Building Calculated Uncertainty: Cedric Price’s Interaction Centre

As his friend Niall Hobhouse claimed, Cedric Price ‘wasn’t really an architect, but a social critic to the left of the Left who stumbled on the post-war ruins of modernism’.1 The role of Price’s unbuilt legacy for Western architectural culture has been praised extensively, with a special emphasis on the unorthodox nature of both his practice and academic contributions.2 Succeeding generations have found inspiration in Price’s personal view of the architectural profession, his work being positioned often within radical and utopian approaches yet involving a committed social agenda. The social role of architecture was for Price tightly linked to the capacity of the built environment to be adapted by its users. Buildings should be understood as temporary commodities, malleable objects with a short lifespan dictated by their usefulness for the community. Conceived as infrastructures, unbuilt projects such as the famous Fun Palace, Potteries Thinkbelt, or Magnet were formulated as productive objects with a profound commitment for socially regenerating the contexts into which they were to be inserted.

Cedric Price: 1934–2003

He left few buildings, three books and a great army of admirers. Cedric Price was, in the very best and most creative sense of the word, a researcher and a visionary well ahead of his time. His London Zoo aviary, Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt projects were hugely influential. Here, STEPHEN MULLIN, his chief assistant from 1964 to 1969, remembers both their gestation and (in his extensive notes on p. 118) their extra ordinary and greatly loved progenitor.