Architecture in dialogue: So long sucker

Starting the game:
1. Each player takes 7 chips of one color
2. No two players may start with the same color chips
3. Someone is randomly selected as the first player to move
4. This player places a chip onto the playing area, and selects anyone to be the next person to move

Playing the game:
1. Move by playing a chip of any color onto the playing area (starting a new pile), or on top of any existing chip(s) in the playing area
2. If no chips are captured (see below), the player selects the next person to move, so long as that person’s starting chip color is not in the stack just played on (this may be the same person, if that person used a captured chip). However, if all four colors are in the stack just played on, the next person must be the player whose most-recently-played chip (by color) is furthest down in the stack
3. Chips are captured by playing two chips of the same color consecutively on one pile. The player designated by that color must kill one chip of his choice out of that pile, and take the rest. Then he gets the next move. Killed chips are taken out of the game
4. A chip is a prisoner when held by a player other than the original owner
5. Any prisoner in a player’s possession may be killed or transferred to another player at any time. Such transfers are unconditional and cannot be retracted. A player may not transfer or kill chips of his own color
6. A player is defeated when given the move, but has no chips in his possession (and hence is unable to play). Defeat is not final until every player holding prisoners has refused to rescue him by transferring chips. After defeat, the move returns to the player who gave the defeated player the move. The defeated player’s chips remain in play as prisoners, but are ignored in determining the order of play. If a pile is captured by the chips of a defeated player, the entire pile is killed, and the move rebounds to the capturing player
7. Players must keep their chips in view at all times

Order of play:
1. If a capture occurs: the player whose color made the capture gets the next move
2. If a player is defeated: move returns to the player who gave the defeated player the move. If this should also defeat that player in turn, whoever gave that player the move will get the next turn, etc
3. Otherwise, the next player to move is decided by last player to have moved as follows:
They may give the move to any player (including themselves) whose color is not represented in the pile just played upon; If all players are represented in that pile, the move goes to the player whose most-recently-played chip is furthest down in the pile.

Strategy:
1. Coalitions, or agreements to cooperate, are permitted, and may take any form
2. No penalty for failure to live up to an agreement
3. Players are freely allowed to confer only at the table during the game – no secret or prior agreements are allowed

Winning the game:
1. The winner is the last surviving player (after the others have been defeated)
2. A player can win even if they hold no chips and all of their chips have been killed

So Long Sucker is a s a four-person bargaining/economic strategy game invented in 1950 by John Forbes Nash in collaboration with Mel Hausner, Lloyd S. Shapley and Martin Shubik

Tumbleweed catcher

“An unusual skyscraper”, “Tumbleweed catcher”, Gianni Pettena, Salt Lake City, 1971

Le Corbusier – and the Tragic View of Architecture

Unité d’Habitation, Marseille, Le Corbusier, 1947-52. All photos by Lucien Hervé, 1949 (part of a series of c. 650 photos taken by Hervé during one day in December and later sent to Le Corbusier as what was to become the starting point of a life long collaboration)

The Unité is in every way as keen, sharp and terrifying as the Parthenon. in fact the same effects are achieved by the same means. A straightforward functional simplicity exaggerated in its plastic effect and – what is not often seen in metaphorical terms – the power of proportion. The whole building is constructed from fifteen basic dimensions, ‘Modulor’ dimensions, which are related to each other in simple, harmonic proportions. These relationships give a semantic strength quite apart from their numerical ratios and it may well be that the Modulor (Le Corbusier’s system of proportion worked out at this time) will be valued for this rather thn its particular dimensions. For what it brings to the building is the fullness, even dignity, of each constructional element. They are all allowed a plenitude of space and gesture. None is cramped, or hesitant or truncated as in so much architecture where one part obscures or denies another. Rather, by giving each part its ratio to another, a relationship is set up between them which implies a humane, mature and dignified discourse among equals. Why is this dignity found in so much classical architecture and not in other kinds? Perhaps because the adoption of a proportional system itself leads to particular visual meanings: harmony, restraint, a set of dramatic relationships where no single part is allowed unduly to usurp the presence of the whole. One thinks of the pyramids of Egypt and the Pantheon in Rome or the villas of Palladio which achieve certain feelings of grandeur and on concludes that perhaps the semantic meanings of all proportional systems are the same regardless of their favoured ratios and dimensions. Yet while an overall harmony is common to these buildings, individual meanings vary greatly. (…)

All in all, the Unité is what it was intended to be – a radical alternative to suburban sprawl, where groups of 1,600 people form a manageably-sized association that gives the benefits of individual privacy and collective participation in one unity. If this unity lacks one element, it is in the public realm and political space that are implied in an autonomous unit of this nature and which can be found in its utopian predecessors of the nineteenth century.

