Despite his rather plummy tones which form a gentle sonic background to this small exhibition (filtering through from the little lecture film playing on a loop), Cedric Price (1934-2003) was a peculiarly un-English architect. He built virtually nothing. Even the building he is known for, the Aviary in Regent’s Park (1961), designed with Lord Snowdon, was intended to be removed once the birds became used to the setting and decided to stay on, so even that one building was, effectively, unsuccessful. Price was an intellectual, a thinker whose influence on architecture has been, indeed still is, out of all proportion to his output. He was also an enigma who, it could be argued, frittered his talent away.
The Design Museum show is restrained and studious, eschewing the flash and the baroque which can be the temptation when there is so little actual architecture to display. This allows a series of visionary drawings and sketches to shine. These include designs for the Fun Palace (1960-65), a multi-use arts centre commissioned by Joan Littlewood. With the Fun Palace Price intended to create a steel scaffold structure which could easily change in response to public demand, cranes and gantries would allow it to effectively rebuild itself. It was a classic 1960s conceit, a genuine belief in the ability of architecture to change the world which seems to have almost entirely disappeared. Rogers and Piano’s Centre Pompidou, perhaps the 1970s most radical building, would have been unimaginable without the Fun Palace. His ambitious 1983 designs for London’s South Bank (the precise future of which remains in limbo) presaged the London Eye. Other schemes exhibited here include an animal pen, a university set on trains and along a railway line and an adventure playground.
Price named one of the rooms in his office ‘East Grinstead’ so that when he shut the door his secretary could answer phone enquiries by saying ‘Mr Price is in East Grinstead’. No one knows what he did up there but the consensus is that he either just spent time thinking or perhaps, heaven forbid, did absolutely bugger all. He is a fine advertisement for just sitting and thinking. Rem Koolhaas, currently the hippest and sharpest architect working on the international scene, remains in thrall to Price’s methods and his attachment to a pure expression of the diagram, regardless of the aesthetic impact. This is work not about beauty but about imagination, not context but content. I have often been sceptical of the value of Price’s work, wondering whether his reputation might have far outstripped his talent. This exhibition has done nothing to change my views yet there is something hugely encouraging for all us dreamers about an exhibition of the works of someone who achieved so little.
Design Museum until 9 October 2005
