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MARISTELLA CASCIATO MONIQUE ELEB SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN SANDY ISENSTADT MARY LOUISE LOBS INGER REINHOLD MARTIN FRANCESCA ROGIER TIMOTHY M. ROHAN FELICITY SCOTT JEAN-LOUIS VIOLEAU CORNELIS WAGENAAR CHERIE WENDELKEN 0l1}Jr. · lOlls 1\1 ())) Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

1())) - Florida International Universitydesigntheory.fiu.edu/readings/lobsinger_cybernetic_theory.pdf · sarah williams goldhagen . sandy isenstadt . mary louise lobs inger . reinhold

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Page 1: 1())) - Florida International Universitydesigntheory.fiu.edu/readings/lobsinger_cybernetic_theory.pdf · sarah williams goldhagen . sandy isenstadt . mary louise lobs inger . reinhold

MARISTELLA CASCIATO

MONIQUE ELEB

SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN

SANDY ISENSTADT

MARY LOUISE LOBS INGER

REINHOLD MARTIN

FRANCESCA ROGIER

TIMOTHY M ROHAN

FELICITY SCOTT

JEAN-LOUIS VIOLEAU

CORNELIS WAGENAAR

CHERIE WENDELKEN

0l1Jr middot lOlls

11()))1~I~NIS1IS Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture

Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal The MIT Press Cambridge Massachusetts and London England

(OJ gt000 Centre Canadien dArchitecture Canadian Centre for Architecture and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Canadian Centre for Architecture po rue Baile Montrbl Quebec Canada H3H lS6

ISBN 0-62-02084 (MIT)

The MIT Press Five Cambrid~ Center Cmbri~ MA 0242

All righ reserved No part of this hook may be reproshyduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (incl~ding photo~opying recording or infor mation storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher

Library of Congress Card Number ()oIlOIampj

Printed and bound in Canada

Legal Deposit Nationl Library of Canada 2000

Bibliotheque nabonale du Quebec 2000

PHOTO CREDITS

Allantic Film and Imaging figs 69610 Calavas fig 9middot7 CCA Photographic Services figs 305 51-59 0-4 Ian Vriihoftrhe Netherlands Photo Archives figs 113-117 John Maltby fig 2 John R Paollin fig 3- Peter Smithson fig 3

COPYRICHTS

( Alison and Peter Smithson Architects figs I-B 5 106 copy Arata Isoi figs 127 uS copy Balthazar

cover figs 62 63 copy Bertha RudofSL) figs 92

94 copy Courtesy of Kevin Roche John Kindeloo and Associales figs 69610 copy IBM Corporation figs 61 64 66-lti8 copy Immtut gta ETIl Zurich fig l7 copy Ian Vriihoftrhe Netherlands Photo Archives cover figs ILl 112 118 copy lean-Louis Cohen Paris fig 29

lohn Wiley amp Sons Limited fig 28 copy Julius Shulman cover figs 4-3 +5 46 copy Keruo Tange

~ Kiyonori Kikutllke figs 122 123 copy Marc figs 25 26 copy Paul Rudolph figs 82 83 86

88 Photo copy Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Columbia University in the City of New York figs 81 8+ 85 Photograph copy 2000 Museum of Modem Art New York cover fig 98 copy Photo WD Morgan fig + copy Rogier Hillier figs 6-3-9 copy Van den Braek en Bakema Architceten figs ll6 ll7 copy Yukio Futllgawa Frank Uoyd Wright Foundation fig 87

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identifY ner of copyrights Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent reprints

Senior Editor Lesley Johnstone Production Manager Oems Hunter Translation Barry Fifield Neville Saulter Editing Edward Tingley Marcia Rodriguez

Peter Smith Reproduction Rights Jocelyne Gervais Index EvaMarie Neumann Design Glenn Goluska

Contents

Preface 9

Introduction Critical Themes of Postwar Modernism SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN AND REjEAN LEGAULT II

1 Neorealism in Italian Architecture MARISTELLA CASCIATO 25

2 An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism Ecochard Candilis and ATBAT-Afrique MONIQUE ELEB 55

3 Freedoms Domiciles Three Projects by Alison and Peter Smithson SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN 75

4- Richard Neutra and the Psychology of Architechnal Consumption SANDY ISENSTADT 97

Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance Cedric Prices Fun Palace MARY LOUISE LOBS INGER 119

6 Computer Architectures Saarinens Patterns IBMS Brains REINHOLD MARTIN 14-1

7 The Monumentality of Rhetoric The Will to Rebuild in Postwar Berlin FRANCESCA ROGIER 165

8 The Dangers of Eclecticism Paul Rudolphs Jewett Arts Center at Wellesley TIMOTHY M ROHAN 191

9 Bernard Rudofsky Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling FELICITY SCOTT 21 5

10 ACritique ofArchitecture The Bitter Victory of the Situationist International JEAN-LOUIS VIOLEAU 239

11 Jaap Bakema and the for Freedom CORNELIS WAGENAAR 261

12 Putting Metabolism Back in Place The Making of a Radically Decontextualized Architecture in Japan CHERIE WENDELKEN 279

Coda Reconcephlalizing the Modem SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN 301

Contributors 325

Index 328

MARY lOUISE LOBSINGER

Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance Cedric Prices Fun Palace

~~

The Modem Mcwement

Popular Culhwel e-ydayLiIe

AnIiArchiIedu

Democraiic Freedom

Homo Luden

Primitivism

Aulhenticily

Architectures History

Regionalism Ploc

We just havent learned how to enjoy our new freedom how to tum machinery robots computers and buildings themselves into instruments ofpleasure and enjoyment CEDRIC PRICE

To pry the subject free from the stifling repetitions of everyday convention and to nurture an emergent individuality - these were the aspirations that galvanized the Fun Palace Project As archishytecture it would be purely utilitarian and purposeful a mechanical slab served as a provisional stage to be continuously set and reset sited and resited What was expected to happen in the Palace was as diagrammatically diffused as the contraption itself It wouldnt be the polite space of municipal geranium beds or fixed teak benches rather it was conceived as a social experiment that would fuel both conflict and cooperation l

Sometime in 1960 Joan Littlewood met and became friends with Cedric Price Littlewood a veteran of the English radical theater scene was on the brink of resignation after a nearly thirty-year fight against establishment and commercial entertainments Prior to the Second World War she had been a member of the Theatre of Action a left-leaning theatrical company working out of Manchester that favored Brechtian aesthetics and agit-prop street theaterl In 1945 she co-founded the Theatre Workshop and during the 1950S had some success in advancing the cause of experimental theater At the time of their meeting Price was still a young architect on the London scene He was teaching at the Architectural Association socializing within a circle of young aspiring architects with a penchant for techshynology and was acquainted with architectural critic Reyner Banham4

The meeting would prove auspicious Littlewoods desire for a new kind of theatrical venue where her performances could flourish unconshystrained by built form became the inspiration for Prices architecturshyal imagination In tum their project for a Fun Palace became the vehicle through which the architect developed his idea for an anticipashytory architecture capable of responding to users needs and desires

119

The Fun Palace was a proposal for an infinitely flexible multi-programmed twentyshyfour-hour entertainment center that marries communications technologies and industrial building components to produce a machine capable of adapting to the needs of users A grid of servicing towers supports open trusses to which a system of gantries are appended for maneuvering interchangeable parts (from information monitors to pre-fab units) into position (fig 51) Circulation elements comshyprise moving catwalks escalators or travelashytors (suspended stair-like and ground-level systems) The conventional determination of built form as an enclosure or legible enveshy

for functional requirements is supplantshyed by an idea of environmental control in which for example adjustable sky-blinds perform the role of roofing and the task of spatial division is assigned to mutable barriers described as movable screens warm air screens optical barriers and static vapor zones5Programmatic elements with specific functional requirements such as kitchens or workshops are housed in standardized enclosed units sited on temporary mechanishycally fitted deck-panels6 The structure is serviced by a three-dimensional grid and an uariable net of packaged conditioning equipment distributed across a gigantic plinth housing a sewage purification plant and other support systems The ever-pragmatshyic Price proudly declared it a uself-washing giant capable of continually cleansing itself with recycled river water and suggested that the site not be less than 20 acres This description patently challenges the idea of architecture as shelter as enclosure or as a permanent signifier of social values Here the concept of architecture as conveyor of symbolic expression has been forfeited for a fully automated and above all transient machine Reyner Banham approvingly comshypared it to a gigantic erector sets

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

Prices ideas for a technologically innoshyvative non-deterministic architecture of planned obsolescence couched in terms of Littlewoods conceptions for alternative theatrical practice produced the quintesshysential anti-architectural project the Fun Palace Littlewoods aesthetic was charactershyized by an emphasis on direct commushynication between audience and performer and importantly on a communication that stressed physical form over speech as the means of expressing content9 The idea that the form of theatrical experience should be dynamic ran counter to the well-oiled proscenium-framed productions of bourgeois theater Littlewoods work thrived on conshyflict employed interactive techniques drew on a variety of popular genres and media from pantomime to music hall to film and television and adapted environmental forms such as festivals with the aim of engagshying the sensory and physical partiCipation of the audience in the action 10 In keeping with her early communist roots theater had a pedagogical function By the end of the 1950S however given rapidly changing social and political imperatives a burgeonshying of mass media and consumer culture and the tum of the Left to an ideal of parshyticipatory democracy the tactics of radical theater required reassessment Theater as a forum for instruction was no longer an effective instrument where the pressing conshycern was to awaken the compliant subjects of an affluent consumer society Welfare State passivity had to be countered through motivated self-willed learning Littlewoods theatrical expertise and social mission were well met by Prices wit and architectural objective to produce an architecture that could accommodate change

According to Littlewood Price proshyduced the first sketch for the Fun Palace in response to her complaints about the

51 Fun PoIace perspedi lea River slle 1961-65 Ced-ic Price archllec1 and drallsmon Photo reproduc1ion of 0 pholomontoge on mason lie CCA Colledion

British taste for quaint old theatersll This first drawing minimally articulates Prices architectural intentions (fig 502) The represhysentation of the program is limited to a few hand-scrawled notations a long-distance observation deck large viewing screens an inflatable conference hall and an area desigshynated for eating and drinking that is identishycal to a space labeled open exhibition A floating volume labeled circular theatershypart enclosed is the most substantial clue to programmatic content By Littlewoods account the drawing was inexplicable more diagram than suggestion for built-foIDI the

identifiable objects being gantries escashylators and various level markings within a thin-lined filigree-like structure of towers and trusses 12 Of the more than four hundred drawings consisting of time schedules movement diagrams mechanical drawings details and some perspectives (figs 53 to 57) this initial conceptual sketch still accushyrately captures the essence of the scheme The perspective is more locational than

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

expressive of spatial qualities or formal characteristics - but then there really isnt much in the way of architectonic qualities or materiality to describe in the Fun Palace As Price himself laconically noted Its a kit of parts not a building - one that he doubted would ever look the same twice B

If the initiation of the project seems rather fortuitous the ensuing campaign of fundshyraising and promotion negotiations with jurisdictional bodies such as the London County Council meetings with residential associations and the struggle to find a site constituted a colossal undertaking that could only have been impelled by a passionate belief in the social necessity of realizing the project14 Littlewood spearheaded the effort with Price managing the architectural aspects In 196 she enlisted the help of Dr Gordon Pask an expert on teaching machines who Littlewood characterized as the romantic doyen of cybemeticians15 111at same year Pask formed the Committee for the Fun Palace Cybernetic Theatre

121

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52 Fun Palace interior perspective ketch showing mickecion 1961-65 Cedric Prico orchiled and drafbmon Pnk on trocing vellum CCA Collection

which added a new twist to Littlewoods idea of direct communicationl6 With the expershytise of an unusual interdisciplinary commitshytee now in place the goals of the project were refocused no longer merely the proshyvision of a barrier-free venue for experimenshytal theater the technological mandate moved beyond the realm of mechanical mobility into the more ephemeral mobility offered by new information media and mass communications The discrete disciplinary interests of the three protagonists - cybernetshyics transient architecture participatory theshyater and communications merged in the objectives of the Fun Palace project to facilitate the emergence of an ephemeral subjectivity through the theatricality of comshymunication Thus began a working relashytionship spanning more than a decade of

MARY LOUISE L08SINGER

activityI7 The implicit consequence of the project an institutional critique of Welfare State-administered culture

Representing Architectural Reality From Image-Based Anti-Formalism 10 Technological Ephemerality Prices proposal for a technologically factual system of assembly a mobile architectureshythat eschewed architectural image recommends itself to Banhams ideas about the true vocation of architecture as proshymulgated in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) Banhams revisionist history of the modern movement was coushypled in the books last chapter with a radical prognostication for the future of architecshyture In a polemic chastising architects of the first machine age for their preoccupation

54 Fun Palaeo interior pergtpeltli showing apended mezzanines and slairways 1961-65 Cedric Price arehiled PeKIncgtnk on phologroph CCA Collodion

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 123

with the representation of technology Banham challenged the architects of the second machine age to run with technology The heroes of his tract were the Futurists and Buckminster Fuller between whom Banham identified a shared inclination toward pennanence and a resolution to exploit science and technology In somewhat apocalyptic tenns he declared architects should emulate the Futurists discard their whole cultural load and propose the conshytinual renovation of the built environment or architecture as a profession would not survive the technological revolution is Fullers 1927 proposal for the Dymaxion House provided Banham with an object lesson in which a liberated attitude to both mechanical services and materials techshynology organized the plan and where forshymal qualities were not remarkable except in combination with the structural and planshyning methods involvedi9 The essence of Banhams message was to drop illusionism and the symbolic use of a machine aesthetic and to accept the unhaltable progression of constant accelerated change2o

Banhams promotion of an anti-formalist techn~logical approach to architecture is central to understanding the context of British postwar architecture and the rejecshytion of International Modernism In brief

the critique may be framed in a threefold way The perception that International Modshyernism was elitist and overly pre-occupied with formal issues was met with a response that emphasized a visual approach (the picturesque) couched in terms of nationalshyism and traditional crafts 11 These responses which included such movements as British Townscape or the New Romanticism were in tum counter-critiqued by the British avant-garde One of the strongest reactions to the revaluation of modernism in postwar Britain was launched by the Independent

MARY LOUISE l08SlNGER

Group which in response to the insularity of tradition-ltlriented aesthetics advocated complete immersion in the visual excesses of (mostly American) mass consumer cuture22

The London-based avant-garde of the mid 1950S cultivated an image-based aesthetic with in part the intention of raising (or as some argue lowering) visual communicashytion to a threshold in keeping with everyday materiality and the experience of mass media In contrast to this Price in the early 1960s advanced a third position an alternashytive to the dominant counter-critiques For Price the new transient social configurations emerging from mass culture were as transhysient as the means of mass communication themselves and thus an architecture that might adequately service and ultimately encourage such social fonnations could not rely on image or an ethos based in materi-

To say that Prices work lacks strong visual impact is an understatement but Prices idea of architectural communication has little to do with a mimetic function that is a natural correspondence with reality and is rather as pure and ephemeral as the act of communicating itself 23 In the mid

Price made the following observations on the relation of architecture to the visual

The role of architecture as provider ofvisually recognizable symbols of identity place and

activity becomes an increasingly attractive excuse for architects to revel in the immensity of their personal visual dexterity aesthetic sensibility and

spatial awareness demanding from both clients and observers recognition of the very causations of such

In his 1963 review of the Team 10 Primer Price took the opportunity to inspect its rhetoric and dissociated himself from conshytemporary theories of urbanism and architecshyture2) With citations from texts by the

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Of1d draftson Groplile with colored pencil on trocing YIIllum CCA Collection

CEDRIC PRICES FUN FA LACE 125

Smithsons and others he challenged Team Tens ideas of social collectivism for examshyple on the gTOunds that in promoting forms more valid in the past than the present they fail to address the needs of an emergent socishyety in which transience and fluctuations in population and group appetites will generate new and often unpredictable urban forms For Price The needs of a new mobile society and communication systems which serve it invalidate existing town planning techniques of fixed building hierarchies and anonymous space2(l The Primer he notes surely identifies the pertinent issues of the times but Price was not convinced of Team Tens commitment due in part to their logic The crux of his doubt centered on the ambiguous use of texts and images For example the works authors rightly to the phenomenon of mobility as a conshytributing factor in the development of urbanshyism and yet Price asked is mobility worth investing with architectonic importance simply because it is there27 Price wondered whether we were not simply being confrontshyed once again by the aesthetic of the early modernists which visualized mechanizashytion (real or imagined) rather than utilizing new technologies28 Taking existing form as evidence for their critique Team Tens

reliance on the found as reality neglected the complex ways in which cities really worked in spite of their physicallimil529 For Price both the groups criticism and its theory of production failed to offer in his words a well-serviced mobility3o These last points - mobility and an insistence that

is not necessarily visibly evident shyare issues he has adhered to ever since and continues to develop to this day

Although the Fun Palace was never realshyized Price achieved such notoriety with this and other projects such as the Potteries Thinkbelt as to secure for himself a seminal

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

role within debates about architecture and technology31 For cutting-edge technological visionaries such as Archigram Price was the man to watch but for those who thought architecture had a visually communicative role inextricably bound to optical appropriashytion his work was anathema to everything architecture might stand for 32 But for Price to ask what meaning might look like was to pursue the WTOng line of inquiry when confronted with new technologies (both mechanical and cybernetic) and new modes of scientific analysis (such as systems design theory) conventional notions of architecshyture were rendered moot 33 Price believed no premium could be placed on what be considered meaningful experience or how it might be achieved or represented in advance of use In fact architecl5 were not in the business of providing meaning at all according to Price their task was to solve problems and extend the possibilities of choice and delight l4 Collective meaning if the word can be used in this context was to be deciphered from within a dynamically interactive field of communication To this end Price aimed to provide an environment that would both anticipate and accommoshydate change It was envisioned as a giant leaming machine with the capacity to enable humans to physically and mentally adapt to the intangible experiences and accelerated pace of technological culture16

In one of his earliest musings on the project Price stated

Is it not possible that with a little imagination we can ourselves lind a new way of learning new things to Jearn and enjoy our life the space the light the knowledge and the inventiveness we have in ourselves in a new wayl7

t

56 Fun Paloce diaglllmmolic sec1ion 1961-65 Cedric Price architoct Pen and black ink grophik ond dry trcnser on lTacing ampIlum CCA Collec1ion

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 127

critique of the Welfare State AnhiIecture and Technologicaly Enhanced Perfurmativity In a statement typifying Pricean ambiguity Price claimed that a structure should stand only as long as it was socially useful To ensure the temporality of the Fun Palace Price assigned a ten-year life to its structural frame 38 But temporality was not simply a matter of planned obsolescence or the interchangeability and disposability of various building components rather time was intended to playa dynamic role in human perception - dynamic in the cybershynetic sense of real_time39

The production of the social and the indishyvidual- both physically and virtually - in real-time is the theoretical crux of the Fun Palace Reiterated in the Fun Palace briefs is a soft leftist critique arguing that the discishyplinary regime of time is dictated by a marshyket-place that artificially divides a workers life into work-time and leisure-time a regishymentation of time that is materially enforced through the zoning of work and leisure in urban space40 For Price this archaic sense of time ran counter to the emerging realshytime of cybernetics and its network of invisshyible services The conflict between the simultaneous time of information and the disciplinary time of work (of schedules timeshytables industrial production) had to be amended for humans to allow them to adapt to the flux and flow of the future technologshyical world In the article Non-Plan An Experiment in Freedom of 19~ Banham Barker Price and Hall almost paraphrase an earlier statement by one of the founders of cybernetics Norbert Wiener when they claim that the cybernetic revolution must be accompanied by a revolution in human thought and required a new mental and physical mobility-l Fun Palace as a diagramshymatic architecture of probability in present time would act as a temporary measure to

MARY lOUISE LOeSINGER

ease the transition into the real-time of the information age

In a conventional sense the Fun Palace as architecture had no intrinsic meaning as a machine it was merely an abstract machine that when activated by the users was capable of producing and processing inforrnationZ In this way it may be considshyered performative for only at the moment of transaction between user and machine would meaning or content be expressed and at that moment would expression be identical with the act of perfonning Furthershymore in the act of performing the and spatiality of the architecture would be annulled for the ephemerality of pure umeshy communication For at the most literal level activities such as the maneuvershying of building components or the group determination of a program involves a basic form of social interaction It was also imagshyined that the Fun Palace would be equipped with the latest in communications technolshyogy reading machines televisions and computers4