“Le Corbusier – and the Tragic View of Architecture”, Charles Jencks, 1973

“Le Corbusier in His Cabin, Cap-Martin. Photo by Lucien Hervé, 1951

Plan C: The ride

Photo by Tod Seelie

The project is self-inculcated with mystery. Assumably Eva Mattes from 0100101110101101.ORG got loaded at a bar in Barcelona, only to be absorbed in a discussion with machine artist Ryan C. Doyle over a joint obsession with “Stalker”, decided to go “The Zone” (“..of alienation”, an area the size of Switzerland surrounding the former nuclear plant, uninhabitable for the coming 300 years, scavenged for profitable scrap metal, frequently visited by tourists of catastrophy) in Chernobyl together with Frank Mattes, filmmaker Todd Chandler, photographer Tod Seelie, Jeff Stark and fabricator Steve Valdez. Later, at the Abandon Normal Devices festival in Manchester (2010), “a rusty, soviet-style sculpture, created with contaminated materials scavenged from the site of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, appeared overnight in one of Manchester’s public parks”. Plan C, in their own words:

Clue 1: The Zone

The story is not clear at all, and it will probably never be. But in the Summer 2010 a group of six people, who barely knew each other, met in an anonymous apartment in the suburbs of Kyev, Ukraine. They came from different parts of Europe and the US, and they had an appointment. Nobody knew about their final destination, nobody knew about Plan C. They told friends vague stories about “entering The Zone” and “throwing metal nuts”. They had one thing in common: an obsession for Tarkovsky’s 1979 movie Stalker. On August 10th the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation Administration – responsible for the protection of the highly radioactive area – issued authorization to six US and European citizens to enter the Zone.

Video by Todd Chandler

Clue 2: The Park

Once in the Zone, they threw metal nuts. Maybe in search of an answer, they ventured into the abandoned amusement park of the ghost town of Pripyat. Finally the group located what they were hoping to find, the Red Ride. They picked through the irradiated remains. One of them got contaminated.

Photo by Tod Seelie

Clue 3: The Ride

Before they departed, a rural tractor left the Zone, leading west. A month later a load of scrap metal was sitting in an anonymous warehouse under the railroad in Manchester, UK. The group moved into the warehouse and started secretly working day and night on The Liquidator. After two weeks The Liquidator is ready. The strange interactive sculpture was installed overnight in Manchester’s Whitworth Park.

Photo by Tod Seelie

Till kunskapens lov

Kvällsljus över Nya Katarinahissen och Slussen. Foto av Gustaf Cronquist, 1937. Bild från Stockholmskällan

Slussen, Mark Isitt och en utspilld kopp te senare. Eller, en måndagkväll med gårdagens tidning och väderkvarnar.

Om du någonsin råkar snubbla in på en debatt om Slussens framtid – och de är många och förfärligt svåra att undvika – finns det risk att du vänder i dörren i tron att du hamnat mitt i en extatisk offerritual hos någon exotisk infödingsstam. En infödingsstam där den typiske shamanen har rufsigt grått hår och manchesterkostym. Det är Stockholms kulturelit som har samlats, högljudda och ilskna.

Hm. Som om inte debatten om Slussen och dess framtid redan var tillräckligt infekterad, infantiliserad och omöjliggjord så gräver Mark Isitt i gårdagens DN fram samma urinfyllda vattenballonger som han i sällskap av Henry Morton Stanley tidigare i år sågs kasta mot en slasklupen talldunge i Hammarkullen. Den här gången är det inte de påstått kriminaliserande stora modernistiska husen och de av arkitekuren degenererade förortsborna som skall travesteras av den sanningsskådande flanören med en av New Urbanism censurerad fulkopia av The Death and Life of Great American Cities indignerat uppryckt ur bröstfickan. Inte heller är det Sharon “Sulking” Zukin som utifrån en skyttegrav i Gamla Enskede skall trivialiseras och med en kopp hembryggt kokkaffe i handen dräneras på nyanser, omsorgsfull ambivalens (inte minst inför Isitts husgud Jane Jacobs), problematik och relevans. Nope, nu är det tydligen ett gäng imbecilla och sentimentaliserande infödingar med för stort kulturellt kapital som har förvanskat den av drottningen helgade Lordens verk.

