«Cedric Price. An Architecture of Performance»

Journal of Architectural Education, 2015

Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman, eds., Architecture from Neo-Avant-garde to Postmodern in Britain and Beyond, 2010

Criticality was an anguished debate in contemporary architecture. A classic 1974 essay on the problem, Manfredo Tafuri’s “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir,” argued that neo-avant-garde architects manipulated the empty signifiers of their art and left the world at large unchallenged. Nevertheless, my chapter argues, neo-avant-garde modernists like Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling, Archigram, and the Office of Metropolitan Architecture sincerely posited design as a mode of research into architecture’s relationships to an emergent modernity. Tafuri correctly warned that this postwar celebration of Futurism, Constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, Pop art, and technology strayed, in distinction to the interwar modernism from which it grew, toward the mimesis and celebration of capitalism and its associated social relationships. But faced with the accelerating deterritorializing effects of cultural, economic, extraurban, transnational, and technological development, this "projective modernism" was nonetheless civic, reinventing the 19th-century public-sphere typologies of concert halls, libraries, museums, and transport interchanges threatened with extinction. This pragmatic, optimistic, and liberal architecture left the boudoir, then, only to be detained in the Salon.

The impact of 'non-planning' upon mainstream construction in the 1960s, an era of high-rises and city-centre reconstruction, was marginal at best. But in experimental work, non-planning was played out upon the printed page and in the studio with a fervency unmatched before or since, spurred on by the social and cultural debates about the nature of freedom that characterized the period. This chapter offers a genealogy of non-planning from elaborate architecture systems to counterculture.

Without and within: essays on territory and the interior, 2007

The most common type of contemporary large-scale space-with which almost everyone who has walked through a shopping mall, an international airport or the entrance area of a major museum is familiar-embodies aspects of the corporate lobby, the Winter Garden, the shopping mall and the transport terminal concourse. These various resemblances are frequently blurred or ambiguous, emphasised by such spaces' scale and extensiveness. In the largest instances, one passes from one mood to the next in what are represented as a continuous and potentially limitless interiors. Their internal diversity of programme and conditions marks them out as environments rather than specific interiors; but interiors are precisely what they are. The self-sufficiency of such environments seems to negate the existence of the World without altogether: the World is simply that area from which people who use the interior are captured. Extensive interior environments that present themselves as continuous with the city are nearly always, like the shopping malls that precede them, controlled: their security, their climates, and their representations are planned to ensure predictable use and performance. It is possible for their proprietors to effect atmospheres of normality, and with these exercise power over their users, who agree to be participants, through natural assent to their obvious benefits. This is the last of six essays in the book 'Without and within: essays on territory and the interior' (Rotterdam: episode publishers, 2007)

Art & The 60s, 2004

This survey of British architecture in the 1960s, written for the Tate Britain's 2004 exhibition "Art & the 60s: This Was Tomorrow," ranges from the architecture of the Welfare State to the architecture of property development, concluding with the architecture of activism. For some activists, the modernization of the British built environment had been too much, too fast; for others, it had been too timid. Yet both branches of activists were united in an antipathy to 1960s building, an antipathy that would grow until its reconsideration in the 1990s.

A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the 'Techno-Social' Moment

Government Office of Science, Future Cities, 2014

Depictions of future cities can play an important role in shaping our thinking on cities and our future urban strategies. This report explores the ways future cities have been depicted over the last 100 years and considers what these depictions sought to communicate and why. Its aim is to identify and understand the types of cities visions which have had the most influence on UK cities.

The following audit will examine the Fun Palace (1961) designed by Cedric Price discussing it through the themes of Architecture and Delight, Technology, and the Architectural Profession. (Year 2, Sheffield School of Architecture)

The Architectural League of New York Situated Technologies Pamphlet 4, 2009

This volume of the Situated Technologies Pamphlet Series discusses key qualities of “responsive” architecture, a framing that understands it to be a performing instrument. A new generation of architecture that responds to building occupants and environmental factors has embraced distributed technical systems as a means and end for developing more mutually enriching relationships between people, the space they inhabit, and the environment. In contrast to wide optimism about this new kinetic, interactive technology, this conversation examines responsiveness as mutable and contestable.

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.