These scientific gadgets held the promise of thrusting the participant beyond mundane reality and into a virtual realm of communication

The earliest stated objectives fur the Fun Palace were to arrange as many forms of fun as possible in one spot to make moving in all directions on feet or wheel a delight to provide conditions which make everyone part of the total activity and to exploit drinking necking looking listening shouting and resting in the hopes of an emption or explosion of unimagined socialshyity through pleasure+ At first glance this agenda seems typical of calls during the IcentoS for theatrical self-expression as a route to personal liberation But Price was quick to say that what he had in mind was not a mecca for conventional free-will activ-

In the early documents presumably

written to convince legislative boards the rhetoric of pleasure is accompanied by argushyments for amendments to land-use and for the elimination of redundant proshygramming brought about by borough-toshyborough competition for new leisure and cultural facilities46 In later briefs the cultural mission becomes more pointed the Fun Palace was a leaming machine that enabled self-participatory education through the interface between man and machine between human beings and in keeping with the cybernetic theory it suggests between smart machines7 According to Price the Fun Palace would be a short term life toy of dimensions and organization not limited by or to a particular site which is one good way of trying in physical terms to catch up with the mental dexterity and mobility exercised by all today- As a shortshyterm exploratory toy it would require the coordination and cooperation in i15 day to

day operations oflocal authorities the State industry private organizations and individshyuals49 And in i15 various designations as toy university of the stree15 or laboratory of pleasure it was not merely another conshytainer of amenities for Welfare State entershytainment In As Littlewood and Price stated in 1962

The present socia-political talk of increased

leisure makes both a slovenly and dangerous

assumption that people on one hand are suffishy

ciently numb and servile to accept that the

period during which they eam money can be

little more than made mentally hygienically

bearable and that a mentality is awaken [sic] during self-willed activityH

This reiterated a commonly voiced criticism of British social conditions In 1960 Malcolm Muggeridge described the routinized and self-satisfied Welfare State in vivid language

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PAlACE

The new towns rise as do the television aerials

dreaming spires the streams flow pellucid

through comprehensive school the BBC lifts up our heam in the morning and bids us good

night in the evening We wait for Godot we shall have strip-tease wherever we go 52

Muggeridge captures the sense of social complacency that attended the success of Welfare State cultural and educational policies and the economic prosperity of the 19505 The leveling of social experience shynot to be mistaken for a leveling of the class structure - and the anaesthetization of socishyety was perceived by some intellectuals as a situation nearing crisis Two responses to this cultural uncertainty Richard Hoggarts The Uses ofLiteracy (1957) and Raymond Williamss Britain in the Sixties Communi cations (Icent~) attempted to analyze the crisis in view of the proliferation of mass-media communications Written in a nostalgic vein The Uses ofLiteracy reads as a lament for the loss of an identifiable working class and for the erosion of indigenous forms of popular culture 13 Hoggart targeted the pulp-print culture of tabloids dailies and romances as the cause of both the trivializashytion oflife and the individuals distancing from concrete social reality He argued that despite the rise in literacy the profusion of iunk culture had become debilitating especially for the most vulnerable group the working class which easily succumbed to its appeals to conformity Distinctive class characteristics - communal bonds local wisdom and ethics and importantly tradishytions in speech ~the guying of authority by putting a finger to the nose - disapshypeared in the programming of homogenous appetites 4 Hoggarts problem with mass publications was not that they debased taste but that they over-excited it eventually dulled it and would finally kill it - they

129

enervate rather than corrupt -leaving numb and passive subjects5 The problem was political who controlled the proliferashytion of mass media who formed and whetted the appetite for it

In his analysis of mass-communicashylions technology in British culture Raymond Williams did not worry about the loss of cultural distinctions but feared for the evolushytion of an educated and participating democshyracy 56 Williams claimed that Britain had been quick off the mark to employ new media technologies for cultural and educashytional purposes in the belief that via the ailwaves a classless and egalitarian society composed of literate and rational subjects would emerge However by the late 19505 it was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a space of freedom outside the market was no longer tenable Between the paternalistic educational policies adopted by BBe culture guardians and the imperatives of the comshymercial market there seemed to be little room for the kind of communication that Williams thought essential for the growth of a truly democratic society5i Williams argued that democracy depended on free spontashyneous communication and significantly that it had no predetermined form for when put into practice could it be felt to be real58 He called for a rethinking of British cultural institutions and proposed the formashytion of new kinds of bodies such as Commushynications Centers for research and analysis However more urgent was the need for a

where ordinary people could exercise choice and effectively exert control within an uncensored network of communications 59

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

Control and Communication From Participatory Architecture 10 a Cybernetic Learning Machine If programmatic components such as an automated information library a news room auditoria rallying spaces and committee therapy and research rooms seem rather unusual for an entertainment center and if some of the assertions about the Fun Palace seem naively optimistic (the Fun Palace is both a pleasure arcade and an instrument which motivates the passive participant into thinking more abstractly or scientific gadgets new sysshytems knowledge locked away in research stations can be brought to the street corner) what is one to make of Littlewoods stateshyment that the fun arcade will be full of games and tests that psychologists and elecshytronic engineers now devise for the service of war - knowledge will be piped juke-boxes60 To understand this we must examine the contribution of the Fun Palace Cybernetics Committee specifically that of Dr Gordon Pasko

Pasks Theatre Workshop and Systems Research Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre offers some insight into the degree of his commitment to the project After a few introductory remarks - such as the crux of a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience should genuinely participate in a play and that it should overcome the restrictions in entertainment media such as cinema and television - Pask proceeds to outline in rather opaque technical jargon a cybernetic analysis of the problem (fig 58)61 He then provides some of the most initially baffling but fascinating diagrams of the entire proshyject It seems that in Pasks theater the seats would be equipped with controls allowing the audience to intervene in the action of the play62 A computing machine located backstage would calculate audience input

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CEORIC PRICES FUN PALACE 131

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

Page 2: 1())) - Florida International Universitydesigntheory.fiu.edu/readings/lobsinger_cybernetic_theory.pdf · sarah williams goldhagen . sandy isenstadt . mary louise lobs inger . reinhold

(OJ gt000 Centre Canadien dArchitecture Canadian Centre for Architecture and Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Canadian Centre for Architecture po rue Baile Montrbl Quebec Canada H3H lS6

ISBN 0-62-02084 (MIT)

The MIT Press Five Cambrid~ Center Cmbri~ MA 0242

All righ reserved No part of this hook may be reproshyduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (incl~ding photo~opying recording or infor mation storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher

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Printed and bound in Canada

Legal Deposit Nationl Library of Canada 2000

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PHOTO CREDITS

Allantic Film and Imaging figs 69610 Calavas fig 9middot7 CCA Photographic Services figs 305 51-59 0-4 Ian Vriihoftrhe Netherlands Photo Archives figs 113-117 John Maltby fig 2 John R Paollin fig 3- Peter Smithson fig 3

COPYRICHTS

( Alison and Peter Smithson Architects figs I-B 5 106 copy Arata Isoi figs 127 uS copy Balthazar

cover figs 62 63 copy Bertha RudofSL) figs 92

94 copy Courtesy of Kevin Roche John Kindeloo and Associales figs 69610 copy IBM Corporation figs 61 64 66-lti8 copy Immtut gta ETIl Zurich fig l7 copy Ian Vriihoftrhe Netherlands Photo Archives cover figs ILl 112 118 copy lean-Louis Cohen Paris fig 29

lohn Wiley amp Sons Limited fig 28 copy Julius Shulman cover figs 4-3 +5 46 copy Keruo Tange

~ Kiyonori Kikutllke figs 122 123 copy Marc figs 25 26 copy Paul Rudolph figs 82 83 86

88 Photo copy Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library Columbia University in the City of New York figs 81 8+ 85 Photograph copy 2000 Museum of Modem Art New York cover fig 98 copy Photo WD Morgan fig + copy Rogier Hillier figs 6-3-9 copy Van den Braek en Bakema Architceten figs ll6 ll7 copy Yukio Futllgawa Frank Uoyd Wright Foundation fig 87

Every reasonable attempt has been made to identifY ner of copyrights Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent reprints

Senior Editor Lesley Johnstone Production Manager Oems Hunter Translation Barry Fifield Neville Saulter Editing Edward Tingley Marcia Rodriguez

Peter Smith Reproduction Rights Jocelyne Gervais Index EvaMarie Neumann Design Glenn Goluska

Contents

Preface 9

Introduction Critical Themes of Postwar Modernism SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN AND REjEAN LEGAULT II

1 Neorealism in Italian Architecture MARISTELLA CASCIATO 25

2 An Alternative to Functionalist Universalism Ecochard Candilis and ATBAT-Afrique MONIQUE ELEB 55

3 Freedoms Domiciles Three Projects by Alison and Peter Smithson SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN 75

4- Richard Neutra and the Psychology of Architechnal Consumption SANDY ISENSTADT 97

Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance Cedric Prices Fun Palace MARY LOUISE LOBS INGER 119

6 Computer Architectures Saarinens Patterns IBMS Brains REINHOLD MARTIN 14-1

7 The Monumentality of Rhetoric The Will to Rebuild in Postwar Berlin FRANCESCA ROGIER 165

8 The Dangers of Eclecticism Paul Rudolphs Jewett Arts Center at Wellesley TIMOTHY M ROHAN 191

9 Bernard Rudofsky Allegories of Nomadism and Dwelling FELICITY SCOTT 21 5

10 ACritique ofArchitecture The Bitter Victory of the Situationist International JEAN-LOUIS VIOLEAU 239

11 Jaap Bakema and the for Freedom CORNELIS WAGENAAR 261

12 Putting Metabolism Back in Place The Making of a Radically Decontextualized Architecture in Japan CHERIE WENDELKEN 279

Coda Reconcephlalizing the Modem SARAH WILLIAMS GOLDHAGEN 301

Contributors 325

Index 328

MARY lOUISE LOBSINGER

Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance Cedric Prices Fun Palace

~~

The Modem Mcwement

Popular Culhwel e-ydayLiIe

AnIiArchiIedu

Democraiic Freedom

Homo Luden

Primitivism

Aulhenticily

Architectures History

Regionalism Ploc

We just havent learned how to enjoy our new freedom how to tum machinery robots computers and buildings themselves into instruments ofpleasure and enjoyment CEDRIC PRICE

To pry the subject free from the stifling repetitions of everyday convention and to nurture an emergent individuality - these were the aspirations that galvanized the Fun Palace Project As archishytecture it would be purely utilitarian and purposeful a mechanical slab served as a provisional stage to be continuously set and reset sited and resited What was expected to happen in the Palace was as diagrammatically diffused as the contraption itself It wouldnt be the polite space of municipal geranium beds or fixed teak benches rather it was conceived as a social experiment that would fuel both conflict and cooperation l

Sometime in 1960 Joan Littlewood met and became friends with Cedric Price Littlewood a veteran of the English radical theater scene was on the brink of resignation after a nearly thirty-year fight against establishment and commercial entertainments Prior to the Second World War she had been a member of the Theatre of Action a left-leaning theatrical company working out of Manchester that favored Brechtian aesthetics and agit-prop street theaterl In 1945 she co-founded the Theatre Workshop and during the 1950S had some success in advancing the cause of experimental theater At the time of their meeting Price was still a young architect on the London scene He was teaching at the Architectural Association socializing within a circle of young aspiring architects with a penchant for techshynology and was acquainted with architectural critic Reyner Banham4

The meeting would prove auspicious Littlewoods desire for a new kind of theatrical venue where her performances could flourish unconshystrained by built form became the inspiration for Prices architecturshyal imagination In tum their project for a Fun Palace became the vehicle through which the architect developed his idea for an anticipashytory architecture capable of responding to users needs and desires

119

The Fun Palace was a proposal for an infinitely flexible multi-programmed twentyshyfour-hour entertainment center that marries communications technologies and industrial building components to produce a machine capable of adapting to the needs of users A grid of servicing towers supports open trusses to which a system of gantries are appended for maneuvering interchangeable parts (from information monitors to pre-fab units) into position (fig 51) Circulation elements comshyprise moving catwalks escalators or travelashytors (suspended stair-like and ground-level systems) The conventional determination of built form as an enclosure or legible enveshy

for functional requirements is supplantshyed by an idea of environmental control in which for example adjustable sky-blinds perform the role of roofing and the task of spatial division is assigned to mutable barriers described as movable screens warm air screens optical barriers and static vapor zones5Programmatic elements with specific functional requirements such as kitchens or workshops are housed in standardized enclosed units sited on temporary mechanishycally fitted deck-panels6 The structure is serviced by a three-dimensional grid and an uariable net of packaged conditioning equipment distributed across a gigantic plinth housing a sewage purification plant and other support systems The ever-pragmatshyic Price proudly declared it a uself-washing giant capable of continually cleansing itself with recycled river water and suggested that the site not be less than 20 acres This description patently challenges the idea of architecture as shelter as enclosure or as a permanent signifier of social values Here the concept of architecture as conveyor of symbolic expression has been forfeited for a fully automated and above all transient machine Reyner Banham approvingly comshypared it to a gigantic erector sets

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

Prices ideas for a technologically innoshyvative non-deterministic architecture of planned obsolescence couched in terms of Littlewoods conceptions for alternative theatrical practice produced the quintesshysential anti-architectural project the Fun Palace Littlewoods aesthetic was charactershyized by an emphasis on direct commushynication between audience and performer and importantly on a communication that stressed physical form over speech as the means of expressing content9 The idea that the form of theatrical experience should be dynamic ran counter to the well-oiled proscenium-framed productions of bourgeois theater Littlewoods work thrived on conshyflict employed interactive techniques drew on a variety of popular genres and media from pantomime to music hall to film and television and adapted environmental forms such as festivals with the aim of engagshying the sensory and physical partiCipation of the audience in the action 10 In keeping with her early communist roots theater had a pedagogical function By the end of the 1950S however given rapidly changing social and political imperatives a burgeonshying of mass media and consumer culture and the tum of the Left to an ideal of parshyticipatory democracy the tactics of radical theater required reassessment Theater as a forum for instruction was no longer an effective instrument where the pressing conshycern was to awaken the compliant subjects of an affluent consumer society Welfare State passivity had to be countered through motivated self-willed learning Littlewoods theatrical expertise and social mission were well met by Prices wit and architectural objective to produce an architecture that could accommodate change

According to Littlewood Price proshyduced the first sketch for the Fun Palace in response to her complaints about the

51 Fun PoIace perspedi lea River slle 1961-65 Ced-ic Price archllec1 and drallsmon Photo reproduc1ion of 0 pholomontoge on mason lie CCA Colledion

British taste for quaint old theatersll This first drawing minimally articulates Prices architectural intentions (fig 502) The represhysentation of the program is limited to a few hand-scrawled notations a long-distance observation deck large viewing screens an inflatable conference hall and an area desigshynated for eating and drinking that is identishycal to a space labeled open exhibition A floating volume labeled circular theatershypart enclosed is the most substantial clue to programmatic content By Littlewoods account the drawing was inexplicable more diagram than suggestion for built-foIDI the

identifiable objects being gantries escashylators and various level markings within a thin-lined filigree-like structure of towers and trusses 12 Of the more than four hundred drawings consisting of time schedules movement diagrams mechanical drawings details and some perspectives (figs 53 to 57) this initial conceptual sketch still accushyrately captures the essence of the scheme The perspective is more locational than

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

expressive of spatial qualities or formal characteristics - but then there really isnt much in the way of architectonic qualities or materiality to describe in the Fun Palace As Price himself laconically noted Its a kit of parts not a building - one that he doubted would ever look the same twice B

If the initiation of the project seems rather fortuitous the ensuing campaign of fundshyraising and promotion negotiations with jurisdictional bodies such as the London County Council meetings with residential associations and the struggle to find a site constituted a colossal undertaking that could only have been impelled by a passionate belief in the social necessity of realizing the project14 Littlewood spearheaded the effort with Price managing the architectural aspects In 196 she enlisted the help of Dr Gordon Pask an expert on teaching machines who Littlewood characterized as the romantic doyen of cybemeticians15 111at same year Pask formed the Committee for the Fun Palace Cybernetic Theatre

121

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which added a new twist to Littlewoods idea of direct communicationl6 With the expershytise of an unusual interdisciplinary commitshytee now in place the goals of the project were refocused no longer merely the proshyvision of a barrier-free venue for experimenshytal theater the technological mandate moved beyond the realm of mechanical mobility into the more ephemeral mobility offered by new information media and mass communications The discrete disciplinary interests of the three protagonists - cybernetshyics transient architecture participatory theshyater and communications merged in the objectives of the Fun Palace project to facilitate the emergence of an ephemeral subjectivity through the theatricality of comshymunication Thus began a working relashytionship spanning more than a decade of

MARY LOUISE L08SINGER

activityI7 The implicit consequence of the project an institutional critique of Welfare State-administered culture

Representing Architectural Reality From Image-Based Anti-Formalism 10 Technological Ephemerality Prices proposal for a technologically factual system of assembly a mobile architectureshythat eschewed architectural image recommends itself to Banhams ideas about the true vocation of architecture as proshymulgated in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) Banhams revisionist history of the modern movement was coushypled in the books last chapter with a radical prognostication for the future of architecshyture In a polemic chastising architects of the first machine age for their preoccupation

54 Fun Palaeo interior pergtpeltli showing apended mezzanines and slairways 1961-65 Cedric Price arehiled PeKIncgtnk on phologroph CCA Collodion

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 123

with the representation of technology Banham challenged the architects of the second machine age to run with technology The heroes of his tract were the Futurists and Buckminster Fuller between whom Banham identified a shared inclination toward pennanence and a resolution to exploit science and technology In somewhat apocalyptic tenns he declared architects should emulate the Futurists discard their whole cultural load and propose the conshytinual renovation of the built environment or architecture as a profession would not survive the technological revolution is Fullers 1927 proposal for the Dymaxion House provided Banham with an object lesson in which a liberated attitude to both mechanical services and materials techshynology organized the plan and where forshymal qualities were not remarkable except in combination with the structural and planshyning methods involvedi9 The essence of Banhams message was to drop illusionism and the symbolic use of a machine aesthetic and to accept the unhaltable progression of constant accelerated change2o

Banhams promotion of an anti-formalist techn~logical approach to architecture is central to understanding the context of British postwar architecture and the rejecshytion of International Modernism In brief

the critique may be framed in a threefold way The perception that International Modshyernism was elitist and overly pre-occupied with formal issues was met with a response that emphasized a visual approach (the picturesque) couched in terms of nationalshyism and traditional crafts 11 These responses which included such movements as British Townscape or the New Romanticism were in tum counter-critiqued by the British avant-garde One of the strongest reactions to the revaluation of modernism in postwar Britain was launched by the Independent

MARY LOUISE l08SlNGER

Group which in response to the insularity of tradition-ltlriented aesthetics advocated complete immersion in the visual excesses of (mostly American) mass consumer cuture22

The London-based avant-garde of the mid 1950S cultivated an image-based aesthetic with in part the intention of raising (or as some argue lowering) visual communicashytion to a threshold in keeping with everyday materiality and the experience of mass media In contrast to this Price in the early 1960s advanced a third position an alternashytive to the dominant counter-critiques For Price the new transient social configurations emerging from mass culture were as transhysient as the means of mass communication themselves and thus an architecture that might adequately service and ultimately encourage such social fonnations could not rely on image or an ethos based in materi-

To say that Prices work lacks strong visual impact is an understatement but Prices idea of architectural communication has little to do with a mimetic function that is a natural correspondence with reality and is rather as pure and ephemeral as the act of communicating itself 23 In the mid

Price made the following observations on the relation of architecture to the visual

The role of architecture as provider ofvisually recognizable symbols of identity place and

activity becomes an increasingly attractive excuse for architects to revel in the immensity of their personal visual dexterity aesthetic sensibility and

spatial awareness demanding from both clients and observers recognition of the very causations of such

In his 1963 review of the Team 10 Primer Price took the opportunity to inspect its rhetoric and dissociated himself from conshytemporary theories of urbanism and architecshyture2) With citations from texts by the