Henry Morton Stanley and Kalulu. “In the dress he wore when he met Livingstone in Africa”. Bild från eee.uci.edu

I jakt på skenbart kultiverande argument viftar Isitt lite i förbifarten mot historien med sitt hemsnickrade cricketslagträ. Där det en gång har stått ett hus kan det stå ett hus igen verkar hans korta arkitekturhistorielektion antyda. Lordens arkitektoniska vision saknar däremot nästan helt historieskrivning, i Marks värld. Den är ren. Och av fulländad brittisk espri kommen. Inga exploateringskrav, ingen social komplexitet, inga medarbetare, inga finansieringsbehov, inga trafikplaner, inga politiska agendor, inga spegelbilder och inga manchesterkavajer har tillåtits att missfärga skapelsen. Bara Nyréns. Istället är det debatten, dialogen (i den mån det är ett rättvisande ord i Slussen-sammanhang) och de demokratiska processerna som har smutsat ned de båda staffagefigurerna Lordens och Den maktfullkomlige politikerns kommande imperium, Staden. I den rena visionen erbjöds infödingarna allt te(cappuccino)drickande, möjligt självförverkligande, utsiktslapande och all historiserande nostalgi de kunde tänkas drömma sig bort om. Så vad fan gnäller de om nu, tycks Isitt muttra högt för sig själv.

“För här pratar vi Norman Foster. Lord Foster. Baron Foster of Thames Bank som drottning Elizabeth lyckades döpa honom till när han adlades. Det är han som är ansvarig arkitekt för nya Slussen. I och för sig tillsammans med svenske Svante Berg, upphovsmannen till Globen, men det är lätt att glömma bort, intill Foster bleknar de flesta. Han är som sina byggnadsverk, denne engelsman: elegant som domen över riksdagshuset i Berlin, skarpskuren som skyskrapan The Gherkin i London, distinkt som bågen över Wembley.”

Turerna kring, om och runt Slussen har lämnat efter sig ett stort antal fettfläckiga lågvattenmärken – för demokratin, stadsbyggnadskonsten och dess institutioner, för marknaden, politiken, arkitekten, arkitekturen och, inte minst, för arkitekturkritiken. Det är allvarligt och förtjänar en lika allvarlig, kunnig och artikulerad diskussion, långt bortom ironiserande omkväden. En diskussion som skulle kunna ta spjärn i frågor gällande arkitektonisk kvalitet, språk, stadsbyggandets valörer, exploateringskompetens, historisk tillhörighet, historieskrivning, rumslig precision, tid, stadens som idé, selektering, professionell identitet, offentlighet, utanförskap, nostalgi, dynamik, politikens relation till ekonomiska intressen, förändring, framtid, privatisering och det allmänna. För att bara antyda några möjliga startpunkter. Och debatten om Fosters och Bergs förslags kvaliteter och hur de hanterats av Stockholm stad när de manglats genom demokratiska processer och politiska, kulturella och ekonomiska intressen förtjänar definitivt att både problematiseras och nyanseras, i det har Mark Isitts utspel en halvljummen poäng. På samma sätt finns det all anledning att diskutera hur demokratins ökade medialisering eventuellt ökar klyftorna mellan oss som politiska subjekt och gör vissa röster ännu mer värda än andra, den skillnad som Isitt raljerar över som kulturelitismens politiska inflytande. Men precis som i fallet med den sönderironiserade östermalmsekens öden och äventyr så är det inte anledning att förringa engagemanget i sig. Att någon bryr sig om de platser vi gemensamt förvaltar, befolkar och åkallar är, alltid, positivt. Oavsett vilka bakomliggande värderingar och åsikter det är ett uttryck för och oavsett hur problematiska dess konsekvenser är. Att vi i samma ögonblick riskerar underminera demokratin, det offentliga rummet och tilltron till det allmänna genom att tillåta vissas engagemang att väga tyngre än andras (därmed också de platser, träd, trädgårdsstäder och tidningssidor som dessa vissa befolkar) och samtidigt begränsar det demokratiska samtalet till att enbart inrymmas i den effekt- och konfliktsökande kolorit som den medialiserade logiken förmår frammana är åtminstone delvis andra frågor. Frågor och frågeställningar som Mark Isitt i sin jakt på doktor Livingstone helt sonika spankulerar förbi.

