The Price of Play: Cedric Price and the Fun Palace

Abstract

This research examines the life, work and influence of British Architect Cedric Price (1934 – 2003). The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part looks at Price’s biographical social context and how this was translated to his relationship with architectural contemporaries and architectural discourse. Part Two examines how Price’s own unique theories of architecture were manifest in his un-built Fun Palace project. By utilising Price’s drawings and diagrams, the third part documents the recreation and analysis of the proposed Fun Palace as a 3D computer model. Price was one of the most imaginative and influential architects of the late 20th Century and his Fun Palace was perhaps the most inventive and innovative proposal to facilitate extra leisure time in post-war Britain. Price spent most of his life fighting against the entrenched and conventional notions of his profession and built few physical structures. He maintained that he was not adverse to the process of building however, and the intention of the whole Fun Palace team was for the structure to be built somewhere near London. It was conceived as a dynamic, interactive theatre, to be assembled by the users by means of a gantry crane and prefabricated modules. Firstly, the concept and Fun Palace philosophies are investigated in their social, political and architectural context. Next, the research examines Price’s drawings and diagrams of the Fun Palace and utilises them in recreating the proposed building as a 3D computer model. The model is analysed and used to discuss implications of the design had it been physically built. Price’s drawings and diagrams are sober representations of the poetic possibilities of the scheme and although technology is considered in separate diagrams, it is not explained or shown in the perspective drawings. The creation of a 3D computer model and associated analysis of Price’s 2D drawings reveals a series of inconsistencies between plan and sections. These inconsistencies did not matter to Price; perhaps he knew that the ideas inherent in the scheme were far more important than the architectural language that he used (therefore calling himself an ‘anti-architect’). The aspects that were developed, the non - programme, structure and the cybernetics, were the work of others (Joan Littlewood, Frank Newby and Gordon Pask). After constructing and analysing the computer model, the likelihood of Price’s design of the Fun Palace working as a physical reality seems very unlikely. However, he had a lasting influence on a younger generation of architects such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Will Alsop and the architectural group, Archigram.