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN FA LACE 125

Smithsons and others he challenged Team Tens ideas of social collectivism for examshyple on the gTOunds that in promoting forms more valid in the past than the present they fail to address the needs of an emergent socishyety in which transience and fluctuations in population and group appetites will generate new and often unpredictable urban forms For Price The needs of a new mobile society and communication systems which serve it invalidate existing town planning techniques of fixed building hierarchies and anonymous space2(l The Primer he notes surely identifies the pertinent issues of the times but Price was not convinced of Team Tens commitment due in part to their logic The crux of his doubt centered on the ambiguous use of texts and images For example the works authors rightly to the phenomenon of mobility as a conshytributing factor in the development of urbanshyism and yet Price asked is mobility worth investing with architectonic importance simply because it is there27 Price wondered whether we were not simply being confrontshyed once again by the aesthetic of the early modernists which visualized mechanizashytion (real or imagined) rather than utilizing new technologies28 Taking existing form as evidence for their critique Team Tens

reliance on the found as reality neglected the complex ways in which cities really worked in spite of their physicallimil529 For Price both the groups criticism and its theory of production failed to offer in his words a well-serviced mobility3o These last points - mobility and an insistence that

is not necessarily visibly evident shyare issues he has adhered to ever since and continues to develop to this day

Although the Fun Palace was never realshyized Price achieved such notoriety with this and other projects such as the Potteries Thinkbelt as to secure for himself a seminal

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

role within debates about architecture and technology31 For cutting-edge technological visionaries such as Archigram Price was the man to watch but for those who thought architecture had a visually communicative role inextricably bound to optical appropriashytion his work was anathema to everything architecture might stand for 32 But for Price to ask what meaning might look like was to pursue the WTOng line of inquiry when confronted with new technologies (both mechanical and cybernetic) and new modes of scientific analysis (such as systems design theory) conventional notions of architecshyture were rendered moot 33 Price believed no premium could be placed on what be considered meaningful experience or how it might be achieved or represented in advance of use In fact architecl5 were not in the business of providing meaning at all according to Price their task was to solve problems and extend the possibilities of choice and delight l4 Collective meaning if the word can be used in this context was to be deciphered from within a dynamically interactive field of communication To this end Price aimed to provide an environment that would both anticipate and accommoshydate change It was envisioned as a giant leaming machine with the capacity to enable humans to physically and mentally adapt to the intangible experiences and accelerated pace of technological culture16

In one of his earliest musings on the project Price stated

Is it not possible that with a little imagination we can ourselves lind a new way of learning new things to Jearn and enjoy our life the space the light the knowledge and the inventiveness we have in ourselves in a new wayl7

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 127

critique of the Welfare State AnhiIecture and Technologicaly Enhanced Perfurmativity In a statement typifying Pricean ambiguity Price claimed that a structure should stand only as long as it was socially useful To ensure the temporality of the Fun Palace Price assigned a ten-year life to its structural frame 38 But temporality was not simply a matter of planned obsolescence or the interchangeability and disposability of various building components rather time was intended to playa dynamic role in human perception - dynamic in the cybershynetic sense of real_time39

The production of the social and the indishyvidual- both physically and virtually - in real-time is the theoretical crux of the Fun Palace Reiterated in the Fun Palace briefs is a soft leftist critique arguing that the discishyplinary regime of time is dictated by a marshyket-place that artificially divides a workers life into work-time and leisure-time a regishymentation of time that is materially enforced through the zoning of work and leisure in urban space40 For Price this archaic sense of time ran counter to the emerging realshytime of cybernetics and its network of invisshyible services The conflict between the simultaneous time of information and the disciplinary time of work (of schedules timeshytables industrial production) had to be amended for humans to allow them to adapt to the flux and flow of the future technologshyical world In the article Non-Plan An Experiment in Freedom of 19~ Banham Barker Price and Hall almost paraphrase an earlier statement by one of the founders of cybernetics Norbert Wiener when they claim that the cybernetic revolution must be accompanied by a revolution in human thought and required a new mental and physical mobility-l Fun Palace as a diagramshymatic architecture of probability in present time would act as a temporary measure to

MARY lOUISE LOeSINGER

ease the transition into the real-time of the information age

In a conventional sense the Fun Palace as architecture had no intrinsic meaning as a machine it was merely an abstract machine that when activated by the users was capable of producing and processing inforrnationZ In this way it may be considshyered performative for only at the moment of transaction between user and machine would meaning or content be expressed and at that moment would expression be identical with the act of perfonning Furthershymore in the act of performing the and spatiality of the architecture would be annulled for the ephemerality of pure umeshy communication For at the most literal level activities such as the maneuvershying of building components or the group determination of a program involves a basic form of social interaction It was also imagshyined that the Fun Palace would be equipped with the latest in communications technolshyogy reading machines televisions and computers4

These scientific gadgets held the promise of thrusting the participant beyond mundane reality and into a virtual realm of communication

The earliest stated objectives fur the Fun Palace were to arrange as many forms of fun as possible in one spot to make moving in all directions on feet or wheel a delight to provide conditions which make everyone part of the total activity and to exploit drinking necking looking listening shouting and resting in the hopes of an emption or explosion of unimagined socialshyity through pleasure+ At first glance this agenda seems typical of calls during the IcentoS for theatrical self-expression as a route to personal liberation But Price was quick to say that what he had in mind was not a mecca for conventional free-will activ-

In the early documents presumably

written to convince legislative boards the rhetoric of pleasure is accompanied by argushyments for amendments to land-use and for the elimination of redundant proshygramming brought about by borough-toshyborough competition for new leisure and cultural facilities46 In later briefs the cultural mission becomes more pointed the Fun Palace was a leaming machine that enabled self-participatory education through the interface between man and machine between human beings and in keeping with the cybernetic theory it suggests between smart machines7 According to Price the Fun Palace would be a short term life toy of dimensions and organization not limited by or to a particular site which is one good way of trying in physical terms to catch up with the mental dexterity and mobility exercised by all today- As a shortshyterm exploratory toy it would require the coordination and cooperation in i15 day to

day operations oflocal authorities the State industry private organizations and individshyuals49 And in i15 various designations as toy university of the stree15 or laboratory of pleasure it was not merely another conshytainer of amenities for Welfare State entershytainment In As Littlewood and Price stated in 1962

The present socia-political talk of increased

leisure makes both a slovenly and dangerous

assumption that people on one hand are suffishy

ciently numb and servile to accept that the

period during which they eam money can be

little more than made mentally hygienically

bearable and that a mentality is awaken [sic] during self-willed activityH

This reiterated a commonly voiced criticism of British social conditions In 1960 Malcolm Muggeridge described the routinized and self-satisfied Welfare State in vivid language

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PAlACE

The new towns rise as do the television aerials

dreaming spires the streams flow pellucid

through comprehensive school the BBC lifts up our heam in the morning and bids us good

night in the evening We wait for Godot we shall have strip-tease wherever we go 52

Muggeridge captures the sense of social complacency that attended the success of Welfare State cultural and educational policies and the economic prosperity of the 19505 The leveling of social experience shynot to be mistaken for a leveling of the class structure - and the anaesthetization of socishyety was perceived by some intellectuals as a situation nearing crisis Two responses to this cultural uncertainty Richard Hoggarts The Uses ofLiteracy (1957) and Raymond Williamss Britain in the Sixties Communi cations (Icent~) attempted to analyze the crisis in view of the proliferation of mass-media communications Written in a nostalgic vein The Uses ofLiteracy reads as a lament for the loss of an identifiable working class and for the erosion of indigenous forms of popular culture 13 Hoggart targeted the pulp-print culture of tabloids dailies and romances as the cause of both the trivializashytion oflife and the individuals distancing from concrete social reality He argued that despite the rise in literacy the profusion of iunk culture had become debilitating especially for the most vulnerable group the working class which easily succumbed to its appeals to conformity Distinctive class characteristics - communal bonds local wisdom and ethics and importantly tradishytions in speech ~the guying of authority by putting a finger to the nose - disapshypeared in the programming of homogenous appetites 4 Hoggarts problem with mass publications was not that they debased taste but that they over-excited it eventually dulled it and would finally kill it - they

129

enervate rather than corrupt -leaving numb and passive subjects5 The problem was political who controlled the proliferashytion of mass media who formed and whetted the appetite for it

In his analysis of mass-communicashylions technology in British culture Raymond Williams did not worry about the loss of cultural distinctions but feared for the evolushytion of an educated and participating democshyracy 56 Williams claimed that Britain had been quick off the mark to employ new media technologies for cultural and educashytional purposes in the belief that via the ailwaves a classless and egalitarian society composed of literate and rational subjects would emerge However by the late 19505 it was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a space of freedom outside the market was no longer tenable Between the paternalistic educational policies adopted by BBe culture guardians and the imperatives of the comshymercial market there seemed to be little room for the kind of communication that Williams thought essential for the growth of a truly democratic society5i Williams argued that democracy depended on free spontashyneous communication and significantly that it had no predetermined form for when put into practice could it be felt to be real58 He called for a rethinking of British cultural institutions and proposed the formashytion of new kinds of bodies such as Commushynications Centers for research and analysis However more urgent was the need for a

where ordinary people could exercise choice and effectively exert control within an uncensored network of communications 59

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

Control and Communication From Participatory Architecture 10 a Cybernetic Learning Machine If programmatic components such as an automated information library a news room auditoria rallying spaces and committee therapy and research rooms seem rather unusual for an entertainment center and if some of the assertions about the Fun Palace seem naively optimistic (the Fun Palace is both a pleasure arcade and an instrument which motivates the passive participant into thinking more abstractly or scientific gadgets new sysshytems knowledge locked away in research stations can be brought to the street corner) what is one to make of Littlewoods stateshyment that the fun arcade will be full of games and tests that psychologists and elecshytronic engineers now devise for the service of war - knowledge will be piped juke-boxes60 To understand this we must examine the contribution of the Fun Palace Cybernetics Committee specifically that of Dr Gordon Pasko

Pasks Theatre Workshop and Systems Research Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre offers some insight into the degree of his commitment to the project After a few introductory remarks - such as the crux of a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience should genuinely participate in a play and that it should overcome the restrictions in entertainment media such as cinema and television - Pask proceeds to outline in rather opaque technical jargon a cybernetic analysis of the problem (fig 58)61 He then provides some of the most initially baffling but fascinating diagrams of the entire proshyject It seems that in Pasks theater the seats would be equipped with controls allowing the audience to intervene in the action of the play62 A computing machine located backstage would calculate audience input

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CEORIC PRICES FUN PALACE 131

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

Page 3: 1())) - Florida International Universitydesigntheory.fiu.edu/readings/lobsinger_cybernetic_theory.pdf · sarah williams goldhagen . sandy isenstadt . mary louise lobs inger . reinhold

MARY lOUISE LOBSINGER

Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance Cedric Prices Fun Palace

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We just havent learned how to enjoy our new freedom how to tum machinery robots computers and buildings themselves into instruments ofpleasure and enjoyment CEDRIC PRICE

To pry the subject free from the stifling repetitions of everyday convention and to nurture an emergent individuality - these were the aspirations that galvanized the Fun Palace Project As archishytecture it would be purely utilitarian and purposeful a mechanical slab served as a provisional stage to be continuously set and reset sited and resited What was expected to happen in the Palace was as diagrammatically diffused as the contraption itself It wouldnt be the polite space of municipal geranium beds or fixed teak benches rather it was conceived as a social experiment that would fuel both conflict and cooperation l

Sometime in 1960 Joan Littlewood met and became friends with Cedric Price Littlewood a veteran of the English radical theater scene was on the brink of resignation after a nearly thirty-year fight against establishment and commercial entertainments Prior to the Second World War she had been a member of the Theatre of Action a left-leaning theatrical company working out of Manchester that favored Brechtian aesthetics and agit-prop street theaterl In 1945 she co-founded the Theatre Workshop and during the 1950S had some success in advancing the cause of experimental theater At the time of their meeting Price was still a young architect on the London scene He was teaching at the Architectural Association socializing within a circle of young aspiring architects with a penchant for techshynology and was acquainted with architectural critic Reyner Banham4

The meeting would prove auspicious Littlewoods desire for a new kind of theatrical venue where her performances could flourish unconshystrained by built form became the inspiration for Prices architecturshyal imagination In tum their project for a Fun Palace became the vehicle through which the architect developed his idea for an anticipashytory architecture capable of responding to users needs and desires

119

The Fun Palace was a proposal for an infinitely flexible multi-programmed twentyshyfour-hour entertainment center that marries communications technologies and industrial building components to produce a machine capable of adapting to the needs of users A grid of servicing towers supports open trusses to which a system of gantries are appended for maneuvering interchangeable parts (from information monitors to pre-fab units) into position (fig 51) Circulation elements comshyprise moving catwalks escalators or travelashytors (suspended stair-like and ground-level systems) The conventional determination of built form as an enclosure or legible enveshy

for functional requirements is supplantshyed by an idea of environmental control in which for example adjustable sky-blinds perform the role of roofing and the task of spatial division is assigned to mutable barriers described as movable screens warm air screens optical barriers and static vapor zones5Programmatic elements with specific functional requirements such as kitchens or workshops are housed in standardized enclosed units sited on temporary mechanishycally fitted deck-panels6 The structure is serviced by a three-dimensional grid and an uariable net of packaged conditioning equipment distributed across a gigantic plinth housing a sewage purification plant and other support systems The ever-pragmatshyic Price proudly declared it a uself-washing giant capable of continually cleansing itself with recycled river water and suggested that the site not be less than 20 acres This description patently challenges the idea of architecture as shelter as enclosure or as a permanent signifier of social values Here the concept of architecture as conveyor of symbolic expression has been forfeited for a fully automated and above all transient machine Reyner Banham approvingly comshypared it to a gigantic erector sets

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

Prices ideas for a technologically innoshyvative non-deterministic architecture of planned obsolescence couched in terms of Littlewoods conceptions for alternative theatrical practice produced the quintesshysential anti-architectural project the Fun Palace Littlewoods aesthetic was charactershyized by an emphasis on direct commushynication between audience and performer and importantly on a communication that stressed physical form over speech as the means of expressing content9 The idea that the form of theatrical experience should be dynamic ran counter to the well-oiled proscenium-framed productions of bourgeois theater Littlewoods work thrived on conshyflict employed interactive techniques drew on a variety of popular genres and media from pantomime to music hall to film and television and adapted environmental forms such as festivals with the aim of engagshying the sensory and physical partiCipation of the audience in the action 10 In keeping with her early communist roots theater had a pedagogical function By the end of the 1950S however given rapidly changing social and political imperatives a burgeonshying of mass media and consumer culture and the tum of the Left to an ideal of parshyticipatory democracy the tactics of radical theater required reassessment Theater as a forum for instruction was no longer an effective instrument where the pressing conshycern was to awaken the compliant subjects of an affluent consumer society Welfare State passivity had to be countered through motivated self-willed learning Littlewoods theatrical expertise and social mission were well met by Prices wit and architectural objective to produce an architecture that could accommodate change

According to Littlewood Price proshyduced the first sketch for the Fun Palace in response to her complaints about the

51 Fun PoIace perspedi lea River slle 1961-65 Ced-ic Price archllec1 and drallsmon Photo reproduc1ion of 0 pholomontoge on mason lie CCA Colledion

British taste for quaint old theatersll This first drawing minimally articulates Prices architectural intentions (fig 502) The represhysentation of the program is limited to a few hand-scrawled notations a long-distance observation deck large viewing screens an inflatable conference hall and an area desigshynated for eating and drinking that is identishycal to a space labeled open exhibition A floating volume labeled circular theatershypart enclosed is the most substantial clue to programmatic content By Littlewoods account the drawing was inexplicable more diagram than suggestion for built-foIDI the

identifiable objects being gantries escashylators and various level markings within a thin-lined filigree-like structure of towers and trusses 12 Of the more than four hundred drawings consisting of time schedules movement diagrams mechanical drawings details and some perspectives (figs 53 to 57) this initial conceptual sketch still accushyrately captures the essence of the scheme The perspective is more locational than

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

expressive of spatial qualities or formal characteristics - but then there really isnt much in the way of architectonic qualities or materiality to describe in the Fun Palace As Price himself laconically noted Its a kit of parts not a building - one that he doubted would ever look the same twice B

If the initiation of the project seems rather fortuitous the ensuing campaign of fundshyraising and promotion negotiations with jurisdictional bodies such as the London County Council meetings with residential associations and the struggle to find a site constituted a colossal undertaking that could only have been impelled by a passionate belief in the social necessity of realizing the project14 Littlewood spearheaded the effort with Price managing the architectural aspects In 196 she enlisted the help of Dr Gordon Pask an expert on teaching machines who Littlewood characterized as the romantic doyen of cybemeticians15 111at same year Pask formed the Committee for the Fun Palace Cybernetic Theatre

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52 Fun Palace interior perspective ketch showing mickecion 1961-65 Cedric Prico orchiled and drafbmon Pnk on trocing vellum CCA Collection

which added a new twist to Littlewoods idea of direct communicationl6 With the expershytise of an unusual interdisciplinary commitshytee now in place the goals of the project were refocused no longer merely the proshyvision of a barrier-free venue for experimenshytal theater the technological mandate moved beyond the realm of mechanical mobility into the more ephemeral mobility offered by new information media and mass communications The discrete disciplinary interests of the three protagonists - cybernetshyics transient architecture participatory theshyater and communications merged in the objectives of the Fun Palace project to facilitate the emergence of an ephemeral subjectivity through the theatricality of comshymunication Thus began a working relashytionship spanning more than a decade of

MARY LOUISE L08SINGER

activityI7 The implicit consequence of the project an institutional critique of Welfare State-administered culture

Representing Architectural Reality From Image-Based Anti-Formalism 10 Technological Ephemerality Prices proposal for a technologically factual system of assembly a mobile architectureshythat eschewed architectural image recommends itself to Banhams ideas about the true vocation of architecture as proshymulgated in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) Banhams revisionist history of the modern movement was coushypled in the books last chapter with a radical prognostication for the future of architecshyture In a polemic chastising architects of the first machine age for their preoccupation

54 Fun Palaeo interior pergtpeltli showing apended mezzanines and slairways 1961-65 Cedric Price arehiled PeKIncgtnk on phologroph CCA Collodion

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 123

with the representation of technology Banham challenged the architects of the second machine age to run with technology The heroes of his tract were the Futurists and Buckminster Fuller between whom Banham identified a shared inclination toward pennanence and a resolution to exploit science and technology In somewhat apocalyptic tenns he declared architects should emulate the Futurists discard their whole cultural load and propose the conshytinual renovation of the built environment or architecture as a profession would not survive the technological revolution is Fullers 1927 proposal for the Dymaxion House provided Banham with an object lesson in which a liberated attitude to both mechanical services and materials techshynology organized the plan and where forshymal qualities were not remarkable except in combination with the structural and planshyning methods involvedi9 The essence of Banhams message was to drop illusionism and the symbolic use of a machine aesthetic and to accept the unhaltable progression of constant accelerated change2o

Banhams promotion of an anti-formalist techn~logical approach to architecture is central to understanding the context of British postwar architecture and the rejecshytion of International Modernism In brief

the critique may be framed in a threefold way The perception that International Modshyernism was elitist and overly pre-occupied with formal issues was met with a response that emphasized a visual approach (the picturesque) couched in terms of nationalshyism and traditional crafts 11 These responses which included such movements as British Townscape or the New Romanticism were in tum counter-critiqued by the British avant-garde One of the strongest reactions to the revaluation of modernism in postwar Britain was launched by the Independent

MARY LOUISE l08SlNGER

Group which in response to the insularity of tradition-ltlriented aesthetics advocated complete immersion in the visual excesses of (mostly American) mass consumer cuture22

The London-based avant-garde of the mid 1950S cultivated an image-based aesthetic with in part the intention of raising (or as some argue lowering) visual communicashytion to a threshold in keeping with everyday materiality and the experience of mass media In contrast to this Price in the early 1960s advanced a third position an alternashytive to the dominant counter-critiques For Price the new transient social configurations emerging from mass culture were as transhysient as the means of mass communication themselves and thus an architecture that might adequately service and ultimately encourage such social fonnations could not rely on image or an ethos based in materi-

To say that Prices work lacks strong visual impact is an understatement but Prices idea of architectural communication has little to do with a mimetic function that is a natural correspondence with reality and is rather as pure and ephemeral as the act of communicating itself 23 In the mid

Price made the following observations on the relation of architecture to the visual

The role of architecture as provider ofvisually recognizable symbols of identity place and

activity becomes an increasingly attractive excuse for architects to revel in the immensity of their personal visual dexterity aesthetic sensibility and

spatial awareness demanding from both clients and observers recognition of the very causations of such

