by Gianni Pettena

Re:CP Cedric Price, a cura di Hans Ulrich Obrist, Birkhäuser, Bael-Boston-Berlin, 2003 (pp. 186, s.i.p.)

In his brief foreword to this book, Cedric Price dwells on the need to add an ‘invisible sandwich’ to the menu of the urban context. This echoes the ironic parallel between architecture and food that he had previously drawn in ‘The Importance of Food to Architecture’, a 2001 lecture at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. The concept alludes to all of the gap-like potential that architects must be able to grasp, both in terms of time and space.

Once again, he indicates that the indeterminate, the flexible and the unfinished are additional components of design, an invisible dictionary of possibilities that lets you redefine rather than improve or enhance a context. The stimuli triggered by curiosity, doubt, continual exchange and debate are the tools he uses here. The reader is invited to devour this blend of concepts and images, to ‘eat them voraciously and constructively’. As Price put it, this essay contains ‘the best until May 1, 2006 (by then the author may have changed his mind)’, but it is published practically at the moment of his death. The mostly fresh drawings and suggestions contain some of his favourite building ‘recipes’, both his own and those by others.

This critical overview consists of plenty of short remarks, excerpts from essays and competitions and images and sketches from the 1970s to the present day (called ‘snacks’). There is a long chat with Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose old and new schemes are discussed in the light of recent issues (the city, museums and new technologies). There also is the diary of a car trip from London to Rochester and back again in search of the home of Charles Dickens, a pretext for a timely, complex observation of the urban and metropolitan context, where architecture is daily life, memory, history and literature. Price, Smithson and Venturi pioneered ‘utopian’ design.

In London in the 1950s, this approach used the city as a practice ground where architecture could set aside its preoccupations about form, space and symbolism to devote itself to observing reality – including the trite, the imperfect and the unbeautiful. Price was to make a great contribution to the definition of experimental architecture, fully independent from the previous heritage. Instead, it was influenced and developed in harmony with both the climate of linguistic experimentation and revolution in the other creative fields and the mutations in the culture and urban customs.

Significantly, the London-based Archigram group followed Price’s teaching and example concerning space’s indeterminate, decaying and multipurpose nature. They applied his ideas to an original town model that theoretically accepted and relished the traits of consumerism, the ephemeral, dynamism, constant and necessary flexibility and the development of the functions of an urban environment, expressed in the visually enticing language of the media.

The same approach (later called ‘radical’) appeared at nearly the same time in Austria, with Hollein and Pichler; then came Italy’s Archizoom and Superstudio, showing how much the architectural world still intact in the 1950s and 1960s had been challenged. Much of this break was due to Price, especially in Britain; in the introduction to this book, Rem Koolhaas puts it this way: ‘ironically, his scorched earth turned into fertile land for the still triumphant Anglo-Saxons: Archigram, Rogers, Foster, Alsop.’

Arata Isozaki’s article in this volume helps us realize how much Price helped modify and renovate the last 40 years of architectural theory and construction, besides just how much his influence is still alive. His original essay (‘Dismantling Architecture’), dating from 1975, analyzed his most famed schemes of the time – the Fun Palace, the ATOM project, the Thinkbelt Potteries and the London Zoo Aviary. In a 2003 afterword, Isozaki underscores Price’s introduction of the factor of time in design. He maintains that it is similar to the Japanese concept of ma, in which space and time are the same. He recalls that the idea was stressed in a 1999 Manhattan redevelopment project (‘A Lung for Midtown Manhattan’) in which he returned to his earlier ‘NonPlans’, choosing not to choose, leaving the site a free city space.

Isozaki writes that, convinced that his designs could only be understood in terms of irony, weirdness and diversity, Price ‘turned himself into a conceptual object and plays any kind of part’.

Gianni Pettena Professor of history of architecture at Florence University