The life and work of Cedric Price, the unconventional and visionary architect best-known for buildings which never saw the light of day ...
A newly-opened exhibition at St John's sheds light on the life and work of the eccentric and influential 20th century architect Cedric Price, the designer of a “Fun Palace”, a university on rails and a flexible geodesic dome which anticipated the Millennium Dome by decades.
In the words of Jude Kelly, the artistic director for the Southbank Centre, Price was “as famous for not building things as he was for building things”. Many of Price’s designs were so outlandish and unconventional they were never built, yet his influence on modern architecture remains considerable. Price’s inspiration can be seen today in world-famous structures such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the London Eye.
Price’s best-known completed work is probably the aviary at London Zoo, the first walk-through “free-flight” aviary in Britain which is now a Grade II listed building, but it is his offbeat unfinished concepts which truly reveal who Cedric Price was as an architect.
One of Price’s most ambitious unrealised designs was for a “Fun Palace” to be built on the banks of the Thames in 1961 for the progressive theatre director Joan Littlewood. Littlewood’s idea of a theatre where the audience are also players combined with Price’s architectural vision of a collaborative and ever-changing environment which would be a “laboratory of fun”, featuring moving walls and floors, interactive panels and even an “inflatable conference centre”.
With its lack of doors to control entry and no solid roof, the Fun Palace became referred to as an “anti-building”, designed to be dismantled and re-assembled to fulfil different needs. Despite critical acclaim from leading architects such as Buckminster Fuller, Cedric Price’s design for the Fun Palace never came to fruition. Yet, according to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Fun Palace was “the first of many projects that supported Cedric Price’s idea that architecture should not determine human behaviour but rather enable possibility”.
Price’s architectural style came from his belief that buildings should serve the needs of the people, and be radically transformed or demolished if they no longer served their purpose. A life-long socialist, Price was deeply sceptical of political institutions and their tendency to use grand, monumental buildings as a means of consolidating power. Instead, Price proposed building temporary and mutable structures which would be open and accessible to all.
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Price completed relatively little and never achieved stratospheric success, but his iconoclastic, eccentric and forward-thinking vision of architecture and its relationship with people shaped modern thinking and influenced a generation of architects and designers. His plans for a flexible geodesic dome, designed to be an auditorium and entertainment centre that could raise up to allow people entry, can be seen as an influence on the design of London’s Millennium Dome, and at one point he anticipated the London Eye by several decades when he envisaged a giant Ferris Wheel to be erected on the banks of the Thames, for the enjoyment of local residents.
The St John’s College exhibition, called Cedric Price: Out of the Box, examines Price’s life and works from his very earliest days, sketching and designing under the encouraging eye of his architect father, through to his time as a student at Cambridge and beyond.