In his 1963 review of the Team 10 Primer Price took the opportunity to inspect its rhetoric and dissociated himself from conshytemporary theories of urbanism and architecshyture2) With citations from texts by the

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN FA LACE 125

Smithsons and others he challenged Team Tens ideas of social collectivism for examshyple on the gTOunds that in promoting forms more valid in the past than the present they fail to address the needs of an emergent socishyety in which transience and fluctuations in population and group appetites will generate new and often unpredictable urban forms For Price The needs of a new mobile society and communication systems which serve it invalidate existing town planning techniques of fixed building hierarchies and anonymous space2(l The Primer he notes surely identifies the pertinent issues of the times but Price was not convinced of Team Tens commitment due in part to their logic The crux of his doubt centered on the ambiguous use of texts and images For example the works authors rightly to the phenomenon of mobility as a conshytributing factor in the development of urbanshyism and yet Price asked is mobility worth investing with architectonic importance simply because it is there27 Price wondered whether we were not simply being confrontshyed once again by the aesthetic of the early modernists which visualized mechanizashytion (real or imagined) rather than utilizing new technologies28 Taking existing form as evidence for their critique Team Tens

reliance on the found as reality neglected the complex ways in which cities really worked in spite of their physicallimil529 For Price both the groups criticism and its theory of production failed to offer in his words a well-serviced mobility3o These last points - mobility and an insistence that

is not necessarily visibly evident shyare issues he has adhered to ever since and continues to develop to this day

Although the Fun Palace was never realshyized Price achieved such notoriety with this and other projects such as the Potteries Thinkbelt as to secure for himself a seminal

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

role within debates about architecture and technology31 For cutting-edge technological visionaries such as Archigram Price was the man to watch but for those who thought architecture had a visually communicative role inextricably bound to optical appropriashytion his work was anathema to everything architecture might stand for 32 But for Price to ask what meaning might look like was to pursue the WTOng line of inquiry when confronted with new technologies (both mechanical and cybernetic) and new modes of scientific analysis (such as systems design theory) conventional notions of architecshyture were rendered moot 33 Price believed no premium could be placed on what be considered meaningful experience or how it might be achieved or represented in advance of use In fact architecl5 were not in the business of providing meaning at all according to Price their task was to solve problems and extend the possibilities of choice and delight l4 Collective meaning if the word can be used in this context was to be deciphered from within a dynamically interactive field of communication To this end Price aimed to provide an environment that would both anticipate and accommoshydate change It was envisioned as a giant leaming machine with the capacity to enable humans to physically and mentally adapt to the intangible experiences and accelerated pace of technological culture16

In one of his earliest musings on the project Price stated

Is it not possible that with a little imagination we can ourselves lind a new way of learning new things to Jearn and enjoy our life the space the light the knowledge and the inventiveness we have in ourselves in a new wayl7

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 127

critique of the Welfare State AnhiIecture and Technologicaly Enhanced Perfurmativity In a statement typifying Pricean ambiguity Price claimed that a structure should stand only as long as it was socially useful To ensure the temporality of the Fun Palace Price assigned a ten-year life to its structural frame 38 But temporality was not simply a matter of planned obsolescence or the interchangeability and disposability of various building components rather time was intended to playa dynamic role in human perception - dynamic in the cybershynetic sense of real_time39

The production of the social and the indishyvidual- both physically and virtually - in real-time is the theoretical crux of the Fun Palace Reiterated in the Fun Palace briefs is a soft leftist critique arguing that the discishyplinary regime of time is dictated by a marshyket-place that artificially divides a workers life into work-time and leisure-time a regishymentation of time that is materially enforced through the zoning of work and leisure in urban space40 For Price this archaic sense of time ran counter to the emerging realshytime of cybernetics and its network of invisshyible services The conflict between the simultaneous time of information and the disciplinary time of work (of schedules timeshytables industrial production) had to be amended for humans to allow them to adapt to the flux and flow of the future technologshyical world In the article Non-Plan An Experiment in Freedom of 19~ Banham Barker Price and Hall almost paraphrase an earlier statement by one of the founders of cybernetics Norbert Wiener when they claim that the cybernetic revolution must be accompanied by a revolution in human thought and required a new mental and physical mobility-l Fun Palace as a diagramshymatic architecture of probability in present time would act as a temporary measure to

MARY lOUISE LOeSINGER

ease the transition into the real-time of the information age

In a conventional sense the Fun Palace as architecture had no intrinsic meaning as a machine it was merely an abstract machine that when activated by the users was capable of producing and processing inforrnationZ In this way it may be considshyered performative for only at the moment of transaction between user and machine would meaning or content be expressed and at that moment would expression be identical with the act of perfonning Furthershymore in the act of performing the and spatiality of the architecture would be annulled for the ephemerality of pure umeshy communication For at the most literal level activities such as the maneuvershying of building components or the group determination of a program involves a basic form of social interaction It was also imagshyined that the Fun Palace would be equipped with the latest in communications technolshyogy reading machines televisions and computers4

These scientific gadgets held the promise of thrusting the participant beyond mundane reality and into a virtual realm of communication

The earliest stated objectives fur the Fun Palace were to arrange as many forms of fun as possible in one spot to make moving in all directions on feet or wheel a delight to provide conditions which make everyone part of the total activity and to exploit drinking necking looking listening shouting and resting in the hopes of an emption or explosion of unimagined socialshyity through pleasure+ At first glance this agenda seems typical of calls during the IcentoS for theatrical self-expression as a route to personal liberation But Price was quick to say that what he had in mind was not a mecca for conventional free-will activ-

In the early documents presumably

written to convince legislative boards the rhetoric of pleasure is accompanied by argushyments for amendments to land-use and for the elimination of redundant proshygramming brought about by borough-toshyborough competition for new leisure and cultural facilities46 In later briefs the cultural mission becomes more pointed the Fun Palace was a leaming machine that enabled self-participatory education through the interface between man and machine between human beings and in keeping with the cybernetic theory it suggests between smart machines7 According to Price the Fun Palace would be a short term life toy of dimensions and organization not limited by or to a particular site which is one good way of trying in physical terms to catch up with the mental dexterity and mobility exercised by all today- As a shortshyterm exploratory toy it would require the coordination and cooperation in i15 day to

day operations oflocal authorities the State industry private organizations and individshyuals49 And in i15 various designations as toy university of the stree15 or laboratory of pleasure it was not merely another conshytainer of amenities for Welfare State entershytainment In As Littlewood and Price stated in 1962

The present socia-political talk of increased

leisure makes both a slovenly and dangerous

assumption that people on one hand are suffishy

ciently numb and servile to accept that the

period during which they eam money can be

little more than made mentally hygienically

bearable and that a mentality is awaken [sic] during self-willed activityH

This reiterated a commonly voiced criticism of British social conditions In 1960 Malcolm Muggeridge described the routinized and self-satisfied Welfare State in vivid language

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PAlACE

The new towns rise as do the television aerials

dreaming spires the streams flow pellucid

through comprehensive school the BBC lifts up our heam in the morning and bids us good

night in the evening We wait for Godot we shall have strip-tease wherever we go 52

Muggeridge captures the sense of social complacency that attended the success of Welfare State cultural and educational policies and the economic prosperity of the 19505 The leveling of social experience shynot to be mistaken for a leveling of the class structure - and the anaesthetization of socishyety was perceived by some intellectuals as a situation nearing crisis Two responses to this cultural uncertainty Richard Hoggarts The Uses ofLiteracy (1957) and Raymond Williamss Britain in the Sixties Communi cations (Icent~) attempted to analyze the crisis in view of the proliferation of mass-media communications Written in a nostalgic vein The Uses ofLiteracy reads as a lament for the loss of an identifiable working class and for the erosion of indigenous forms of popular culture 13 Hoggart targeted the pulp-print culture of tabloids dailies and romances as the cause of both the trivializashytion oflife and the individuals distancing from concrete social reality He argued that despite the rise in literacy the profusion of iunk culture had become debilitating especially for the most vulnerable group the working class which easily succumbed to its appeals to conformity Distinctive class characteristics - communal bonds local wisdom and ethics and importantly tradishytions in speech ~the guying of authority by putting a finger to the nose - disapshypeared in the programming of homogenous appetites 4 Hoggarts problem with mass publications was not that they debased taste but that they over-excited it eventually dulled it and would finally kill it - they

129

enervate rather than corrupt -leaving numb and passive subjects5 The problem was political who controlled the proliferashytion of mass media who formed and whetted the appetite for it

In his analysis of mass-communicashylions technology in British culture Raymond Williams did not worry about the loss of cultural distinctions but feared for the evolushytion of an educated and participating democshyracy 56 Williams claimed that Britain had been quick off the mark to employ new media technologies for cultural and educashytional purposes in the belief that via the ailwaves a classless and egalitarian society composed of literate and rational subjects would emerge However by the late 19505 it was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a space of freedom outside the market was no longer tenable Between the paternalistic educational policies adopted by BBe culture guardians and the imperatives of the comshymercial market there seemed to be little room for the kind of communication that Williams thought essential for the growth of a truly democratic society5i Williams argued that democracy depended on free spontashyneous communication and significantly that it had no predetermined form for when put into practice could it be felt to be real58 He called for a rethinking of British cultural institutions and proposed the formashytion of new kinds of bodies such as Commushynications Centers for research and analysis However more urgent was the need for a

where ordinary people could exercise choice and effectively exert control within an uncensored network of communications 59

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

Control and Communication From Participatory Architecture 10 a Cybernetic Learning Machine If programmatic components such as an automated information library a news room auditoria rallying spaces and committee therapy and research rooms seem rather unusual for an entertainment center and if some of the assertions about the Fun Palace seem naively optimistic (the Fun Palace is both a pleasure arcade and an instrument which motivates the passive participant into thinking more abstractly or scientific gadgets new sysshytems knowledge locked away in research stations can be brought to the street corner) what is one to make of Littlewoods stateshyment that the fun arcade will be full of games and tests that psychologists and elecshytronic engineers now devise for the service of war - knowledge will be piped juke-boxes60 To understand this we must examine the contribution of the Fun Palace Cybernetics Committee specifically that of Dr Gordon Pasko

Pasks Theatre Workshop and Systems Research Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre offers some insight into the degree of his commitment to the project After a few introductory remarks - such as the crux of a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience should genuinely participate in a play and that it should overcome the restrictions in entertainment media such as cinema and television - Pask proceeds to outline in rather opaque technical jargon a cybernetic analysis of the problem (fig 58)61 He then provides some of the most initially baffling but fascinating diagrams of the entire proshyject It seems that in Pasks theater the seats would be equipped with controls allowing the audience to intervene in the action of the play62 A computing machine located backstage would calculate audience input

- 3 shy

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5B Fun Palace diagram lor a cybemelics theater from minule of the Cyberneficgt Commiliee 27Jonuory 1965 Cedric Price and Gordon Pak Pitolocapy en wove poper CCA Collection

CEORIC PRICES FUN PALACE 131

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

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The Fun Palace was a proposal for an infinitely flexible multi-programmed twentyshyfour-hour entertainment center that marries communications technologies and industrial building components to produce a machine capable of adapting to the needs of users A grid of servicing towers supports open trusses to which a system of gantries are appended for maneuvering interchangeable parts (from information monitors to pre-fab units) into position (fig 51) Circulation elements comshyprise moving catwalks escalators or travelashytors (suspended stair-like and ground-level systems) The conventional determination of built form as an enclosure or legible enveshy

for functional requirements is supplantshyed by an idea of environmental control in which for example adjustable sky-blinds perform the role of roofing and the task of spatial division is assigned to mutable barriers described as movable screens warm air screens optical barriers and static vapor zones5Programmatic elements with specific functional requirements such as kitchens or workshops are housed in standardized enclosed units sited on temporary mechanishycally fitted deck-panels6 The structure is serviced by a three-dimensional grid and an uariable net of packaged conditioning equipment distributed across a gigantic plinth housing a sewage purification plant and other support systems The ever-pragmatshyic Price proudly declared it a uself-washing giant capable of continually cleansing itself with recycled river water and suggested that the site not be less than 20 acres This description patently challenges the idea of architecture as shelter as enclosure or as a permanent signifier of social values Here the concept of architecture as conveyor of symbolic expression has been forfeited for a fully automated and above all transient machine Reyner Banham approvingly comshypared it to a gigantic erector sets

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

Prices ideas for a technologically innoshyvative non-deterministic architecture of planned obsolescence couched in terms of Littlewoods conceptions for alternative theatrical practice produced the quintesshysential anti-architectural project the Fun Palace Littlewoods aesthetic was charactershyized by an emphasis on direct commushynication between audience and performer and importantly on a communication that stressed physical form over speech as the means of expressing content9 The idea that the form of theatrical experience should be dynamic ran counter to the well-oiled proscenium-framed productions of bourgeois theater Littlewoods work thrived on conshyflict employed interactive techniques drew on a variety of popular genres and media from pantomime to music hall to film and television and adapted environmental forms such as festivals with the aim of engagshying the sensory and physical partiCipation of the audience in the action 10 In keeping with her early communist roots theater had a pedagogical function By the end of the 1950S however given rapidly changing social and political imperatives a burgeonshying of mass media and consumer culture and the tum of the Left to an ideal of parshyticipatory democracy the tactics of radical theater required reassessment Theater as a forum for instruction was no longer an effective instrument where the pressing conshycern was to awaken the compliant subjects of an affluent consumer society Welfare State passivity had to be countered through motivated self-willed learning Littlewoods theatrical expertise and social mission were well met by Prices wit and architectural objective to produce an architecture that could accommodate change

According to Littlewood Price proshyduced the first sketch for the Fun Palace in response to her complaints about the

51 Fun PoIace perspedi lea River slle 1961-65 Ced-ic Price archllec1 and drallsmon Photo reproduc1ion of 0 pholomontoge on mason lie CCA Colledion

British taste for quaint old theatersll This first drawing minimally articulates Prices architectural intentions (fig 502) The represhysentation of the program is limited to a few hand-scrawled notations a long-distance observation deck large viewing screens an inflatable conference hall and an area desigshynated for eating and drinking that is identishycal to a space labeled open exhibition A floating volume labeled circular theatershypart enclosed is the most substantial clue to programmatic content By Littlewoods account the drawing was inexplicable more diagram than suggestion for built-foIDI the

identifiable objects being gantries escashylators and various level markings within a thin-lined filigree-like structure of towers and trusses 12 Of the more than four hundred drawings consisting of time schedules movement diagrams mechanical drawings details and some perspectives (figs 53 to 57) this initial conceptual sketch still accushyrately captures the essence of the scheme The perspective is more locational than

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

expressive of spatial qualities or formal characteristics - but then there really isnt much in the way of architectonic qualities or materiality to describe in the Fun Palace As Price himself laconically noted Its a kit of parts not a building - one that he doubted would ever look the same twice B

If the initiation of the project seems rather fortuitous the ensuing campaign of fundshyraising and promotion negotiations with jurisdictional bodies such as the London County Council meetings with residential associations and the struggle to find a site constituted a colossal undertaking that could only have been impelled by a passionate belief in the social necessity of realizing the project14 Littlewood spearheaded the effort with Price managing the architectural aspects In 196 she enlisted the help of Dr Gordon Pask an expert on teaching machines who Littlewood characterized as the romantic doyen of cybemeticians15 111at same year Pask formed the Committee for the Fun Palace Cybernetic Theatre

121

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-shy-53 Fun Palace diagrams for pilot projoct 1961-65 Cedrie Price onhilecl Pen-oncgtnk with IeIHip pen an vellum CCA Collection

52 Fun Palace interior perspective ketch showing mickecion 1961-65 Cedric Prico orchiled and drafbmon Pnk on trocing vellum CCA Collection

which added a new twist to Littlewoods idea of direct communicationl6 With the expershytise of an unusual interdisciplinary commitshytee now in place the goals of the project were refocused no longer merely the proshyvision of a barrier-free venue for experimenshytal theater the technological mandate moved beyond the realm of mechanical mobility into the more ephemeral mobility offered by new information media and mass communications The discrete disciplinary interests of the three protagonists - cybernetshyics transient architecture participatory theshyater and communications merged in the objectives of the Fun Palace project to facilitate the emergence of an ephemeral subjectivity through the theatricality of comshymunication Thus began a working relashytionship spanning more than a decade of

MARY LOUISE L08SINGER

activityI7 The implicit consequence of the project an institutional critique of Welfare State-administered culture

Representing Architectural Reality From Image-Based Anti-Formalism 10 Technological Ephemerality Prices proposal for a technologically factual system of assembly a mobile architectureshythat eschewed architectural image recommends itself to Banhams ideas about the true vocation of architecture as proshymulgated in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) Banhams revisionist history of the modern movement was coushypled in the books last chapter with a radical prognostication for the future of architecshyture In a polemic chastising architects of the first machine age for their preoccupation

54 Fun Palaeo interior pergtpeltli showing apended mezzanines and slairways 1961-65 Cedric Price arehiled PeKIncgtnk on phologroph CCA Collodion

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 123

with the representation of technology Banham challenged the architects of the second machine age to run with technology The heroes of his tract were the Futurists and Buckminster Fuller between whom Banham identified a shared inclination toward pennanence and a resolution to exploit science and technology In somewhat apocalyptic tenns he declared architects should emulate the Futurists discard their whole cultural load and propose the conshytinual renovation of the built environment or architecture as a profession would not survive the technological revolution is Fullers 1927 proposal for the Dymaxion House provided Banham with an object lesson in which a liberated attitude to both mechanical services and materials techshynology organized the plan and where forshymal qualities were not remarkable except in combination with the structural and planshyning methods involvedi9 The essence of Banhams message was to drop illusionism and the symbolic use of a machine aesthetic and to accept the unhaltable progression of constant accelerated change2o

Banhams promotion of an anti-formalist techn~logical approach to architecture is central to understanding the context of British postwar architecture and the rejecshytion of International Modernism In brief

the critique may be framed in a threefold way The perception that International Modshyernism was elitist and overly pre-occupied with formal issues was met with a response that emphasized a visual approach (the picturesque) couched in terms of nationalshyism and traditional crafts 11 These responses which included such movements as British Townscape or the New Romanticism were in tum counter-critiqued by the British avant-garde One of the strongest reactions to the revaluation of modernism in postwar Britain was launched by the Independent

MARY LOUISE l08SlNGER

Group which in response to the insularity of tradition-ltlriented aesthetics advocated complete immersion in the visual excesses of (mostly American) mass consumer cuture22

The London-based avant-garde of the mid 1950S cultivated an image-based aesthetic with in part the intention of raising (or as some argue lowering) visual communicashytion to a threshold in keeping with everyday materiality and the experience of mass media In contrast to this Price in the early 1960s advanced a third position an alternashytive to the dominant counter-critiques For Price the new transient social configurations emerging from mass culture were as transhysient as the means of mass communication themselves and thus an architecture that might adequately service and ultimately encourage such social fonnations could not rely on image or an ethos based in materi-

To say that Prices work lacks strong visual impact is an understatement but Prices idea of architectural communication has little to do with a mimetic function that is a natural correspondence with reality and is rather as pure and ephemeral as the act of communicating itself 23 In the mid

Price made the following observations on the relation of architecture to the visual

The role of architecture as provider ofvisually recognizable symbols of identity place and

activity becomes an increasingly attractive excuse for architects to revel in the immensity of their personal visual dexterity aesthetic sensibility and

spatial awareness demanding from both clients and observers recognition of the very causations of such

In his 1963 review of the Team 10 Primer Price took the opportunity to inspect its rhetoric and dissociated himself from conshytemporary theories of urbanism and architecshyture2) With citations from texts by the

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN FA LACE 125

Smithsons and others he challenged Team Tens ideas of social collectivism for examshyple on the gTOunds that in promoting forms more valid in the past than the present they fail to address the needs of an emergent socishyety in which transience and fluctuations in population and group appetites will generate new and often unpredictable urban forms For Price The needs of a new mobile society and communication systems which serve it invalidate existing town planning techniques of fixed building hierarchies and anonymous space2(l The Primer he notes surely identifies the pertinent issues of the times but Price was not convinced of Team Tens commitment due in part to their logic The crux of his doubt centered on the ambiguous use of texts and images For example the works authors rightly to the phenomenon of mobility as a conshytributing factor in the development of urbanshyism and yet Price asked is mobility worth investing with architectonic importance simply because it is there27 Price wondered whether we were not simply being confrontshyed once again by the aesthetic of the early modernists which visualized mechanizashytion (real or imagined) rather than utilizing new technologies28 Taking existing form as evidence for their critique Team Tens

reliance on the found as reality neglected the complex ways in which cities really worked in spite of their physicallimil529 For Price both the groups criticism and its theory of production failed to offer in his words a well-serviced mobility3o These last points - mobility and an insistence that

is not necessarily visibly evident shyare issues he has adhered to ever since and continues to develop to this day

