos paradigmáticos es
el proyecto Fun Palace de Cedric Price y Joan Littlewood. Los fondos de CCA proveen una información privilegiada en forma de dibujos y material textual para explicitar este proyecto. En él, se propone una estructura y planta liberadas para dar cabida a un nuevo concepto de centro cultural durante los años 60: móvil, en permanente movimiento y contacto con lo circundante. Ello, además de sus influencias
y consideraciones culturales previas, tendrá importantes implicaciones en la arquitectura para equipamientos culturales de los años posteriores, siendo el Centro Pompidou, proyectado por Richard Rogers y Renzo Piano, uno de los ejemplos más claros.

espanolLa significacion critica del Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) de Montreal es decisiva en la interpretacion y sistematizacion de proyectos clave de la arquitectura del s. XX. Uno de estos casos paradigmaticos es el proyecto Fun Palace de Cedric Price y Joan Littlewood. Los fondos de CCA proveen una informacion privilegiada en forma de dibujos y material textual para explicitar este proyecto. En el, se propone una estructura y planta liberadas para dar cabida a un nuevo concepto de centro cultural durante los anos 60: movil, en permanente movimiento y contacto con lo circundante. Ello, ademas de sus influencias y consideraciones culturales previas, tendra importantes implicaciones en la arquitectura para equipamientos culturales de los anos posteriores, siendo el Centro Pompidou, proyectado por Richard Rogers y Renzo Piano, uno de los ejemplos mas claros. EnglishThe critical importance of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) of Montreal is decisive towards the inter...

How food shapes our cities: A blue print for a sustainable food and city systems.

A través de la perspectiva del alimento, podremos construir ciudades cuyos espacios y actividades pongan de manifiesto la caótica diversidad de nuestras experiencias sensoriales, y tengan el potencial de venerar las máximas cualidades que tenemos como seres humanos.

In his book, Playing and Reality, child psychologist D.H. Winnicott proposes that an abstract playground exists between two people in a relationship. This potential space, as he calls it, hovers between the inner worlds of an individual’s mind, which are private and subjective, and the external reality that we occupy together, in which observation and experience can be shared. Part of the game is to test our inner world– our ideas, thoughts, hopes and dreams– in and against reality.

For architects, designers and artists, the studio is also a playground, one that facilitates and exercises the imagination through make-believe theoretical frameworks. On the one hand, it is a relatively safe place to take risks, experiment and play. On the other hand, it requires a significant commitment of time, energy, and money. The value of the studio-as-playground lies in its pretense and potential. It's a place for our imaginations to take off into make-believe worlds as a way to rethink the world we now live in.

Architecture itself can act as a playground too. In the 1960’s Cedric Price and Joan Little conceived of Fun Palace, a performative platform meant for all members of society. In this interactive cultural space, the game was to have fun. It was a place for amusement, experimentation, and discovery; a place to create, explore and learn. Although Fun Palace was never realized, it had an enduring influence on future buildings including the Centre Pompidou, and most recently, The Shed, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (currently in construction).  But what distinguishes Fun Palace as a play-space is its precarious nature, its indefinite and unpredictable form which allows for the spontaneous activity of reality testing.

This paper argues for three design strategies (rules) that promote play as a form of creative activity and cultural practice: (1) It must have a changeable form, allowing for improvisational extensions, alterations and interventions. Without a changeable form it risks becoming a monument or spectacle inspiring awe perhaps, but not intervention and agency. (2) The infrastructure must be exposed. Without an exposed infrastructure the design risks turning into a simulacrum or hyperreal construction (turn the fake castle at Disney World inside out). (3) It must be designed to be temporary. Without impermanence it risks banality, platitude or sheer exhaustion (imagine a Burning Man that never ends).

Whether it occurs in a studio, or some other built environment, having a potential space to play– to test our imaginations in and against reality– is important not only for creative practitioners, buy for all citizens. The precarious infrastructure of Fun Palace, along with its shifting ladders and cranes, is comparable to a circus, except here, the spectators are also the players; they make their own acts, their own sideshows, their own rings. They can even invent their own rules (or break the ones in the paper). This 50-year old concept yields important strategies for creating future cultural experiences that are fun, inclusive, and adaptable to changing populations.

