Cedric Price, who died in August 2003 at the age of 68, was that rare thing a non-authoritarian architect, and that even rarer thing a non-authoritarian socialist. One of the odd aspects of architectural history is the tremendous influence of thinkers who built very little. Price is only known for one or two buildings, including one for London Zoo; but he was, and will continue to be, extremely influential.
The concept of calculated uncertainty was central to his vision. He favoured adaptable, temporary structures. (One of his heroes was Buckminster Fuller, the American inventor of the geodesic dome.) In a project for a new university, he proposed simple, moveable buildings which would deliver education with the same lack of peculiarity as the supply of drinking water.
Cedric Price (1934-2003) was born in Englands Potteries, the son of an architect, and studied at Londons Architectural Association. His ideas included the Fun Palace (1961) for the theatre director Joan Littlewood and the Potteries Thinkbelt (1964), an innovative circuit of transport, education and technology. Among his later projects was Magnet City which used the intermediary spaces or trigger points of Londons urban landscape to stimulate new patterns and situations of urban movement in the city.
He advocated the concept of an anticipatory architect who would give people the freedom to control and shape their own environment; all buildings should allow for obsolescence and complete changes of use. He was the only architect to be a paid-up member of Britains National Institute of Demolition Contractors.
He was the most convivial of men, who knew that a joke can often be the best way to put an idea across. But he stuck to his principles. In 1999, when a preservation order was proposed for a disused arts centre hed built in North London in 1971, he campaigned against preservation, saying that something better should be put in its place; I cant think of another architect who would have done this.
His best-known unbuilt project was for a Fun Palace in East London, developed in the early 1960s in close collaboration with the Theatre Workshop director, Joan Littlewood. It was killed off by local government bureaucracy. The design of Richard Rogers and Renzo Pianos Pompidou Centre in Paris is a direct descendant, but on the way it somehow became a monument to the French state.
Cedric Prices father had worked as an architect for the firm that designed the great British chain of Art Deco super-cinemas, the Odeons. His speciality was the foyers, and one of his techniques was to have all the mirrors tinted slightly pink, to make the customers look, and feel, happier.
Price was pleased to think he followed in that tradition. He exerted much of his influence through the independent London architecture school, the Architectural Association, in Bloomsburys Bedford Square. His lectures were celebrated. An aside might begin two sentences into a lecture, and last for the rest of the allotted hour. Architects, he once said, are the greatest whores in town. They talk in platitudes about improving the quality of life, and then get out drawings of the prison theyre working on.
Freedom from idiocy
He and I collaborated on Non-Plan, an anti-planning polemic, which infuriated architects, planners and assorted do-gooders. The idea emerged during a conversation I had with Peter Hall, geographer and planner, in the late 1960s. Both of us were appalled at the disasters that urban planning had brought about. We wondered if things could be any worse if there were no planning at all.
Anyone who wants to know more about Non-Plan, its origins and its later history can find it in Paul Barker, Non-Plan Revisited : Or the Real Way Cities Grow (London : Journal of Design History, 12 / 2, summer 1999) and in Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler, Non-Plan : Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (Oxford : Architectural Press, 2000).
The name Non-Plan was, I think, my suggestion. I saw it as the theme for a special issue of the social affairs magazine, New Society, which I edited. The obvious collaborators were Cedric Price, who had already appeared in New Society, and whose non-authoritarian designs certainly influenced us; and his great friend, the architecture historian, and chronicler of popular culture, Reyner Banham. We drew deeply on Peter Halls and Reyner Banhams wide knowledge of the United States. (A less common thing in Britain than it has since become.)
What worried our critics, who were many, when the four of us published our Non-Plan issue of New Society (20 March 1969), was their uncertainty about our political stance. Was this anarchism? Or deep-dyed conservatism, a precursor of Thatcherism? Our essential point was that you should always think very hard before telling other people how they ought to live. They had their own preferences, which ought to be respected.
We suggested carrying out a Non-Plan test. Four districts should be freed from all controls, and we could then judge whether the upshot was any worse than what happened with the controls on. To make readers sit up, we chose four much-cherished slices of English countryside for our test. The resultant incandescence was highly satisfactory.
Cedric was delighted with the furore, and continued to propagandise for Non-Plan for the rest of his life. Whenever we met, hed point out to me some new example of architectural or planster idiocy, which proved how right wed been. I usually agreed with him. Later, when I began to write regularly about architecture and urban change, I always counted Cedric, Reyner Banham and Peter Hall among my principal influences.
St Katherine's Dock, the first stage in London's docklands re-development, of which the best-known bits happened under 'Non-Plan' conditions, of which Cedric Price was a key advocate. Canary Wharf is seen in the distance. (Ken Worpole)
Non-Plan is one of Cedrics bequests, intellectually. As a concept it has never gone away. I find that people refer back to it constantly. It had very practical results, also. At the time, we thought that cities were too complex for Non-Plan, but the problem of what to do with urban dereliction from the 1970s onwards changed all that. Peter Hall developed the idea of the control-free enterprise zone, a miniature Non-Plan. This was applied, for example, in the London Docklands. Without it, there would be no Canary Wharf. The first American-style mall, in Gateshead, across the river from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was also built in an enterprise zone. This and its various successors were despised and detested by everyone apart from the millions who used them.
Cedric, Peter Hall, Reyner Banham and I had suggested that, at the very least, Non-Plan would give us a clear idea of what popular design might look like. We eventually got an answer.