Although the Fun Palace was never realshyized Price achieved such notoriety with this and other projects such as the Potteries Thinkbelt as to secure for himself a seminal

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

role within debates about architecture and technology31 For cutting-edge technological visionaries such as Archigram Price was the man to watch but for those who thought architecture had a visually communicative role inextricably bound to optical appropriashytion his work was anathema to everything architecture might stand for 32 But for Price to ask what meaning might look like was to pursue the WTOng line of inquiry when confronted with new technologies (both mechanical and cybernetic) and new modes of scientific analysis (such as systems design theory) conventional notions of architecshyture were rendered moot 33 Price believed no premium could be placed on what be considered meaningful experience or how it might be achieved or represented in advance of use In fact architecl5 were not in the business of providing meaning at all according to Price their task was to solve problems and extend the possibilities of choice and delight l4 Collective meaning if the word can be used in this context was to be deciphered from within a dynamically interactive field of communication To this end Price aimed to provide an environment that would both anticipate and accommoshydate change It was envisioned as a giant leaming machine with the capacity to enable humans to physically and mentally adapt to the intangible experiences and accelerated pace of technological culture16

In one of his earliest musings on the project Price stated

Is it not possible that with a little imagination we can ourselves lind a new way of learning new things to Jearn and enjoy our life the space the light the knowledge and the inventiveness we have in ourselves in a new wayl7

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 127

critique of the Welfare State AnhiIecture and Technologicaly Enhanced Perfurmativity In a statement typifying Pricean ambiguity Price claimed that a structure should stand only as long as it was socially useful To ensure the temporality of the Fun Palace Price assigned a ten-year life to its structural frame 38 But temporality was not simply a matter of planned obsolescence or the interchangeability and disposability of various building components rather time was intended to playa dynamic role in human perception - dynamic in the cybershynetic sense of real_time39

The production of the social and the indishyvidual- both physically and virtually - in real-time is the theoretical crux of the Fun Palace Reiterated in the Fun Palace briefs is a soft leftist critique arguing that the discishyplinary regime of time is dictated by a marshyket-place that artificially divides a workers life into work-time and leisure-time a regishymentation of time that is materially enforced through the zoning of work and leisure in urban space40 For Price this archaic sense of time ran counter to the emerging realshytime of cybernetics and its network of invisshyible services The conflict between the simultaneous time of information and the disciplinary time of work (of schedules timeshytables industrial production) had to be amended for humans to allow them to adapt to the flux and flow of the future technologshyical world In the article Non-Plan An Experiment in Freedom of 19~ Banham Barker Price and Hall almost paraphrase an earlier statement by one of the founders of cybernetics Norbert Wiener when they claim that the cybernetic revolution must be accompanied by a revolution in human thought and required a new mental and physical mobility-l Fun Palace as a diagramshymatic architecture of probability in present time would act as a temporary measure to

MARY lOUISE LOeSINGER

ease the transition into the real-time of the information age

In a conventional sense the Fun Palace as architecture had no intrinsic meaning as a machine it was merely an abstract machine that when activated by the users was capable of producing and processing inforrnationZ In this way it may be considshyered performative for only at the moment of transaction between user and machine would meaning or content be expressed and at that moment would expression be identical with the act of perfonning Furthershymore in the act of performing the and spatiality of the architecture would be annulled for the ephemerality of pure umeshy communication For at the most literal level activities such as the maneuvershying of building components or the group determination of a program involves a basic form of social interaction It was also imagshyined that the Fun Palace would be equipped with the latest in communications technolshyogy reading machines televisions and computers4

These scientific gadgets held the promise of thrusting the participant beyond mundane reality and into a virtual realm of communication

The earliest stated objectives fur the Fun Palace were to arrange as many forms of fun as possible in one spot to make moving in all directions on feet or wheel a delight to provide conditions which make everyone part of the total activity and to exploit drinking necking looking listening shouting and resting in the hopes of an emption or explosion of unimagined socialshyity through pleasure+ At first glance this agenda seems typical of calls during the IcentoS for theatrical self-expression as a route to personal liberation But Price was quick to say that what he had in mind was not a mecca for conventional free-will activ-

In the early documents presumably

written to convince legislative boards the rhetoric of pleasure is accompanied by argushyments for amendments to land-use and for the elimination of redundant proshygramming brought about by borough-toshyborough competition for new leisure and cultural facilities46 In later briefs the cultural mission becomes more pointed the Fun Palace was a leaming machine that enabled self-participatory education through the interface between man and machine between human beings and in keeping with the cybernetic theory it suggests between smart machines7 According to Price the Fun Palace would be a short term life toy of dimensions and organization not limited by or to a particular site which is one good way of trying in physical terms to catch up with the mental dexterity and mobility exercised by all today- As a shortshyterm exploratory toy it would require the coordination and cooperation in i15 day to

day operations oflocal authorities the State industry private organizations and individshyuals49 And in i15 various designations as toy university of the stree15 or laboratory of pleasure it was not merely another conshytainer of amenities for Welfare State entershytainment In As Littlewood and Price stated in 1962

The present socia-political talk of increased

leisure makes both a slovenly and dangerous

assumption that people on one hand are suffishy

ciently numb and servile to accept that the

period during which they eam money can be

little more than made mentally hygienically

bearable and that a mentality is awaken [sic] during self-willed activityH

This reiterated a commonly voiced criticism of British social conditions In 1960 Malcolm Muggeridge described the routinized and self-satisfied Welfare State in vivid language

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PAlACE

The new towns rise as do the television aerials

dreaming spires the streams flow pellucid

through comprehensive school the BBC lifts up our heam in the morning and bids us good

night in the evening We wait for Godot we shall have strip-tease wherever we go 52

Muggeridge captures the sense of social complacency that attended the success of Welfare State cultural and educational policies and the economic prosperity of the 19505 The leveling of social experience shynot to be mistaken for a leveling of the class structure - and the anaesthetization of socishyety was perceived by some intellectuals as a situation nearing crisis Two responses to this cultural uncertainty Richard Hoggarts The Uses ofLiteracy (1957) and Raymond Williamss Britain in the Sixties Communi cations (Icent~) attempted to analyze the crisis in view of the proliferation of mass-media communications Written in a nostalgic vein The Uses ofLiteracy reads as a lament for the loss of an identifiable working class and for the erosion of indigenous forms of popular culture 13 Hoggart targeted the pulp-print culture of tabloids dailies and romances as the cause of both the trivializashytion oflife and the individuals distancing from concrete social reality He argued that despite the rise in literacy the profusion of iunk culture had become debilitating especially for the most vulnerable group the working class which easily succumbed to its appeals to conformity Distinctive class characteristics - communal bonds local wisdom and ethics and importantly tradishytions in speech ~the guying of authority by putting a finger to the nose - disapshypeared in the programming of homogenous appetites 4 Hoggarts problem with mass publications was not that they debased taste but that they over-excited it eventually dulled it and would finally kill it - they

129

enervate rather than corrupt -leaving numb and passive subjects5 The problem was political who controlled the proliferashytion of mass media who formed and whetted the appetite for it

In his analysis of mass-communicashylions technology in British culture Raymond Williams did not worry about the loss of cultural distinctions but feared for the evolushytion of an educated and participating democshyracy 56 Williams claimed that Britain had been quick off the mark to employ new media technologies for cultural and educashytional purposes in the belief that via the ailwaves a classless and egalitarian society composed of literate and rational subjects would emerge However by the late 19505 it was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a space of freedom outside the market was no longer tenable Between the paternalistic educational policies adopted by BBe culture guardians and the imperatives of the comshymercial market there seemed to be little room for the kind of communication that Williams thought essential for the growth of a truly democratic society5i Williams argued that democracy depended on free spontashyneous communication and significantly that it had no predetermined form for when put into practice could it be felt to be real58 He called for a rethinking of British cultural institutions and proposed the formashytion of new kinds of bodies such as Commushynications Centers for research and analysis However more urgent was the need for a

where ordinary people could exercise choice and effectively exert control within an uncensored network of communications 59

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

Control and Communication From Participatory Architecture 10 a Cybernetic Learning Machine If programmatic components such as an automated information library a news room auditoria rallying spaces and committee therapy and research rooms seem rather unusual for an entertainment center and if some of the assertions about the Fun Palace seem naively optimistic (the Fun Palace is both a pleasure arcade and an instrument which motivates the passive participant into thinking more abstractly or scientific gadgets new sysshytems knowledge locked away in research stations can be brought to the street corner) what is one to make of Littlewoods stateshyment that the fun arcade will be full of games and tests that psychologists and elecshytronic engineers now devise for the service of war - knowledge will be piped juke-boxes60 To understand this we must examine the contribution of the Fun Palace Cybernetics Committee specifically that of Dr Gordon Pasko

Pasks Theatre Workshop and Systems Research Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre offers some insight into the degree of his commitment to the project After a few introductory remarks - such as the crux of a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience should genuinely participate in a play and that it should overcome the restrictions in entertainment media such as cinema and television - Pask proceeds to outline in rather opaque technical jargon a cybernetic analysis of the problem (fig 58)61 He then provides some of the most initially baffling but fascinating diagrams of the entire proshyject It seems that in Pasks theater the seats would be equipped with controls allowing the audience to intervene in the action of the play62 A computing machine located backstage would calculate audience input

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CEORIC PRICES FUN PALACE 131

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

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which added a new twist to Littlewoods idea of direct communicationl6 With the expershytise of an unusual interdisciplinary commitshytee now in place the goals of the project were refocused no longer merely the proshyvision of a barrier-free venue for experimenshytal theater the technological mandate moved beyond the realm of mechanical mobility into the more ephemeral mobility offered by new information media and mass communications The discrete disciplinary interests of the three protagonists - cybernetshyics transient architecture participatory theshyater and communications merged in the objectives of the Fun Palace project to facilitate the emergence of an ephemeral subjectivity through the theatricality of comshymunication Thus began a working relashytionship spanning more than a decade of

MARY LOUISE L08SINGER

activityI7 The implicit consequence of the project an institutional critique of Welfare State-administered culture

Representing Architectural Reality From Image-Based Anti-Formalism 10 Technological Ephemerality Prices proposal for a technologically factual system of assembly a mobile architectureshythat eschewed architectural image recommends itself to Banhams ideas about the true vocation of architecture as proshymulgated in Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) Banhams revisionist history of the modern movement was coushypled in the books last chapter with a radical prognostication for the future of architecshyture In a polemic chastising architects of the first machine age for their preoccupation

54 Fun Palaeo interior pergtpeltli showing apended mezzanines and slairways 1961-65 Cedric Price arehiled PeKIncgtnk on phologroph CCA Collodion

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 123

with the representation of technology Banham challenged the architects of the second machine age to run with technology The heroes of his tract were the Futurists and Buckminster Fuller between whom Banham identified a shared inclination toward pennanence and a resolution to exploit science and technology In somewhat apocalyptic tenns he declared architects should emulate the Futurists discard their whole cultural load and propose the conshytinual renovation of the built environment or architecture as a profession would not survive the technological revolution is Fullers 1927 proposal for the Dymaxion House provided Banham with an object lesson in which a liberated attitude to both mechanical services and materials techshynology organized the plan and where forshymal qualities were not remarkable except in combination with the structural and planshyning methods involvedi9 The essence of Banhams message was to drop illusionism and the symbolic use of a machine aesthetic and to accept the unhaltable progression of constant accelerated change2o

Banhams promotion of an anti-formalist techn~logical approach to architecture is central to understanding the context of British postwar architecture and the rejecshytion of International Modernism In brief

the critique may be framed in a threefold way The perception that International Modshyernism was elitist and overly pre-occupied with formal issues was met with a response that emphasized a visual approach (the picturesque) couched in terms of nationalshyism and traditional crafts 11 These responses which included such movements as British Townscape or the New Romanticism were in tum counter-critiqued by the British avant-garde One of the strongest reactions to the revaluation of modernism in postwar Britain was launched by the Independent

MARY LOUISE l08SlNGER

Group which in response to the insularity of tradition-ltlriented aesthetics advocated complete immersion in the visual excesses of (mostly American) mass consumer cuture22

The London-based avant-garde of the mid 1950S cultivated an image-based aesthetic with in part the intention of raising (or as some argue lowering) visual communicashytion to a threshold in keeping with everyday materiality and the experience of mass media In contrast to this Price in the early 1960s advanced a third position an alternashytive to the dominant counter-critiques For Price the new transient social configurations emerging from mass culture were as transhysient as the means of mass communication themselves and thus an architecture that might adequately service and ultimately encourage such social fonnations could not rely on image or an ethos based in materi-

To say that Prices work lacks strong visual impact is an understatement but Prices idea of architectural communication has little to do with a mimetic function that is a natural correspondence with reality and is rather as pure and ephemeral as the act of communicating itself 23 In the mid

Price made the following observations on the relation of architecture to the visual

The role of architecture as provider ofvisually recognizable symbols of identity place and

activity becomes an increasingly attractive excuse for architects to revel in the immensity of their personal visual dexterity aesthetic sensibility and

spatial awareness demanding from both clients and observers recognition of the very causations of such

In his 1963 review of the Team 10 Primer Price took the opportunity to inspect its rhetoric and dissociated himself from conshytemporary theories of urbanism and architecshyture2) With citations from texts by the

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN FA LACE 125

Smithsons and others he challenged Team Tens ideas of social collectivism for examshyple on the gTOunds that in promoting forms more valid in the past than the present they fail to address the needs of an emergent socishyety in which transience and fluctuations in population and group appetites will generate new and often unpredictable urban forms For Price The needs of a new mobile society and communication systems which serve it invalidate existing town planning techniques of fixed building hierarchies and anonymous space2(l The Primer he notes surely identifies the pertinent issues of the times but Price was not convinced of Team Tens commitment due in part to their logic The crux of his doubt centered on the ambiguous use of texts and images For example the works authors rightly to the phenomenon of mobility as a conshytributing factor in the development of urbanshyism and yet Price asked is mobility worth investing with architectonic importance simply because it is there27 Price wondered whether we were not simply being confrontshyed once again by the aesthetic of the early modernists which visualized mechanizashytion (real or imagined) rather than utilizing new technologies28 Taking existing form as evidence for their critique Team Tens

reliance on the found as reality neglected the complex ways in which cities really worked in spite of their physicallimil529 For Price both the groups criticism and its theory of production failed to offer in his words a well-serviced mobility3o These last points - mobility and an insistence that

is not necessarily visibly evident shyare issues he has adhered to ever since and continues to develop to this day

Although the Fun Palace was never realshyized Price achieved such notoriety with this and other projects such as the Potteries Thinkbelt as to secure for himself a seminal

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

role within debates about architecture and technology31 For cutting-edge technological visionaries such as Archigram Price was the man to watch but for those who thought architecture had a visually communicative role inextricably bound to optical appropriashytion his work was anathema to everything architecture might stand for 32 But for Price to ask what meaning might look like was to pursue the WTOng line of inquiry when confronted with new technologies (both mechanical and cybernetic) and new modes of scientific analysis (such as systems design theory) conventional notions of architecshyture were rendered moot 33 Price believed no premium could be placed on what be considered meaningful experience or how it might be achieved or represented in advance of use In fact architecl5 were not in the business of providing meaning at all according to Price their task was to solve problems and extend the possibilities of choice and delight l4 Collective meaning if the word can be used in this context was to be deciphered from within a dynamically interactive field of communication To this end Price aimed to provide an environment that would both anticipate and accommoshydate change It was envisioned as a giant leaming machine with the capacity to enable humans to physically and mentally adapt to the intangible experiences and accelerated pace of technological culture16

In one of his earliest musings on the project Price stated

Is it not possible that with a little imagination we can ourselves lind a new way of learning new things to Jearn and enjoy our life the space the light the knowledge and the inventiveness we have in ourselves in a new wayl7

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 127

critique of the Welfare State AnhiIecture and Technologicaly Enhanced Perfurmativity In a statement typifying Pricean ambiguity Price claimed that a structure should stand only as long as it was socially useful To ensure the temporality of the Fun Palace Price assigned a ten-year life to its structural frame 38 But temporality was not simply a matter of planned obsolescence or the interchangeability and disposability of various building components rather time was intended to playa dynamic role in human perception - dynamic in the cybershynetic sense of real_time39

The production of the social and the indishyvidual- both physically and virtually - in real-time is the theoretical crux of the Fun Palace Reiterated in the Fun Palace briefs is a soft leftist critique arguing that the discishyplinary regime of time is dictated by a marshyket-place that artificially divides a workers life into work-time and leisure-time a regishymentation of time that is materially enforced through the zoning of work and leisure in urban space40 For Price this archaic sense of time ran counter to the emerging realshytime of cybernetics and its network of invisshyible services The conflict between the simultaneous time of information and the disciplinary time of work (of schedules timeshytables industrial production) had to be amended for humans to allow them to adapt to the flux and flow of the future technologshyical world In the article Non-Plan An Experiment in Freedom of 19~ Banham Barker Price and Hall almost paraphrase an earlier statement by one of the founders of cybernetics Norbert Wiener when they claim that the cybernetic revolution must be accompanied by a revolution in human thought and required a new mental and physical mobility-l Fun Palace as a diagramshymatic architecture of probability in present time would act as a temporary measure to

MARY lOUISE LOeSINGER

ease the transition into the real-time of the information age

In a conventional sense the Fun Palace as architecture had no intrinsic meaning as a machine it was merely an abstract machine that when activated by the users was capable of producing and processing inforrnationZ In this way it may be considshyered performative for only at the moment of transaction between user and machine would meaning or content be expressed and at that moment would expression be identical with the act of perfonning Furthershymore in the act of performing the and spatiality of the architecture would be annulled for the ephemerality of pure umeshy communication For at the most literal level activities such as the maneuvershying of building components or the group determination of a program involves a basic form of social interaction It was also imagshyined that the Fun Palace would be equipped with the latest in communications technolshyogy reading machines televisions and computers4

These scientific gadgets held the promise of thrusting the participant beyond mundane reality and into a virtual realm of communication

The earliest stated objectives fur the Fun Palace were to arrange as many forms of fun as possible in one spot to make moving in all directions on feet or wheel a delight to provide conditions which make everyone part of the total activity and to exploit drinking necking looking listening shouting and resting in the hopes of an emption or explosion of unimagined socialshyity through pleasure+ At first glance this agenda seems typical of calls during the IcentoS for theatrical self-expression as a route to personal liberation But Price was quick to say that what he had in mind was not a mecca for conventional free-will activ-

In the early documents presumably

written to convince legislative boards the rhetoric of pleasure is accompanied by argushyments for amendments to land-use and for the elimination of redundant proshygramming brought about by borough-toshyborough competition for new leisure and cultural facilities46 In later briefs the cultural mission becomes more pointed the Fun Palace was a leaming machine that enabled self-participatory education through the interface between man and machine between human beings and in keeping with the cybernetic theory it suggests between smart machines7 According to Price the Fun Palace would be a short term life toy of dimensions and organization not limited by or to a particular site which is one good way of trying in physical terms to catch up with the mental dexterity and mobility exercised by all today- As a shortshyterm exploratory toy it would require the coordination and cooperation in i15 day to

day operations oflocal authorities the State industry private organizations and individshyuals49 And in i15 various designations as toy university of the stree15 or laboratory of pleasure it was not merely another conshytainer of amenities for Welfare State entershytainment In As Littlewood and Price stated in 1962

The present socia-political talk of increased

leisure makes both a slovenly and dangerous

assumption that people on one hand are suffishy

ciently numb and servile to accept that the

period during which they eam money can be

little more than made mentally hygienically

bearable and that a mentality is awaken [sic] during self-willed activityH

This reiterated a commonly voiced criticism of British social conditions In 1960 Malcolm Muggeridge described the routinized and self-satisfied Welfare State in vivid language