Este artículo persigue una amplificación de la comprensión de las técnicas de arquitectura, vinculándolas a una “ecología de lo invisible”: la atención prestada a variables cualitativas existentes en el contexto, apenas perceptibles y a menudo desestimadas por los regímenes de valor asentados. Este proceder –que podría ser rastreado en el diseño arquitectónico a lo largo de la historia– ha adquirido un valor nuevo, tras la crisis económico-financiera, como crítica a los modelos de desarrollo que dominaron en el cambio de siglo, lo cual también dificulta su comprensión. Para aclarar este punto, se analizan sus claves en tres proyectos fechados en los años precedentes a la crisis: la propuesta de Cedric Price para el concurso Design of Cities en Manhattan (1998), la remodelación de la plaza Léon Aucoc (1996) y la Escuela de Administración de Empresas (2006), ambas en Burdeos, de Lacaton & Vassal. Si los dos primeros han sido leídos como formas de “no intervención”, asociados a una ren...

The second half of the 60s, that convulsed generator experiences long revisited period, also witnessed a curious phenomenon in Italy that, linked to the American booming nightlife and an intense climate of social emancipation, use these new " fun palaces " as a source of ideological inspiration when perceived among young Italian radical architects and designers as a stylistic and functional experimental laboratory capable of generating models for a new social order linked to entertainment.
The fruitful intensity of these years resulting multitude of proposals in which architecture acts as a catalyst for a social drive that mixes in the same space the most radical cultural and experimental art with mass phenomenon in the society of the spectacle, allowing leisure industry occupy without complexes a key position in the discourse of a new generation who intentionally transfers it’s interest from the built form to the production of electronically amplified artificial environments while demonstrating its commitment to the methods and logic of new technologies.

KEYWORDS: Andy Warhol, E.P.I., night-club, counterculture, amplified environments, Marshall McLuhan, Cedric Price, Leonardo Savioli, Radical Architecture, Piper Club Phenomenon.

Since around 1980, Ranulph Glanville has put forward the idea that rather than seeing research in design as one form of science, we instead see scientific research as a specific form of design. This argument, based on the way that scientific research inevitably involves design activity but not vice versa, and others like it around that time consolidate a shift during the 1970s in thinking about design, from a concern with the scientific method to the idea that design has its own epistemological foundations as a discipline. The attempt to base design on a linear version of the scientific method failed for reasons that have been pointed out by Horst Rittel amongst others: because design involves the creation of the new, design questions cannot be exhaustively formulated in advance. This has marked something of a parting of the ways between design and science as being incompatible in terms of method.

Given Glanville’s argument this is not what we might expect: if science is a limited form of design, shouldn’t scientific approaches be commensurable with design even if they are not a basis for it? This apparent disjunction is only the case if we follow the changes in how design was thought about during this period without also following the comparable changes regarding science. Both broadly parallel each other, moving from a concern with method in the 1960s through a critique of this in the 1970s to new foundations from the 1980s onwards, focusing on what designers and scientists actually do in practice. Indeed the key critiques of method advanced by Feyerabend and Rittel, in science and design respectively, have similar structures and, so, what seems at first sight to be a rupture can also be read as a parallel journey.
Using this account as a basis, and in the light of recent discussions regarding the idea of second order science, I suggest that we can understand contemporary design research as one example of second order research practice, as is indicated by its continuity with cybernetics. More speculatively, and with reference to the Fun Palace project of Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price, to which Gordon Pask also contributed, I suggest that architecture can itself sometimes be thought of as facilitating such a reflective and participatory enquiry.

This paper presents and discusses design studio outcomes developed in response to a studio brief linked to the Fun Palace Futures initiative of the Royal British Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in honour of architect Cedric Price and artist Joan Littlewood. The studio brief was collaboratively developed by the authors. Its core question was: How could the thoughts that guided the development and design of the Fun Palace – a project that was never built but is still today cited as a model for thinking flexible and open architecture – be re-interpreted and renewed for the future? This line of thinking guided the initial and experimental research phase, during which students developed an understanding of what indeterminacy is or could be. The paper shows that through the translation of some of the essential principles of the Fun Palace project into pedagogical instruments, students were enabled to approach the questions of indeterminacy in an open and innovative manner. The paper argues that the use of a variety of media, which often went far beyond the conventional architectural pallet, and the introduction of media shifts were crucial in assisting the students in developing their own tools for creating a new kind of open and flexible architecture. The paper presents this pedagogic approach. We show that the conditions of indeterminacy, uncertainty, chance and change, hold potential for framing the design and creation of a new kind of dynamic architecture, and for initiating experimental architectural thinking in a design studio setting.

