The Enclosure Business

He was born in 1934, the son of A. G. Price, an architect working in the populist arena of picture palace design (a genre much maligned by the more doctrinaire Modernists). His architectural education took place at Cambridge and the Architect-ural Association, linking him with a generation better known for their ideas rather than their actual structures, and for their increasing disquiet with Modernism's rigid approach. Although never a member of the Archigram studio - though he did write for its zesty architectural fanzine - Price's work, with its combination of epic and unbuildable social experiments and small-scale interventions, followed a similar trajectory.

The most enduring project to come from Price's small studio in Alfred Place was the Fun Palace, a 1961 proposal for a vast, shed-like entertainment warehouse. Developed with the theatre producer Joan Littlewood, the Fun Palace was a cultural goods yard, a space formed by the enclosure beneath a travelling crane that could reconfigure the interior components according to the demands of the occupiers - creating a 'laboratory of fun'. The critic Reyner Banham included the Fun Palace in his 1965 discourse on 'Clip-on Architecture', writing that 'day by day this giant neo-futurist machine will stir and re-shuffle its movable parts - walls and floors, ramps and walks, steerable moving staircases, seating and roofing, stages and movie screens, lighting and sound-systems - sometimes bursting at the seams with multiple activities, sometimes with only a small part walled in, but with the public poking about the exposed walls and stairs, pressing buttons to make things happen themselves.'

Fun Palace was quintessentially of the 1960s, a physical manifestation of the emerging liberalized, anti-hierarchical society. Its legacy is plain to see, and not just in its most obvious successor, the Pompidou Centre (1977), designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. The Pompidou generated visual hedonism from its naked admiration for the raw components of building: pipes, wires, vents and structure. Like the later Inter-action project, the interior was free-form, intended as a series of transformable spaces (although the building has become arthritically fixed as the years go by). Yet the Fun Palace's influence can also be seen in contemporary museology, where push-button interaction has become central to the gallery experience.

All this was conveyed through drawing. Price worked in an era when grand schemes were illustrated in the grainy, blotchy blacks and greys of a primitive photocopier, not the slick, lifeless computer-generated renders and walk-throughs that seem to suck all the energy from a project. He had no need for clip-art citizens strolling up and down his imaginary boulevards, smiling in anticipated enjoyment of an unbuilt space. His visions could be encompassed by a few broad strokes of the pen, a sketchy drawing style that occasionally glossed over larger questions of structure and servicing. Instead, each project was presented as a fait accompli, an example of what could be achieved if long-standing cultural, political and social restrictions could only be overcome. (Price was proposing a giant Ferris wheel for London's South Bank back as far back as 1984.) In later life he moved into collage, using crude cut-ups drawn from magazines, newspapers and the architectural press to highlight the paradoxes, absurdities and wonders generated by contemporary culture: technology-induced catastrophes juxtaposed with Futurist triumphalism.

Our world of Bluewaters, Center Parcs, Trocaderos and Disneylands can't be blamed on Price, despite his unerring knack for predicting the rise of popularism and the cultural dominance of market forces. But rather than try to shoehorn commerce into architecture and forestall change, he inverted the profession's traditional priorities and took the opposite approach. Others have followed, most notably Rem Koolhaas, appearing to be under the spell of junk culture while combining a celebration of its efficiencies with a critique of its failings.

In 1964 Price worked on a vast urban design project dubbed the 'Potteries Thinkbelt', devised in direct response to the decline of north Staffordshire's local ceramics industry, subsequent high unemployment and ravaged infrastructure. In its place Price suggested the establishment of a vast educational centre, 108 square miles of loosely linked 'campus' that would turn the region into the national centre of science and technology. The existing railway would form the Thinkbelt's backbone, while all elements, from teaching units to housing, were reconfigurable, demountable and removable. For a scheme conceived in a pre-computer age, the parallels with contemporary networking arrangements, distance-learning initiatives and electronically connected communities are striking. Price's understanding of the fundamental social shifts of the postwar era, from a manufacturing to a knowledge-based economy, was largely ignored, however: one can only speculate on the outcome if even a tiny amount of his ambition and energy had been realized. The recent suggestion by Will Alsop (who worked in Price's studio for four years) that the M62 corridor be reconfigured - mentally, if not physically - as a giant linear 'Supercity' owes a huge debt to the Thinkbelt.

Price's theoretical output was prodigious and rapid; swift elemental sketches were his pre-eminent means of expression. 'No-one has ever changed architecture with fewer means than Cedric Price', observed Koolhaas in his introduction to RE:CP (published in 2003, shortly before Price's death). 'Price is a destroyer', he continued, meaning this as a compliment, thrilled by his huge ambitions and seemingly sacrilegious approach to existing structures, be they social or physical. Price built to the limits of contemporary technology and budgets. His 1971 Inter-action Centre in Kentish Town, a pared-down version of the Fun Palace, was intended from the outset as a temporary structure - he even produced a manual for the deconstruction and reuse of its steel components. Unsurprisingly, Inter-action outlived its allotted timescale of 20 years (it's worth noting that the Pompidou Centre also wasn't projected to last much longer than a quarter of a century), and when the time finally came to redevelop the site, Price opposed the conservationists and gleefully sided with the wreckers (unsurprising, perhaps, given that he was said to be the only architect in the country who was a fully qualified member of the national demolition contractors' association).

Typical of Price's provocations was Non-Plan, a 1969 broadside at the urban planning system that had so visibly failed during the Modernist period. Price and
his collaborator Paul Barker suggested that planning controls should be abolished, a combination of extreme libertarianism and anarchy that did nothing to endear him to the architectural establishment. Again he was ahead of his time. The creation of the Enterprise Zone concept by planner Peter Hall in the late 1970s (epitomized by the frenetic - and ultimately rather bland - development of London's docklands) originated in Price and Barker's Non-Plan manifesto. For better or for worse, it created the architecture the initiative deserved.

One of Price's last works was 'Magnet', a 1997 exhibition devoted to the idea of small buildings as generators of interest and activity. Contemporary architecture is currently going through an iconic phase, a movement that can be traced back to Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim and its catalytic effect on local regeneration. As a result, attention-seeking 'blobs' are being parachuted into the urban context as signature works commissioned solely to bolster status, not social cohesion. Price's magnets weren't icons but attractors, part of the urban mix rather than objects that dominated their surroundings. Just as the application of raw economics to the rather esoteric and subversive concept of the Non-Plan ultimately resulted in timorous architecture, so the idea of the urban 'Magnet' could yet backfire. Yet this might simply confirm Price's world-view, his belief in continuous, incremental change where the only constant is 'calculated uncertainty'. An unpalatable truth, perhaps, for the architectural profession.