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PAlACE

The new towns rise as do the television aerials

dreaming spires the streams flow pellucid

through comprehensive school the BBC lifts up our heam in the morning and bids us good

night in the evening We wait for Godot we shall have strip-tease wherever we go 52

Muggeridge captures the sense of social complacency that attended the success of Welfare State cultural and educational policies and the economic prosperity of the 19505 The leveling of social experience shynot to be mistaken for a leveling of the class structure - and the anaesthetization of socishyety was perceived by some intellectuals as a situation nearing crisis Two responses to this cultural uncertainty Richard Hoggarts The Uses ofLiteracy (1957) and Raymond Williamss Britain in the Sixties Communi cations (Icent~) attempted to analyze the crisis in view of the proliferation of mass-media communications Written in a nostalgic vein The Uses ofLiteracy reads as a lament for the loss of an identifiable working class and for the erosion of indigenous forms of popular culture 13 Hoggart targeted the pulp-print culture of tabloids dailies and romances as the cause of both the trivializashytion oflife and the individuals distancing from concrete social reality He argued that despite the rise in literacy the profusion of iunk culture had become debilitating especially for the most vulnerable group the working class which easily succumbed to its appeals to conformity Distinctive class characteristics - communal bonds local wisdom and ethics and importantly tradishytions in speech ~the guying of authority by putting a finger to the nose - disapshypeared in the programming of homogenous appetites 4 Hoggarts problem with mass publications was not that they debased taste but that they over-excited it eventually dulled it and would finally kill it - they

129

enervate rather than corrupt -leaving numb and passive subjects5 The problem was political who controlled the proliferashytion of mass media who formed and whetted the appetite for it

In his analysis of mass-communicashylions technology in British culture Raymond Williams did not worry about the loss of cultural distinctions but feared for the evolushytion of an educated and participating democshyracy 56 Williams claimed that Britain had been quick off the mark to employ new media technologies for cultural and educashytional purposes in the belief that via the ailwaves a classless and egalitarian society composed of literate and rational subjects would emerge However by the late 19505 it was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a space of freedom outside the market was no longer tenable Between the paternalistic educational policies adopted by BBe culture guardians and the imperatives of the comshymercial market there seemed to be little room for the kind of communication that Williams thought essential for the growth of a truly democratic society5i Williams argued that democracy depended on free spontashyneous communication and significantly that it had no predetermined form for when put into practice could it be felt to be real58 He called for a rethinking of British cultural institutions and proposed the formashytion of new kinds of bodies such as Commushynications Centers for research and analysis However more urgent was the need for a

where ordinary people could exercise choice and effectively exert control within an uncensored network of communications 59

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

Control and Communication From Participatory Architecture 10 a Cybernetic Learning Machine If programmatic components such as an automated information library a news room auditoria rallying spaces and committee therapy and research rooms seem rather unusual for an entertainment center and if some of the assertions about the Fun Palace seem naively optimistic (the Fun Palace is both a pleasure arcade and an instrument which motivates the passive participant into thinking more abstractly or scientific gadgets new sysshytems knowledge locked away in research stations can be brought to the street corner) what is one to make of Littlewoods stateshyment that the fun arcade will be full of games and tests that psychologists and elecshytronic engineers now devise for the service of war - knowledge will be piped juke-boxes60 To understand this we must examine the contribution of the Fun Palace Cybernetics Committee specifically that of Dr Gordon Pasko

Pasks Theatre Workshop and Systems Research Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre offers some insight into the degree of his commitment to the project After a few introductory remarks - such as the crux of a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience should genuinely participate in a play and that it should overcome the restrictions in entertainment media such as cinema and television - Pask proceeds to outline in rather opaque technical jargon a cybernetic analysis of the problem (fig 58)61 He then provides some of the most initially baffling but fascinating diagrams of the entire proshyject It seems that in Pasks theater the seats would be equipped with controls allowing the audience to intervene in the action of the play62 A computing machine located backstage would calculate audience input

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CEORIC PRICES FUN PALACE 131

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

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with the representation of technology Banham challenged the architects of the second machine age to run with technology The heroes of his tract were the Futurists and Buckminster Fuller between whom Banham identified a shared inclination toward pennanence and a resolution to exploit science and technology In somewhat apocalyptic tenns he declared architects should emulate the Futurists discard their whole cultural load and propose the conshytinual renovation of the built environment or architecture as a profession would not survive the technological revolution is Fullers 1927 proposal for the Dymaxion House provided Banham with an object lesson in which a liberated attitude to both mechanical services and materials techshynology organized the plan and where forshymal qualities were not remarkable except in combination with the structural and planshyning methods involvedi9 The essence of Banhams message was to drop illusionism and the symbolic use of a machine aesthetic and to accept the unhaltable progression of constant accelerated change2o

Banhams promotion of an anti-formalist techn~logical approach to architecture is central to understanding the context of British postwar architecture and the rejecshytion of International Modernism In brief

the critique may be framed in a threefold way The perception that International Modshyernism was elitist and overly pre-occupied with formal issues was met with a response that emphasized a visual approach (the picturesque) couched in terms of nationalshyism and traditional crafts 11 These responses which included such movements as British Townscape or the New Romanticism were in tum counter-critiqued by the British avant-garde One of the strongest reactions to the revaluation of modernism in postwar Britain was launched by the Independent

MARY LOUISE l08SlNGER

Group which in response to the insularity of tradition-ltlriented aesthetics advocated complete immersion in the visual excesses of (mostly American) mass consumer cuture22

The London-based avant-garde of the mid 1950S cultivated an image-based aesthetic with in part the intention of raising (or as some argue lowering) visual communicashytion to a threshold in keeping with everyday materiality and the experience of mass media In contrast to this Price in the early 1960s advanced a third position an alternashytive to the dominant counter-critiques For Price the new transient social configurations emerging from mass culture were as transhysient as the means of mass communication themselves and thus an architecture that might adequately service and ultimately encourage such social fonnations could not rely on image or an ethos based in materi-

To say that Prices work lacks strong visual impact is an understatement but Prices idea of architectural communication has little to do with a mimetic function that is a natural correspondence with reality and is rather as pure and ephemeral as the act of communicating itself 23 In the mid

Price made the following observations on the relation of architecture to the visual

The role of architecture as provider ofvisually recognizable symbols of identity place and

activity becomes an increasingly attractive excuse for architects to revel in the immensity of their personal visual dexterity aesthetic sensibility and

spatial awareness demanding from both clients and observers recognition of the very causations of such

In his 1963 review of the Team 10 Primer Price took the opportunity to inspect its rhetoric and dissociated himself from conshytemporary theories of urbanism and architecshyture2) With citations from texts by the

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Of1d draftson Groplile with colored pencil on trocing YIIllum CCA Collection

CEDRIC PRICES FUN FA LACE 125

Smithsons and others he challenged Team Tens ideas of social collectivism for examshyple on the gTOunds that in promoting forms more valid in the past than the present they fail to address the needs of an emergent socishyety in which transience and fluctuations in population and group appetites will generate new and often unpredictable urban forms For Price The needs of a new mobile society and communication systems which serve it invalidate existing town planning techniques of fixed building hierarchies and anonymous space2(l The Primer he notes surely identifies the pertinent issues of the times but Price was not convinced of Team Tens commitment due in part to their logic The crux of his doubt centered on the ambiguous use of texts and images For example the works authors rightly to the phenomenon of mobility as a conshytributing factor in the development of urbanshyism and yet Price asked is mobility worth investing with architectonic importance simply because it is there27 Price wondered whether we were not simply being confrontshyed once again by the aesthetic of the early modernists which visualized mechanizashytion (real or imagined) rather than utilizing new technologies28 Taking existing form as evidence for their critique Team Tens

reliance on the found as reality neglected the complex ways in which cities really worked in spite of their physicallimil529 For Price both the groups criticism and its theory of production failed to offer in his words a well-serviced mobility3o These last points - mobility and an insistence that

is not necessarily visibly evident shyare issues he has adhered to ever since and continues to develop to this day

Although the Fun Palace was never realshyized Price achieved such notoriety with this and other projects such as the Potteries Thinkbelt as to secure for himself a seminal

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

role within debates about architecture and technology31 For cutting-edge technological visionaries such as Archigram Price was the man to watch but for those who thought architecture had a visually communicative role inextricably bound to optical appropriashytion his work was anathema to everything architecture might stand for 32 But for Price to ask what meaning might look like was to pursue the WTOng line of inquiry when confronted with new technologies (both mechanical and cybernetic) and new modes of scientific analysis (such as systems design theory) conventional notions of architecshyture were rendered moot 33 Price believed no premium could be placed on what be considered meaningful experience or how it might be achieved or represented in advance of use In fact architecl5 were not in the business of providing meaning at all according to Price their task was to solve problems and extend the possibilities of choice and delight l4 Collective meaning if the word can be used in this context was to be deciphered from within a dynamically interactive field of communication To this end Price aimed to provide an environment that would both anticipate and accommoshydate change It was envisioned as a giant leaming machine with the capacity to enable humans to physically and mentally adapt to the intangible experiences and accelerated pace of technological culture16

In one of his earliest musings on the project Price stated

Is it not possible that with a little imagination we can ourselves lind a new way of learning new things to Jearn and enjoy our life the space the light the knowledge and the inventiveness we have in ourselves in a new wayl7

t

56 Fun Paloce diaglllmmolic sec1ion 1961-65 Cedric Price architoct Pen and black ink grophik ond dry trcnser on lTacing ampIlum CCA Collec1ion

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CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 127

critique of the Welfare State AnhiIecture and Technologicaly Enhanced Perfurmativity In a statement typifying Pricean ambiguity Price claimed that a structure should stand only as long as it was socially useful To ensure the temporality of the Fun Palace Price assigned a ten-year life to its structural frame 38 But temporality was not simply a matter of planned obsolescence or the interchangeability and disposability of various building components rather time was intended to playa dynamic role in human perception - dynamic in the cybershynetic sense of real_time39

The production of the social and the indishyvidual- both physically and virtually - in real-time is the theoretical crux of the Fun Palace Reiterated in the Fun Palace briefs is a soft leftist critique arguing that the discishyplinary regime of time is dictated by a marshyket-place that artificially divides a workers life into work-time and leisure-time a regishymentation of time that is materially enforced through the zoning of work and leisure in urban space40 For Price this archaic sense of time ran counter to the emerging realshytime of cybernetics and its network of invisshyible services The conflict between the simultaneous time of information and the disciplinary time of work (of schedules timeshytables industrial production) had to be amended for humans to allow them to adapt to the flux and flow of the future technologshyical world In the article Non-Plan An Experiment in Freedom of 19~ Banham Barker Price and Hall almost paraphrase an earlier statement by one of the founders of cybernetics Norbert Wiener when they claim that the cybernetic revolution must be accompanied by a revolution in human thought and required a new mental and physical mobility-l Fun Palace as a diagramshymatic architecture of probability in present time would act as a temporary measure to

MARY lOUISE LOeSINGER

ease the transition into the real-time of the information age

In a conventional sense the Fun Palace as architecture had no intrinsic meaning as a machine it was merely an abstract machine that when activated by the users was capable of producing and processing inforrnationZ In this way it may be considshyered performative for only at the moment of transaction between user and machine would meaning or content be expressed and at that moment would expression be identical with the act of perfonning Furthershymore in the act of performing the and spatiality of the architecture would be annulled for the ephemerality of pure umeshy communication For at the most literal level activities such as the maneuvershying of building components or the group determination of a program involves a basic form of social interaction It was also imagshyined that the Fun Palace would be equipped with the latest in communications technolshyogy reading machines televisions and computers4

These scientific gadgets held the promise of thrusting the participant beyond mundane reality and into a virtual realm of communication

The earliest stated objectives fur the Fun Palace were to arrange as many forms of fun as possible in one spot to make moving in all directions on feet or wheel a delight to provide conditions which make everyone part of the total activity and to exploit drinking necking looking listening shouting and resting in the hopes of an emption or explosion of unimagined socialshyity through pleasure+ At first glance this agenda seems typical of calls during the IcentoS for theatrical self-expression as a route to personal liberation But Price was quick to say that what he had in mind was not a mecca for conventional free-will activ-

In the early documents presumably

written to convince legislative boards the rhetoric of pleasure is accompanied by argushyments for amendments to land-use and for the elimination of redundant proshygramming brought about by borough-toshyborough competition for new leisure and cultural facilities46 In later briefs the cultural mission becomes more pointed the Fun Palace was a leaming machine that enabled self-participatory education through the interface between man and machine between human beings and in keeping with the cybernetic theory it suggests between smart machines7 According to Price the Fun Palace would be a short term life toy of dimensions and organization not limited by or to a particular site which is one good way of trying in physical terms to catch up with the mental dexterity and mobility exercised by all today- As a shortshyterm exploratory toy it would require the coordination and cooperation in i15 day to

day operations oflocal authorities the State industry private organizations and individshyuals49 And in i15 various designations as toy university of the stree15 or laboratory of pleasure it was not merely another conshytainer of amenities for Welfare State entershytainment In As Littlewood and Price stated in 1962

The present socia-political talk of increased

leisure makes both a slovenly and dangerous

assumption that people on one hand are suffishy

ciently numb and servile to accept that the

period during which they eam money can be

little more than made mentally hygienically

bearable and that a mentality is awaken [sic] during self-willed activityH

This reiterated a commonly voiced criticism of British social conditions In 1960 Malcolm Muggeridge described the routinized and self-satisfied Welfare State in vivid language

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PAlACE

The new towns rise as do the television aerials

dreaming spires the streams flow pellucid

through comprehensive school the BBC lifts up our heam in the morning and bids us good

night in the evening We wait for Godot we shall have strip-tease wherever we go 52

Muggeridge captures the sense of social complacency that attended the success of Welfare State cultural and educational policies and the economic prosperity of the 19505 The leveling of social experience shynot to be mistaken for a leveling of the class structure - and the anaesthetization of socishyety was perceived by some intellectuals as a situation nearing crisis Two responses to this cultural uncertainty Richard Hoggarts The Uses ofLiteracy (1957) and Raymond Williamss Britain in the Sixties Communi cations (Icent~) attempted to analyze the crisis in view of the proliferation of mass-media communications Written in a nostalgic vein The Uses ofLiteracy reads as a lament for the loss of an identifiable working class and for the erosion of indigenous forms of popular culture 13 Hoggart targeted the pulp-print culture of tabloids dailies and romances as the cause of both the trivializashytion oflife and the individuals distancing from concrete social reality He argued that despite the rise in literacy the profusion of iunk culture had become debilitating especially for the most vulnerable group the working class which easily succumbed to its appeals to conformity Distinctive class characteristics - communal bonds local wisdom and ethics and importantly tradishytions in speech ~the guying of authority by putting a finger to the nose - disapshypeared in the programming of homogenous appetites 4 Hoggarts problem with mass publications was not that they debased taste but that they over-excited it eventually dulled it and would finally kill it - they

129

enervate rather than corrupt -leaving numb and passive subjects5 The problem was political who controlled the proliferashytion of mass media who formed and whetted the appetite for it

In his analysis of mass-communicashylions technology in British culture Raymond Williams did not worry about the loss of cultural distinctions but feared for the evolushytion of an educated and participating democshyracy 56 Williams claimed that Britain had been quick off the mark to employ new media technologies for cultural and educashytional purposes in the belief that via the ailwaves a classless and egalitarian society composed of literate and rational subjects would emerge However by the late 19505 it was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a space of freedom outside the market was no longer tenable Between the paternalistic educational policies adopted by BBe culture guardians and the imperatives of the comshymercial market there seemed to be little room for the kind of communication that Williams thought essential for the growth of a truly democratic society5i Williams argued that democracy depended on free spontashyneous communication and significantly that it had no predetermined form for when put into practice could it be felt to be real58 He called for a rethinking of British cultural institutions and proposed the formashytion of new kinds of bodies such as Commushynications Centers for research and analysis However more urgent was the need for a

where ordinary people could exercise choice and effectively exert control within an uncensored network of communications 59

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

Control and Communication From Participatory Architecture 10 a Cybernetic Learning Machine If programmatic components such as an automated information library a news room auditoria rallying spaces and committee therapy and research rooms seem rather unusual for an entertainment center and if some of the assertions about the Fun Palace seem naively optimistic (the Fun Palace is both a pleasure arcade and an instrument which motivates the passive participant into thinking more abstractly or scientific gadgets new sysshytems knowledge locked away in research stations can be brought to the street corner) what is one to make of Littlewoods stateshyment that the fun arcade will be full of games and tests that psychologists and elecshytronic engineers now devise for the service of war - knowledge will be piped juke-boxes60 To understand this we must examine the contribution of the Fun Palace Cybernetics Committee specifically that of Dr Gordon Pasko

Pasks Theatre Workshop and Systems Research Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre offers some insight into the degree of his commitment to the project After a few introductory remarks - such as the crux of a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience should genuinely participate in a play and that it should overcome the restrictions in entertainment media such as cinema and television - Pask proceeds to outline in rather opaque technical jargon a cybernetic analysis of the problem (fig 58)61 He then provides some of the most initially baffling but fascinating diagrams of the entire proshyject It seems that in Pasks theater the seats would be equipped with controls allowing the audience to intervene in the action of the play62 A computing machine located backstage would calculate audience input

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Upper Level Prooedure

5B Fun Palace diagram lor a cybemelics theater from minule of the Cyberneficgt Commiliee 27Jonuory 1965 Cedric Price and Gordon Pak Pitolocapy en wove poper CCA Collection

CEORIC PRICES FUN PALACE 131

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

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Smithsons and others he challenged Team Tens ideas of social collectivism for examshyple on the gTOunds that in promoting forms more valid in the past than the present they fail to address the needs of an emergent socishyety in which transience and fluctuations in population and group appetites will generate new and often unpredictable urban forms For Price The needs of a new mobile society and communication systems which serve it invalidate existing town planning techniques of fixed building hierarchies and anonymous space2(l The Primer he notes surely identifies the pertinent issues of the times but Price was not convinced of Team Tens commitment due in part to their logic The crux of his doubt centered on the ambiguous use of texts and images For example the works authors rightly to the phenomenon of mobility as a conshytributing factor in the development of urbanshyism and yet Price asked is mobility worth investing with architectonic importance simply because it is there27 Price wondered whether we were not simply being confrontshyed once again by the aesthetic of the early modernists which visualized mechanizashytion (real or imagined) rather than utilizing new technologies28 Taking existing form as evidence for their critique Team Tens

reliance on the found as reality neglected the complex ways in which cities really worked in spite of their physicallimil529 For Price both the groups criticism and its theory of production failed to offer in his words a well-serviced mobility3o These last points - mobility and an insistence that

is not necessarily visibly evident shyare issues he has adhered to ever since and continues to develop to this day

Although the Fun Palace was never realshyized Price achieved such notoriety with this and other projects such as the Potteries Thinkbelt as to secure for himself a seminal

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

role within debates about architecture and technology31 For cutting-edge technological visionaries such as Archigram Price was the man to watch but for those who thought architecture had a visually communicative role inextricably bound to optical appropriashytion his work was anathema to everything architecture might stand for 32 But for Price to ask what meaning might look like was to pursue the WTOng line of inquiry when confronted with new technologies (both mechanical and cybernetic) and new modes of scientific analysis (such as systems design theory) conventional notions of architecshyture were rendered moot 33 Price believed no premium could be placed on what be considered meaningful experience or how it might be achieved or represented in advance of use In fact architecl5 were not in the business of providing meaning at all according to Price their task was to solve problems and extend the possibilities of choice and delight l4 Collective meaning if the word can be used in this context was to be deciphered from within a dynamically interactive field of communication To this end Price aimed to provide an environment that would both anticipate and accommoshydate change It was envisioned as a giant leaming machine with the capacity to enable humans to physically and mentally adapt to the intangible experiences and accelerated pace of technological culture16

In one of his earliest musings on the project Price stated

Is it not possible that with a little imagination we can ourselves lind a new way of learning new things to Jearn and enjoy our life the space the light the knowledge and the inventiveness we have in ourselves in a new wayl7

t

56 Fun Paloce diaglllmmolic sec1ion 1961-65 Cedric Price architoct Pen and black ink grophik ond dry trcnser on lTacing ampIlum CCA Collec1ion

a - __ A

---shy~-ItI

-foilmiddot ~ - ~~ Tc~Lf rL

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~ lI

-

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~---shy~lJlL-

rr-nt ~ -_--r

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i 01- ___

L bull =

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nrn 57 Fun Palalte dioSlllmmotic plan 1961-65 Cedric Price orchilect Graphite colored pencil perKlnd-ink and balJpoinl pen on mylar CCA Collec1ion

