From Agit-Prop
to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric
Price
by Stanley Matthews
Black Dog Publishing, London, 2007
285 pp., illus. 89 b/w, 42 col. Trade,
$45.00
ISBN 10: 1904772528; ISBN 13: 9781904772521.
Reviewed by Boris Jardine
Department of History and Philosophy of
Science
University of Cambridge
bj210@cam.ac.uk
Cedric Price may always bear the title
of visionary architect: One
whose schemes were grand but unattainable;
a futurist whose ideas were ahead of our
time as well as his own. Yet, as this
extensive study of his two major unrealised
schemes makes clear, Prices plans
for the Fun Palace (a user-guided leisure
emporium) and the Potteries Thinkbelt
(a technically oriented collegiate network)
not only came close to realisation but
also were direct products of post-war
social and architectural trends. Rarely
will a retrospective seem so justified
in concentrating on works that never came
to be.
Matthews presents us with adequate biographical
material on Price and his Fun Palace collaborator
Joan Littlewood, before tackling the various
contexts for the two ventures. The Fun
Palace is shown to have been a systematically
vague scheme, embodying Littlewoods
determination to create anti-elitist venues
for education and leisure and Prices
commitment to high-tech, high-flexibility
structures. This was no mere proto-Millennium
Dome, but rather an attempt to reconfigure
the ways in which people spend their free
time, the ways they learn, and the way
they interact with a built space. The
Fun Palace rejected top-down structures,
literally in that it undermined the role
of the architect, and figuratively in
that it implied user-oriented purpose
throughout. As Matthews puts it, "technology
promised to erase the distinctions between
work, education, and leisure" (p.
69). To this end, Price and Littlewood
teamed up with experts in cybernetics
and game theory in order to optimise plans
for a building that would
allow its users to "improvise and
change their own spaces, using cranes
to assemble prefabricated walls, platforms,
floors, stairs, and ceiling modules"
(p. 77). The Fun Palace repeatedly came
close to the kind of financial and political
backing it required; Matthews account
of these vicissitudes and the projects
eventual failure is as detailed and as
fascinating as one could wish. It is easy
to glimpse of the excitement Littlewood
and Price conveyed, the possibilities
of such a flexible space, the implied
socialism of the plan, and the local-political
fastidiousness that eventually finished
it off.
The Potteries Thinkbelt, by contrast,
was an altogether less convincing idea
(one cant help but wonder whether
this is in part due to the absence of
Littlewoods charisma and energy).
It was a massive project that aimed to
rejuvenate a swathe of the North Staffordshire
Potteries region. Again Price intended
systematic indeterminacy: a sprawling
campus was to be linked together by a
service railway, which would take students
between various housing areas, faculty
buildings, and operational factories/workshops.
The aims of the Thinkbelt, a project undertaken
largely in Prices spare time, were
undoubtedly admirable. While both Labour
and the Conservatives neglected technical
training, Price was attempting simultaneously
to rethink the physical structure of institutes
of higher education, to provide technical
training on a large scale, and to rejuvenate
an unhappy post-industrial area. Matthews
expends fewer words on this less glamorous
project, and perhaps some of the space
devoted to the Fun Palace could have been
sacrificed in order to deal more fully
with the radical nature of Prices
approach. For example, we find the latter
writing, in 1968, that "education
is today little more than a method of
distorting the individuals [mind
and behaviour] to enable him to benefit
from existing social and economic patterning"
(pp. 198-9). The context of this article,
and a deeper analysis of Prices
educational/political commitments would
have been welcome; how far was he adapting
or aping Littlewoods sentiments?
Did others have similarly radical approaches
to the architecture of educational institutions?
Was the Thinkbelt more propaganda than
realisable scheme? The analysis of the
Thinkbelt does not mediate so easily between
the small- and large-scale analysis that
Matthews handles so skilfully with the
Fun Palace.
From Agit-Prop to Free Space is
a book constrained by the fact that its
genre architectural retrospective
implies literally ready-made material
with which to engage; the audience for
such a book might have used and been fascinated
by the buildings it details, and its structure
can be determined by the responses to
a building, as well as its architects
intentions. The Fun Palace and Thinkbelt
produced no buildings, and the nature
of Matthews account theoretical,
social-historical is largely determined
by that fact. For that reason From
Agit-Prop should appeal to those interested
not only in the technical aspects of Prices
work, but in the broader context of post-war
British politics and culture. Prices
work emerges as a kind of social indicator,
imbibing various political, economic,
scientific and formal trends, and almost
succeeding in producing something determined
by them yet wholly new. One of the most
astute comments on his work comes from
Rem Koolhaas: "Price wanted to deflate
architecture to the point where it became
indistinguishable from the ordinary [
]
Nobody has ever changed architecture more
with fewer means than Cedric Price"
(p. 254). Because and not in spite
of their unrealised nature, the Fun Palace
and Thinkbelt remain relevant.