La segunda mitad de los años 60, ese convulso periodo generador de experiencias largamente revisitadas, es testigo también de un curioso fenómeno en Italia que, vinculado al auge de los locales nocturnos en Estados Unidos y a un intenso clima de emancipación social, utiliza estos nuevos “palacios de la diversión” como fuente de inspiración ideológica al ser percibidos entre los jóvenes arquitectos y diseñadores radicales italianos como un laboratorio experimental estilístico y funcional capaz de generar modelos para un nuevo orden social ligado al entretenimiento. La intensidad productiva de estos años da como resultado multitud de propuestas donde la arquitectura actúa como catalizadora de una pulsión social que mezcla en el mismo espacio la vanguardia cultural y experimental más radical con el fenómeno de masas de la sociedad del espectáculo, permitiendo a la industria del placer ocupar sin complejos una posición clave en el discurso de una nueva generación que traslada intencionadamente su interés desde la forma construida a la producción de ambientes artificiales, electrónicamente amplificados, demostrando al mismo tiempo su compromiso con las formas y la lógica de las nuevas tecnologías.



The second half of the 60s, that convulsed generator experiences long revisited period, also witnessed a curious phenomenon in Italy that, linked to the American booming nightlife and an intense climate of social emancipation, use these new “fun palaces” as a source of ideological inspiration when perceived among young Italian radical architects and designers as a stylistic and functional experimental laboratory capable of generating models for a new social order linked to entertainment. The fruitful intensity of these years resulting multitude of proposals in which architecture acts as a catalyst for a social drive that mixes in the same space the most radical cultural and experimental art with mass phenomenon in the society of the spectacle, allowing leisure industry occupy without complexes a key position in the discourse of a new generation who intentionally transfers it’s interest from the built form to the production of electronically amplified artificial environments while demonstrating its commitment to the methods and logic of new technologies.

This paper presents and discusses design studio outcomes developed in response to a studio brief linked to the Fun Palace Futures initiative of the Royal British Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in honour of architect Cedric Price and artist Joan Littlewood. The studio brief was collaboratively developed by the authors. Its core question was: How could the thoughts that guided the development and design of the Fun Palace – a project that was never built but is still today cited as a model for thinking flexible and open architecture – be re-interpreted and renewed for the future? This line of thinking guided the initial and experimental research phase, during which students developed an understanding of what indeterminacy is or could be. The paper shows that through the translation of some of the essential principles of the Fun Palace project into pedagogical instruments, students were enabled to approach the questions of indeterminacy in an open and innovative manner. The paper argues that the use of a variety of media, which often went far beyond the conventional architectural pallet, and the introduction of media shifts were crucial in assisting the students in developing their own tools for creating a new kind of open and flexible architecture. The paper presents this pedagogic approach. We show that the conditions of indeterminacy, uncertainty, chance and change, hold potential for framing the design and creation of a new kind of dynamic architecture, and for initiating experimental architectural thinking in a design studio setting.

Our concept of ‘nature’ in today’s society is conditioned to promote an idealism found exclusively in the prehuman
elements of sun, air and greenery. In reality, the nature of our environments is not inherently clean or green. In an approach that has been refined over millennia, these selective natures have been championed with the aim to create ‘healthy’ environments for people to dwell in. Meanwhile, other natures deemed inferior—known collectively as ‘subnatures’—have been neglected, discouraged and increasingly omitted through our designs. Our attitudes toward environmental cleanliness have remained steadfast amidst the global pandemic and our current trajectory is geared toward increasing the sterilisation of our homes and cities; yet at what cost? Under perpetual cleaning regimes, the ecological health and resilience of our environments suffer; so too (ironically) does our immunity, which depends on a rich and diverse microflora.

The ongoing trend toward the sanitisation of nature in architecture also begs us to reconsider the underlying social and economic agenda. In charting a brief history of perspectives on this topic, a better understanding of subnature’s endemic presence within our environments may be garnered, ultimately breeding productive forms of cooperation between subnatures and humans in our designs, particularly at the scale of the micro.