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE 127

critique of the Welfare State AnhiIecture and Technologicaly Enhanced Perfurmativity In a statement typifying Pricean ambiguity Price claimed that a structure should stand only as long as it was socially useful To ensure the temporality of the Fun Palace Price assigned a ten-year life to its structural frame 38 But temporality was not simply a matter of planned obsolescence or the interchangeability and disposability of various building components rather time was intended to playa dynamic role in human perception - dynamic in the cybershynetic sense of real_time39

The production of the social and the indishyvidual- both physically and virtually - in real-time is the theoretical crux of the Fun Palace Reiterated in the Fun Palace briefs is a soft leftist critique arguing that the discishyplinary regime of time is dictated by a marshyket-place that artificially divides a workers life into work-time and leisure-time a regishymentation of time that is materially enforced through the zoning of work and leisure in urban space40 For Price this archaic sense of time ran counter to the emerging realshytime of cybernetics and its network of invisshyible services The conflict between the simultaneous time of information and the disciplinary time of work (of schedules timeshytables industrial production) had to be amended for humans to allow them to adapt to the flux and flow of the future technologshyical world In the article Non-Plan An Experiment in Freedom of 19~ Banham Barker Price and Hall almost paraphrase an earlier statement by one of the founders of cybernetics Norbert Wiener when they claim that the cybernetic revolution must be accompanied by a revolution in human thought and required a new mental and physical mobility-l Fun Palace as a diagramshymatic architecture of probability in present time would act as a temporary measure to

MARY lOUISE LOeSINGER

ease the transition into the real-time of the information age

In a conventional sense the Fun Palace as architecture had no intrinsic meaning as a machine it was merely an abstract machine that when activated by the users was capable of producing and processing inforrnationZ In this way it may be considshyered performative for only at the moment of transaction between user and machine would meaning or content be expressed and at that moment would expression be identical with the act of perfonning Furthershymore in the act of performing the and spatiality of the architecture would be annulled for the ephemerality of pure umeshy communication For at the most literal level activities such as the maneuvershying of building components or the group determination of a program involves a basic form of social interaction It was also imagshyined that the Fun Palace would be equipped with the latest in communications technolshyogy reading machines televisions and computers4

These scientific gadgets held the promise of thrusting the participant beyond mundane reality and into a virtual realm of communication

The earliest stated objectives fur the Fun Palace were to arrange as many forms of fun as possible in one spot to make moving in all directions on feet or wheel a delight to provide conditions which make everyone part of the total activity and to exploit drinking necking looking listening shouting and resting in the hopes of an emption or explosion of unimagined socialshyity through pleasure+ At first glance this agenda seems typical of calls during the IcentoS for theatrical self-expression as a route to personal liberation But Price was quick to say that what he had in mind was not a mecca for conventional free-will activ-

In the early documents presumably

written to convince legislative boards the rhetoric of pleasure is accompanied by argushyments for amendments to land-use and for the elimination of redundant proshygramming brought about by borough-toshyborough competition for new leisure and cultural facilities46 In later briefs the cultural mission becomes more pointed the Fun Palace was a leaming machine that enabled self-participatory education through the interface between man and machine between human beings and in keeping with the cybernetic theory it suggests between smart machines7 According to Price the Fun Palace would be a short term life toy of dimensions and organization not limited by or to a particular site which is one good way of trying in physical terms to catch up with the mental dexterity and mobility exercised by all today- As a shortshyterm exploratory toy it would require the coordination and cooperation in i15 day to

day operations oflocal authorities the State industry private organizations and individshyuals49 And in i15 various designations as toy university of the stree15 or laboratory of pleasure it was not merely another conshytainer of amenities for Welfare State entershytainment In As Littlewood and Price stated in 1962

The present socia-political talk of increased

leisure makes both a slovenly and dangerous

assumption that people on one hand are suffishy

ciently numb and servile to accept that the

period during which they eam money can be

little more than made mentally hygienically

bearable and that a mentality is awaken [sic] during self-willed activityH

This reiterated a commonly voiced criticism of British social conditions In 1960 Malcolm Muggeridge described the routinized and self-satisfied Welfare State in vivid language

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PAlACE

The new towns rise as do the television aerials

dreaming spires the streams flow pellucid

through comprehensive school the BBC lifts up our heam in the morning and bids us good

night in the evening We wait for Godot we shall have strip-tease wherever we go 52

Muggeridge captures the sense of social complacency that attended the success of Welfare State cultural and educational policies and the economic prosperity of the 19505 The leveling of social experience shynot to be mistaken for a leveling of the class structure - and the anaesthetization of socishyety was perceived by some intellectuals as a situation nearing crisis Two responses to this cultural uncertainty Richard Hoggarts The Uses ofLiteracy (1957) and Raymond Williamss Britain in the Sixties Communi cations (Icent~) attempted to analyze the crisis in view of the proliferation of mass-media communications Written in a nostalgic vein The Uses ofLiteracy reads as a lament for the loss of an identifiable working class and for the erosion of indigenous forms of popular culture 13 Hoggart targeted the pulp-print culture of tabloids dailies and romances as the cause of both the trivializashytion oflife and the individuals distancing from concrete social reality He argued that despite the rise in literacy the profusion of iunk culture had become debilitating especially for the most vulnerable group the working class which easily succumbed to its appeals to conformity Distinctive class characteristics - communal bonds local wisdom and ethics and importantly tradishytions in speech ~the guying of authority by putting a finger to the nose - disapshypeared in the programming of homogenous appetites 4 Hoggarts problem with mass publications was not that they debased taste but that they over-excited it eventually dulled it and would finally kill it - they

129

enervate rather than corrupt -leaving numb and passive subjects5 The problem was political who controlled the proliferashytion of mass media who formed and whetted the appetite for it

In his analysis of mass-communicashylions technology in British culture Raymond Williams did not worry about the loss of cultural distinctions but feared for the evolushytion of an educated and participating democshyracy 56 Williams claimed that Britain had been quick off the mark to employ new media technologies for cultural and educashytional purposes in the belief that via the ailwaves a classless and egalitarian society composed of literate and rational subjects would emerge However by the late 19505 it was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a space of freedom outside the market was no longer tenable Between the paternalistic educational policies adopted by BBe culture guardians and the imperatives of the comshymercial market there seemed to be little room for the kind of communication that Williams thought essential for the growth of a truly democratic society5i Williams argued that democracy depended on free spontashyneous communication and significantly that it had no predetermined form for when put into practice could it be felt to be real58 He called for a rethinking of British cultural institutions and proposed the formashytion of new kinds of bodies such as Commushynications Centers for research and analysis However more urgent was the need for a

where ordinary people could exercise choice and effectively exert control within an uncensored network of communications 59

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

Control and Communication From Participatory Architecture 10 a Cybernetic Learning Machine If programmatic components such as an automated information library a news room auditoria rallying spaces and committee therapy and research rooms seem rather unusual for an entertainment center and if some of the assertions about the Fun Palace seem naively optimistic (the Fun Palace is both a pleasure arcade and an instrument which motivates the passive participant into thinking more abstractly or scientific gadgets new sysshytems knowledge locked away in research stations can be brought to the street corner) what is one to make of Littlewoods stateshyment that the fun arcade will be full of games and tests that psychologists and elecshytronic engineers now devise for the service of war - knowledge will be piped juke-boxes60 To understand this we must examine the contribution of the Fun Palace Cybernetics Committee specifically that of Dr Gordon Pasko

Pasks Theatre Workshop and Systems Research Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre offers some insight into the degree of his commitment to the project After a few introductory remarks - such as the crux of a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience should genuinely participate in a play and that it should overcome the restrictions in entertainment media such as cinema and television - Pask proceeds to outline in rather opaque technical jargon a cybernetic analysis of the problem (fig 58)61 He then provides some of the most initially baffling but fascinating diagrams of the entire proshyject It seems that in Pasks theater the seats would be equipped with controls allowing the audience to intervene in the action of the play62 A computing machine located backstage would calculate audience input

- 3 shy

A To the Jliddle Procadure

from the middle procedure

~ I chOOSing rj

1

l

-To uppor

leval r

ThemiddotFbull m

1_

Preforence Valuation Assertion

Fm next Jptivity scluotion

t F~Zj in sot

mLb Lower Luvol Procodure - givon individual

8Jld (n) = r i (nZj(n)

DLiGRAi1 1

Upper Level Prooedure

5B Fun Palace diagram lor a cybemelics theater from minule of the Cyberneficgt Commiliee 27Jonuory 1965 Cedric Price and Gordon Pak Pitolocapy en wove poper CCA Collection

CEORIC PRICES FUN PALACE 131

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

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critique of the Welfare State AnhiIecture and Technologicaly Enhanced Perfurmativity In a statement typifying Pricean ambiguity Price claimed that a structure should stand only as long as it was socially useful To ensure the temporality of the Fun Palace Price assigned a ten-year life to its structural frame 38 But temporality was not simply a matter of planned obsolescence or the interchangeability and disposability of various building components rather time was intended to playa dynamic role in human perception - dynamic in the cybershynetic sense of real_time39

The production of the social and the indishyvidual- both physically and virtually - in real-time is the theoretical crux of the Fun Palace Reiterated in the Fun Palace briefs is a soft leftist critique arguing that the discishyplinary regime of time is dictated by a marshyket-place that artificially divides a workers life into work-time and leisure-time a regishymentation of time that is materially enforced through the zoning of work and leisure in urban space40 For Price this archaic sense of time ran counter to the emerging realshytime of cybernetics and its network of invisshyible services The conflict between the simultaneous time of information and the disciplinary time of work (of schedules timeshytables industrial production) had to be amended for humans to allow them to adapt to the flux and flow of the future technologshyical world In the article Non-Plan An Experiment in Freedom of 19~ Banham Barker Price and Hall almost paraphrase an earlier statement by one of the founders of cybernetics Norbert Wiener when they claim that the cybernetic revolution must be accompanied by a revolution in human thought and required a new mental and physical mobility-l Fun Palace as a diagramshymatic architecture of probability in present time would act as a temporary measure to

MARY lOUISE LOeSINGER

ease the transition into the real-time of the information age

In a conventional sense the Fun Palace as architecture had no intrinsic meaning as a machine it was merely an abstract machine that when activated by the users was capable of producing and processing inforrnationZ In this way it may be considshyered performative for only at the moment of transaction between user and machine would meaning or content be expressed and at that moment would expression be identical with the act of perfonning Furthershymore in the act of performing the and spatiality of the architecture would be annulled for the ephemerality of pure umeshy communication For at the most literal level activities such as the maneuvershying of building components or the group determination of a program involves a basic form of social interaction It was also imagshyined that the Fun Palace would be equipped with the latest in communications technolshyogy reading machines televisions and computers4

These scientific gadgets held the promise of thrusting the participant beyond mundane reality and into a virtual realm of communication

The earliest stated objectives fur the Fun Palace were to arrange as many forms of fun as possible in one spot to make moving in all directions on feet or wheel a delight to provide conditions which make everyone part of the total activity and to exploit drinking necking looking listening shouting and resting in the hopes of an emption or explosion of unimagined socialshyity through pleasure+ At first glance this agenda seems typical of calls during the IcentoS for theatrical self-expression as a route to personal liberation But Price was quick to say that what he had in mind was not a mecca for conventional free-will activ-

In the early documents presumably

written to convince legislative boards the rhetoric of pleasure is accompanied by argushyments for amendments to land-use and for the elimination of redundant proshygramming brought about by borough-toshyborough competition for new leisure and cultural facilities46 In later briefs the cultural mission becomes more pointed the Fun Palace was a leaming machine that enabled self-participatory education through the interface between man and machine between human beings and in keeping with the cybernetic theory it suggests between smart machines7 According to Price the Fun Palace would be a short term life toy of dimensions and organization not limited by or to a particular site which is one good way of trying in physical terms to catch up with the mental dexterity and mobility exercised by all today- As a shortshyterm exploratory toy it would require the coordination and cooperation in i15 day to

day operations oflocal authorities the State industry private organizations and individshyuals49 And in i15 various designations as toy university of the stree15 or laboratory of pleasure it was not merely another conshytainer of amenities for Welfare State entershytainment In As Littlewood and Price stated in 1962

The present socia-political talk of increased

leisure makes both a slovenly and dangerous

assumption that people on one hand are suffishy

ciently numb and servile to accept that the

period during which they eam money can be

little more than made mentally hygienically

bearable and that a mentality is awaken [sic] during self-willed activityH

This reiterated a commonly voiced criticism of British social conditions In 1960 Malcolm Muggeridge described the routinized and self-satisfied Welfare State in vivid language

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PAlACE

The new towns rise as do the television aerials

dreaming spires the streams flow pellucid

through comprehensive school the BBC lifts up our heam in the morning and bids us good

night in the evening We wait for Godot we shall have strip-tease wherever we go 52

Muggeridge captures the sense of social complacency that attended the success of Welfare State cultural and educational policies and the economic prosperity of the 19505 The leveling of social experience shynot to be mistaken for a leveling of the class structure - and the anaesthetization of socishyety was perceived by some intellectuals as a situation nearing crisis Two responses to this cultural uncertainty Richard Hoggarts The Uses ofLiteracy (1957) and Raymond Williamss Britain in the Sixties Communi cations (Icent~) attempted to analyze the crisis in view of the proliferation of mass-media communications Written in a nostalgic vein The Uses ofLiteracy reads as a lament for the loss of an identifiable working class and for the erosion of indigenous forms of popular culture 13 Hoggart targeted the pulp-print culture of tabloids dailies and romances as the cause of both the trivializashytion oflife and the individuals distancing from concrete social reality He argued that despite the rise in literacy the profusion of iunk culture had become debilitating especially for the most vulnerable group the working class which easily succumbed to its appeals to conformity Distinctive class characteristics - communal bonds local wisdom and ethics and importantly tradishytions in speech ~the guying of authority by putting a finger to the nose - disapshypeared in the programming of homogenous appetites 4 Hoggarts problem with mass publications was not that they debased taste but that they over-excited it eventually dulled it and would finally kill it - they

129

enervate rather than corrupt -leaving numb and passive subjects5 The problem was political who controlled the proliferashytion of mass media who formed and whetted the appetite for it

In his analysis of mass-communicashylions technology in British culture Raymond Williams did not worry about the loss of cultural distinctions but feared for the evolushytion of an educated and participating democshyracy 56 Williams claimed that Britain had been quick off the mark to employ new media technologies for cultural and educashytional purposes in the belief that via the ailwaves a classless and egalitarian society composed of literate and rational subjects would emerge However by the late 19505 it was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a space of freedom outside the market was no longer tenable Between the paternalistic educational policies adopted by BBe culture guardians and the imperatives of the comshymercial market there seemed to be little room for the kind of communication that Williams thought essential for the growth of a truly democratic society5i Williams argued that democracy depended on free spontashyneous communication and significantly that it had no predetermined form for when put into practice could it be felt to be real58 He called for a rethinking of British cultural institutions and proposed the formashytion of new kinds of bodies such as Commushynications Centers for research and analysis However more urgent was the need for a

where ordinary people could exercise choice and effectively exert control within an uncensored network of communications 59

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

Control and Communication From Participatory Architecture 10 a Cybernetic Learning Machine If programmatic components such as an automated information library a news room auditoria rallying spaces and committee therapy and research rooms seem rather unusual for an entertainment center and if some of the assertions about the Fun Palace seem naively optimistic (the Fun Palace is both a pleasure arcade and an instrument which motivates the passive participant into thinking more abstractly or scientific gadgets new sysshytems knowledge locked away in research stations can be brought to the street corner) what is one to make of Littlewoods stateshyment that the fun arcade will be full of games and tests that psychologists and elecshytronic engineers now devise for the service of war - knowledge will be piped juke-boxes60 To understand this we must examine the contribution of the Fun Palace Cybernetics Committee specifically that of Dr Gordon Pasko

Pasks Theatre Workshop and Systems Research Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre offers some insight into the degree of his commitment to the project After a few introductory remarks - such as the crux of a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience should genuinely participate in a play and that it should overcome the restrictions in entertainment media such as cinema and television - Pask proceeds to outline in rather opaque technical jargon a cybernetic analysis of the problem (fig 58)61 He then provides some of the most initially baffling but fascinating diagrams of the entire proshyject It seems that in Pasks theater the seats would be equipped with controls allowing the audience to intervene in the action of the play62 A computing machine located backstage would calculate audience input

- 3 shy

A To the Jliddle Procadure

from the middle procedure

~ I chOOSing rj

1

l

-To uppor

leval r

ThemiddotFbull m

1_

Preforence Valuation Assertion

Fm next Jptivity scluotion

t F~Zj in sot

mLb Lower Luvol Procodure - givon individual

8Jld (n) = r i (nZj(n)

DLiGRAi1 1

Upper Level Prooedure

5B Fun Palace diagram lor a cybemelics theater from minule of the Cyberneficgt Commiliee 27Jonuory 1965 Cedric Price and Gordon Pak Pitolocapy en wove poper CCA Collection

CEORIC PRICES FUN PALACE 131

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

Page 9: 1())) - Florida International Universitydesigntheory.fiu.edu/readings/lobsinger_cybernetic_theory.pdf · sarah williams goldhagen . sandy isenstadt . mary louise lobs inger . reinhold

enervate rather than corrupt -leaving numb and passive subjects5 The problem was political who controlled the proliferashytion of mass media who formed and whetted the appetite for it

In his analysis of mass-communicashylions technology in British culture Raymond Williams did not worry about the loss of cultural distinctions but feared for the evolushytion of an educated and participating democshyracy 56 Williams claimed that Britain had been quick off the mark to employ new media technologies for cultural and educashytional purposes in the belief that via the ailwaves a classless and egalitarian society composed of literate and rational subjects would emerge However by the late 19505 it was clear that the ideal of the ailWaves as a space of freedom outside the market was no longer tenable Between the paternalistic educational policies adopted by BBe culture guardians and the imperatives of the comshymercial market there seemed to be little room for the kind of communication that Williams thought essential for the growth of a truly democratic society5i Williams argued that democracy depended on free spontashyneous communication and significantly that it had no predetermined form for when put into practice could it be felt to be real58 He called for a rethinking of British cultural institutions and proposed the formashytion of new kinds of bodies such as Commushynications Centers for research and analysis However more urgent was the need for a

where ordinary people could exercise choice and effectively exert control within an uncensored network of communications 59

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

Control and Communication From Participatory Architecture 10 a Cybernetic Learning Machine If programmatic components such as an automated information library a news room auditoria rallying spaces and committee therapy and research rooms seem rather unusual for an entertainment center and if some of the assertions about the Fun Palace seem naively optimistic (the Fun Palace is both a pleasure arcade and an instrument which motivates the passive participant into thinking more abstractly or scientific gadgets new sysshytems knowledge locked away in research stations can be brought to the street corner) what is one to make of Littlewoods stateshyment that the fun arcade will be full of games and tests that psychologists and elecshytronic engineers now devise for the service of war - knowledge will be piped juke-boxes60 To understand this we must examine the contribution of the Fun Palace Cybernetics Committee specifically that of Dr Gordon Pasko

Pasks Theatre Workshop and Systems Research Proposals for a Cybernetic Theatre offers some insight into the degree of his commitment to the project After a few introductory remarks - such as the crux of a Cybernetics Theatre is that an audience should genuinely participate in a play and that it should overcome the restrictions in entertainment media such as cinema and television - Pask proceeds to outline in rather opaque technical jargon a cybernetic analysis of the problem (fig 58)61 He then provides some of the most initially baffling but fascinating diagrams of the entire proshyject It seems that in Pasks theater the seats would be equipped with controls allowing the audience to intervene in the action of the play62 A computing machine located backstage would calculate audience input

- 3 shy

A To the Jliddle Procadure

from the middle procedure

~ I chOOSing rj

1

l

-To uppor

leval r

ThemiddotFbull m

1_

Preforence Valuation Assertion

Fm next Jptivity scluotion

t F~Zj in sot

mLb Lower Luvol Procodure - givon individual

8Jld (n) = r i (nZj(n)

DLiGRAi1 1

Upper Level Prooedure

5B Fun Palace diagram lor a cybemelics theater from minule of the Cyberneficgt Commiliee 27Jonuory 1965 Cedric Price and Gordon Pak Pitolocapy en wove poper CCA Collection

CEORIC PRICES FUN PALACE 131

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

Page 10: 1())) - Florida International Universitydesigntheory.fiu.edu/readings/lobsinger_cybernetic_theory.pdf · sarah williams goldhagen . sandy isenstadt . mary louise lobs inger . reinhold

and relay the results to actors on stage If the hardware proposed seems awkward and amusing by comparison with current developments in electronic communication the terms both Pask and Littlewood use remind us of where communication technolshyogy was developed and the kinds of assumpshytions made about human interaction6gt

In this context a brief description of cybershynetics is in order Cybernetics arose the Second World War in connection

responses of pilots in combat A control system that accurately analyzed messhysages between two combatants was of interest as a means of controlling the outcome of battles Postwar research on informationshyfeedback systems focused on a less antagoshynistic but equally competitive model of human interaction In keeping with the classic definition of cybernetics as the study of control and communication in animals and machines research concentrated on how systems organize themselves - that is how they reduce uncertainty and achieve stability by adapting cooperating and comshypeting or basically how systems learn to survive64 One of the basic axioms of cybershynetics has it that messages contain informashytion accessible to the communicator but nat to the recipientD - humans are like black boxes receiving input and outshyput but having no access to our awn or anyshyone elses inner life66 In cybernetics it was irrelevant whether a signal or message had gone through a machine or a person the priority was to facilitate pure communishycation wherever and however it occurred Systems analysis and computational machines were imagined to be SOCially beneficial for they fucilitated the transmis-

MARY lOUISE lOSSINGER

sian of information According to Norbert Wiener information is the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it and make our adjusbnent felt upon it67 To adapt to live more effecshytively within the complexity of modem life it was necessary to have adequate inforshymation feedback 611

To fucilitate learning and help people live in a scientific culture the Fun Palace would be eQuipped with calcushy

as cooperative by twa or three people

or mlt1lVlllual teaching machines) with the idea that these would assist people to learn cooperative behavior and develop speed in observation and deduction69

There would be c1osed-circuit TVS and surshyveillance systems by which participants could experience the emotional thrill and power of watching themselves participate70

It seems clear that the initial ambitions for the Fun Palace have shifted focus from an alternative theater venue to a cybernetshyic learning machine

This escalation of the goals of the Fun Palace did not pass unnoticed through Committee meetings At the meeting on 27 January lcentS a meandering exchange about the character of fun is fallowed by reaffiml3tion of the ambition to merge education with the field of entertainment only to provoke a challenge from one memshyber who objected to the overemphasis on simple-minded mechanization People are too intelligent to be duped by an automaton for long and such thinking had made the Fun Palace redolent of a Scientists toy and nat necessarily something intelligent human beings would enjoy The Commitshytee struggled to define the project was it a fun fair or a night school Were they trying to tum out obedient participant citizens or provide an unusual amenities facility

In a letter to Gordon Pask in 1964 Littlewood grappled with the use of sensory apparatus to receive infonnation about participantsn She argues that it is right in a project of this kind to advance beyond the bounds of respectability and to move into the hinterland of things far we then will know a great deal about how to control people and how to make them Man she claims is mast at home in surshyroundings that like the processes going on in his mind are continually developing and evolving Evidently surprised at the territory she has entered Littlewood submits that oddly enough the whole bases of this entershyprise is [sic1the recognition that man is not an automatonraquo7+ She had wandered into strange territory indeed Littlewood was concocting a project about which she could innocently say that

The operators in the social system are like mirth and sensuality Its operators are actions or intentions or changes in the shade of joy or grief We can to some extent control these transformations though in this case we and our machinery act as catalysts and most of the computation is done as a result of the interacshytion taking place between membelli of the population either by verbal discourses or by competitive utilization of facilities or by cooperation to achieve a common objective75

The suggestion here of behavior-modification techniques gives way further on to tions of the program in the cozying terms of festival days pranks childrens nurseries and the experience of pleasure

Within this discussion it is not fur-fetched to mention the work of Gilles Deleuze on emergent forms of social control In Postshyscript on Control Societies Deleuze argues that control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies and here control

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

becomes a floating control replacing the disciplinary time scales of closed systems76 The archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous aggrashyvated pressure-control where seminars at work continuing education and upgrading exams in business or even the most ludishycrous game shows are presented as means far motivating humans to learn and to produce77 This for Deleuze is a mare nefarious kind of control - invisible apparshy

constraining at the same time In this context the words that accomshypany the promotion of the Fun Palace healthy competition to motivate self-willed learning through the stimulation of appetites self-regulation to achieve group consensus override the light-hearted pleasure-seeking sense of the project which in itself might be thought of as a farm of control 78

Contribution and Conclusion At this juncture it is clear that the Fun Palace project was a free-wheeling exploshyration arising from a cross-disciplinary committee that entertained extreme notions of what a building might be and how or why it was necessary to educate the ITI3sses for a new technological culture The crossshy

based as was the Fun Palace itself on ideas borrowed from systems-design theory especially that of self-organizing systems - ITI3y be its most significant contribution to recent architecshyrural history and theory79In the early stage of Prices career the architect was not explishycit about his use of systems-design theory but it is clear that this first adventure offered him a willing client and the right circumshystances for putting an experimental design and method into play 80 This interdisciplishynary process where Prices contribution is limited to architectural expertise can be understood as a means of circumventing the

133

finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

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finality of architectural fonn as a represenshytation of pennanent social values and also as a non-authorilarian gesture wherein unique authorship is overruled by the organishyzational system The project conceived as a diagram of possibilities seemingly allayed the problem of overdetennination in planshyning since as a system ready at all times to be put into action it refused traditional notions of the architectural discishyplining of space and time

At the mention of control systems and the lax behaviorist psychologizing to happiness one is inclined to recoil in amused disdain But this would misinterpret and misrepresent the contribution of the proshyject Certainl) by the end of the 19605 an anti-technology bacldash was felt in both popshyular culture and architecture For example Alvin TofRers Future Shock (1970) saw techshynology as spinning out of control and argued that the accelerated rate of change manifest in all facets of life was pushing social processes to the brink of socio-psychoshylogical shockSI Future Shock is not the most sober assessment available of the state of society and technology but its hyperbolic gloss is significant in that it captured popular sentiment and signaled a retreat from the optirnism that had welcomed the dawn of the second machine agefll By 1970 the very techniques which were to sponsor human liberation to facilitate the emergence of a participatory democracy to de-institutionalshyize education and put scientific knowledge in the hands of the masses were viewed as instruments of social control The hoped-for transformation to new social configurations within mass communication and the cybershynetic dream of an evolved human perceptual awareness through human-machine intershyface had succumbed to disillusionment

TofHer himself cites Prices Fun Palace as an instance of technocratic thought and

MARY lOUISE lOBSINGER

the impoverishment of the most significant part of human experience the built envishyronmentS) Ayear earlier Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project had faced criticism from within architecture when George Baird argued that the apparently neutral handsshyoff design strategy was nothing less than a thinly veiled attempt to restructure the codes of architectural language Baird stated that Prices refusal to provide visually recognizshyable symbols of identity place and activity and his reduction of architecture to a machine for life-conditioning displayed a gross misconception of architectures place in human experience84 For Baird Prices architecture-as-servicing mechanism was equivalent to architecture as a coffeeshyvending machines5

Beyond these humanist critiques there are aspects of the Fun Palace that are preshyscient of issues surrounding the use of inforshymation technologies and analytical processes associated with computational thought that have been taken up in some current critical architectural practices Despite the fact that systems-design theory as a non-hierarchial more democratic process of problem-solving and producing architecture has been shown to be patently false the updating of its theoshyretical premises and the recent interest in its

means of analysis (particularly diashygramming) has made a positive contribution to architectural theory Many of these pracshytices share with Price a concern about the design process - that is the desire for a genshyerative aesthetic process as a means of usurpshying fomlalist predilections as a means to fully engage the potential of new technoltr

(such as computer software) and as a kind of radical utilitarianism In the 1960s as today the Fun Palace offers architects a challenging conception of architecture that privileges organization and idea over archishytecture as built form

Briefly returning to the ideas that galshyvanized the Fun Palace of the conceptual contrarieties that pose problems for the claims underlying the project the most obvious is the idea that an architecture that accommodates change the very mode of consumption itself might possibly be effecshytive in awakening the compliant subjects of the paternalistic Welfare State This countershyintuitive idea suggests that Price held out for a value-free notion of capitalist entrepreshyneurialism against the bureaucracy of the state Within this ideological frame sponshytaneity and consumption are not obverse sides of the coin Despite the fact that this optimistic vision of individual active parshyticipation within free enterprise implies that enabled participants might somehow take hold of the market one is compelled to ask at what point spontaneity and choice passes over into pure consumption86 As perceptive critics have already pointed out within late capitalism the distance between choice and control on the one hand and market deternlination on the other is uncomfortably narrow

CEDRIC PRICES FUN PALACE

1 Cedric Price A Mee m Londoners draft lOr a promotional brochure for the Fun Palace Canadian Centre for Architecture Montreal Cedric Price Archive Ihereinafter Price Archive]

2 Document dated 1824 Price Archive DlU99S0l886

3 On Littlewood contribution In British radical theater see Howard Goomey The Theatn Workshywp Storr (London Eyre Methuen lt)8) or Joan Littlewood Joan Littlewood Peculiar History as She Tells It (London Methuen 994) On her near retirement in )61 see Coomey Coodbye note from Joan 185 News clipping from The Observer (0 July 1966) 9 Price Archive box lt5 Mareh 1965-September 11)66 rve spent thirty years in the theatre and I never want m ee it again If dead all that i over people have got to be able to come and go look at this or at that have three rings to cboose from or if all compulsion ThaIs why I want the Fun Palace Goome) 11 Manifesto of the Theatre of Action The commercial Theatre of Artion i limited by its dependence upon a mall section of society which neither desires nor dares m face the urgent and vital problems of today The theatre if it is to live must of necessity rellect the spirit of the age This spirit is founded on social conflicts which dominate world history today-the raOO of 000000 unemployed starving for bread while wheat is bumed for fuel This theatre will perform mainly in workingelass districts plays which express life and struggle of the worken Politics in its fullest sense means the affairs of the people

4 In conversation with Cedric Price November lt)96 Conversation with Roy Landau 2 March 999

5 Price Archive box tl5middot 6 Fun Palace Project Report March 1965 Price

Archive box 5 7 Cedric Price Fun Palace for Camden Town

Architectural Design 3711 (November 1967)52gt On the scale of the development see Fun Palace Project Report 5 9 where he refen m the first Mill Meads site along the River Lea lAter estimations for siting pilot projects limit the area to 25 acres It is quite mnihing to imagine a lO-Ilcre mechanishycal plinth At the time ecology WlIS not the issue it would become by the early 19705

8 Reyner Banham A Clip on Architecture Design Quarterl) 63 (Minneapolis Walker Art Center 1965)13middot

9 Goomera 10 Baz Kershaw The Politics ofPer(ornunce Radical

Theatre as Culturallnte1Wlltion (New York Routledge 1991) 103

11 Littlewood 701

II Littlewood 7

13S

13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137

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13 Littlewood 70 14 On 1amp May 1lt]63 Price applied to the London

County Council (Lee) to useland along the River Lea Mayor Lou Sherman approached the Civic Trust with a request lOr a feasibility study They found support with Leslie Lane director of the Civic Trust and located a site in Mill Meads Howshyever when the Lee became the Creater London Council in Apri1196f and the authority changed hands both the site and the political support were lost The site was designated for sewage disposal I roamed fin and wide a land-hungry settler tried Glasgow Edinburgh Liverpool while the designs went round the world I lectured in Helsinki Aarhus the Univeities of London There and at the London School of Economics we found our most helpful supporters Littlewood 713

5 Litllewood637 Pask worked for Research Systems Ltd frequented the Architectu11l1 AISOCiation in the lt60s and published in Archigram Archirectural Design New Scientist and other journals Pask was also an acquaintance of Price

16 The Cybernetics Committee consisted of R Ascott Ipswich School of Art C Beatty Research Institute S Beer Sigma A Briggs Sussex Univenity R Chestennan Goldsmiths College R Coodman Bristol University R Gregory Cambridge Univer-

M Young Institute of Community Studies Littlewood

17 The years between and 1966 were the most active On6 June 1lt]65 the Fun Palace Charitable Trust was established to deal with organizational matters Among the trustees were Buckminster Fuller and Yehudi Menuhin Documents show that the Trust continued to meet well into the 9IIos The most recent engineering memo is dated )85

inrormation for a high platform pivot mecllanlsm Frank Newby a constant collaborator with Price was the structural engineer in the early years Price Jrchive

8 Reyner Banham Theory and Design in tire First Machine Age (1lt60 Cambridge Mass The MIT

Press 1)891 329-30 9 Sanham Theory and Design cent Note that Price

was also a great admirer of Fuller and had been introduced to him by Banham in the late 19505 Price wrote Fullers obituary for The Architectural Review in the cour of which he identified some of the concepts that align his thought with Fullers such as the idea of refomng the environment and not men and the notion of anticipatory design as the only design See Buckminster Fuller 1~5-1)83 TIu Architectural Review 038 (August )83)4shyIn this context it is worth mentioning that Fuller was interested in alternative education and educational rerorm See Fuller Education Automation Freeing

MARY LOUISE LOBSINGER

the Scholar to Return ro Hi Studi (London Fefrer and Simons 1cent)

20 Banham Theory and Daign 327-30 21 The fiftieth-annivenary issue ofTh Architectural

Review provides some interesting insights into the visual approach The editorial claimed that one of ilgt aims over the previous fifty yea had been visual rlt-education See The Second Half Centurv TIu Architectural Review (Jam] 947) bullbull8

Jl See Anne Massey The Independent Croup Modernism and MtlSII Culture in Britain 945-959 (Manchester Manchester University Press 1995) and David Robbins ed TIu Independent Group Posnur Britain and tire Aesthetics ofPlent) (Cambridge Mo The MJT Press 990)

3 Peter Murray Introduction Cedric Price SuppleshymentArchirecturo[ Design 40 (970) 507 On Price as a conceptual architect s Colin Rowe On Conceptual Architecture Artnet bull (October 1975) amp-ltJ

4 Cedric Price Lifconditioning Architectural Design 3610 (October lt]66) 483middot

15 The social ideals notions of critical urhan practices and non-permanent architecture of Price have some affinities with Constants New Babylon The British Situationist Ale Trocchi was in contact with Price and there are affinities also between Price and the Situationists The Sin City Project (1lt]62-63) by Michael Webb ofArchigram also shares some programmatic and architectural concerns Iith the Fun alace However Prices use of a SYStems approach and his dedication to technoiogy distinshyguish his work from all three

6 Cedric Price Reflections on the Team X Primer Architectural Design 325 (May 1cent3) zo8

l7 Price Reflections on the Team X Primerz08 If in the mid-60s it matters little to a man whether he lives and works in Manchester or Southampton the architectural problem is not to rlt-establish urban identities hut to enrich this new-scale localional freedom It is essential that architects in determinshying and providing the scale of perceptual living match or extend the multi-directional activities and appetites of present(lay man

z8 Note that Alan Colquhoun published Symbolic and Literal Aspects of Technology in Architectural Design 3211 (November lt]6) 5~ Both Colquhouns criticism ofthe symbolic use of techshynology and Banhams critique of the symbolic use of machine image I) were probably influential

29 Price Reflections on the Team X Primer wS 30 In a later article on the Potteries Thinkbelt a project

premised on ideas developed in the Fun Palace Price stated I doubt the relevance of the concepts ofTown Centre Town and Balanced Community Calculated suburban sprawl sounds good to me

See Cedric Price The Potteries Thinkbelt Archirectuml Design 36 (October 966) 483

3 See Peter Buchanan High-Tech Another British Thoroughbred The Architecturnl Review 1037 (July 1)83) 5-9 Buchanan cites the Plateau Beaushybourg as the direct descendent of the Fun Palace Also see H Muschamp who views the Fun Palace as the descendant of the 1851 Crystal Palace Fun Ottrgtgano 99 (June 991) 5-Lf

32 Archigram Cedric Price Activity and Change Archigram (1cent) np When interviewed in November 19lt]6 Price did not reciprocate the admiration Pressed by Archigram He considered their work overly preoccupied with style and ics and a slightly disappointing contribution considered the Smithsons House of the Future indebted to Fullers Dymaxion Bathroom of 937 a noteworthy contribution to the genre ofadaptable architecture and to an anti-aestbetic but he was critical of their rhetoric

33 For commentary on Prices method see Cedric Price middotPrices Process Cedric Price and Visual Literacy RDyallnrtitute ofBritish Architects 83 (January 1976) 6--7 Steve Mullin middotCedric Price Architectural Design ~5 (May 1976) 8-87 and Reyner Banham Cycles of the Price-Mechanism AA Files 8 (January 985) 03-00

34 Price Prices Process 17 Price maintains that the architects role is to solve problems and develop ideas and possibilities rather than speCific design solutions

35 See The Architecrural Review 1038 (iIllgust 983) 4shy36 Roy Landau An Architecture ofEnabling The

Work of Cedric Price AA Files 8 (january 1985) 3-7 Landau convincingly argues that Prices position is devoted to enabling the individual and is essentially a deeply ethical and rational point of view_

37 Price Archive box 15 38 Cedric Price Fun Palace Project The Architecturshy

al Review 815 (Janual) 1lt]65) 74 He estimated that it would take 18 months to 2 Years to build Note Price was and is staunchly a~ti-preservationist This is ironic as today the preservationists are attempting to have his Inter-Action Centre (197-77) designated as historically valuable

39 In articles from the later centOS Price refe to cybershynetics and information theory but never so as to directly substantiate his work he also does not use the term middotreal-time See Cedric Price The indusshytrial Designer Architectural Design 39gt ltFebruary 1lt]69) 6-6bull Here he refers to time as the fourth dimension in the design aesthetic This is a vital and continuing point of departure ror Price as evidenced by his recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture Cedric Price Mean Time

CEDRIC PRICES fUN PALACE

40 For a concise description of the shift from disciplishynary regimes to control societies see Gilles Deleuze Postcript on Control Societies Negotiation 97~9o trans Martin loughin (Ne York Columbia Univenity Press 1995) In-B2

4 Reyner Banbam Paul Barker Peter Hall and Cedric Price Non-Plan An Eiltperiment in Freedom New Society 338 (w March 1lt]69) See Norbert Wiener Cybernetic or Control and Communication in tlu Animal and tlu Machine (Cambridge Mau The MIT Press 1948) 39 Later Price reiterates his idea of nonillan Non-plan and the advantages of unevenness proposes to reduce the permanence of the assumed worth of the past uses of space through avoiding their reinforcement society might he given not only the opportunity to re-assess such worth but also be able to establish a new order of priorities ofland sea and air which would be related more directly to the valid social and economic life span of sucb uses replace Utopia with non-plan Cedric Price Approaching an Architecture of Approximation Archirectural Dign ltplO (97) 6f6

ltp This interpretation is indebted to the work ofGilles Deleuze and Flilix Guattari A Thousand Platea Copitaill11l and Schizophrenia trans Brian Massushymi (Minneapolis Minnesota Univeity Press 1ltjJ7) 6S-ql 140-44shy

43 Norbert Wiener TIu Human Use ofHuman Beings Cybernetict and Sodel) (New York Avon Boob 950)133 Robert Bruegman The Pencil and the Electronic Sketchboarti Architecture and Represhysentation and the Computer in Architecture and Its IIIlltIg ed Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Cambridge Mass and Montreal TheIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture 989) 4

44 Unpaginated document (Anti-architect document) Price Archive

45 The Approach to Planning Price Archive 46 Price Archive The main problem faced by the

Committee was to find site This is somewhat paradoxical given that the project is premised on a lack of site specincity

47 Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price A Laboratory of Fun NeScientist 38 (14 May 1ltJ64) 433 In the late centOS Pricegtlestdited an issue ofArchitecshytural Dign on Learning He claimed that Learnshying will soon become the major industry of every developing counlly and those countries with estabshylished educational systems will have to restructure most drastically their existing facilities Learning Archirectural Design 38 (May 968) 08 See Cedric Price National School Plan Architectural Design 39 (March lt]69) 54-55

48 Fun alace Being an account of the necessity of the Fun Palace as a temporary valve in a late

137