För det förslag som kommunstyrelsen ska ta ställning till redan i morgon måndag uppvisar mycket lite av ursprungsritningarnas brittiska enkelhet och esprit. De dansande gångbroarna är borta, det mesta av bebyggelsen likaså. Och vore det inte för någon park här och något glashus där skulle ritningen kunna misstas för det förslag som gav Nyréns segern i tävlingen 2004. Trots att Nyréns förslag var just det som Foster och de övriga stjärnarkitekterna ombads förädla, smycka och förvandla från ren trafiklösning till attraktiv arkitektur.

Flygbild över Slussen. Foto av Gustaf Cronquist, 1936. Bild från Stockholmskällan

Nedskärning av gamla Katarinahissen juli 1933 och invigning av den nya i november 1935. Foto av Gustaf Cronquist, 1933 resp. 1935. Bild från Stockholmskällan

Mark Isitts inlägg är naturligtivs bara ett i raden av kommentarer om Slussen. Sedan Alexis Pontvik vann den första tävlingen om ny gestaltning 1991. Sedan 1634 då Lilleström började byggas om till slussanordning enligt holländsk förebild. I en annan del av DN och i Arkitekten pågår just nu ytterligare ett meningsutbyte där bland andra T Lewan och Space scapes Alexander Ståhle (i en artikel som på många sätt är långt mer innehållsmässigt bekymrande och argumentatoriskt paradoxal än Isitts) yttrar sig om stadsbyggande i allmänhet och Stockholm i synnerhet. Alla, förutom möjligtvis Isitt som verkar famla i stjärnarkitekturens vilsenhet, debattens röster vill på ett eller annat sätt nå fram till en stadsplanering som handlar om nyanser, kvalitet, “rumsliga valörer“, ansvarstagande och kvalificerad validering baserad på teoretisk, analytisk, evidensbaserad, erfarenhetsmässig, demokratisk eller poetiskt gestaltande kompetens. Alla tvingas slutligen in i ett instämmande ja eller nej till att bygga eller inte bygga tät kvartersstad i “världsklass”. Hur fan blev vi och våra idéer om staden och arkitekturen så ödsligt innehållslösa?

Under det senaste halvåret har två av Sveriges största dagstidningar publicerat artiklar som med kladdiga, okunniga och spekulativa resonemang försöker framkalla en fyrkantig idé om absolut god och ond arkitektur/stad (ofta utifrån negativa referenser till vad som beskrivs som modernimsens “historielösa” vilja att göra just det). I GP möttes Isitts förortsgrubblerier av både redaktionellt stöd och nödvändigt motstånd, i sak och i affekt. I DN övergick debatten snart till att handla om någonting annat och om någon annans tyckande om ett absolut rätt Slussen. Förmodligen borde man (jag) lämnat det där, i skamsen tystnad, och likt Per Wirtén avfärdad Isitt som en man med “no skills”, eller som Catharina Dyrssen be GP:s och DN:s kulturredaktioner att skämmas över att de “anlitar en så fördomsfull stadsbyggnadsamatör” för en arkitekturbevakning som kräver både ämneskunskap och självreflekterande insikt i och om sin egen okunskap. Men jag blev förbannad, och på samma gång uppgiven, och har precis svalt hela betet och alldeles uppenbart skrivit något jag inte borde. Något som i fullkomligt onödig sarkasm på inget sätt försöker lyssna på och förstå de delar av Mark Isitts resonemang, ironi och stadsideal som skulle kunna vara intressanta, begripliga och utvecklingsbara. Något som stöper in hans språkkropp i en stereotypt kolonialiserande form som jag på inget sätt tror att han som person fyller ut. Något som lyfter ut honom som ett orättvist tecken på det arkitekturklimat i vars förvrängda spegelbild den nya Slussen ständigt reflekteras. För vilket jag ber om ursäkt för. Senast jag såg Mark Isitt var han för övrigt klädd i manchesterblazer. Khakifärgad tweed hade varit mer passande. Förlåt.

Parc dels Colors

Plan- och sambandsskiss, park och kommunhus (Civic Center), Mollet del Valles, Barcelona, Spanien, oljekrita på papper, Enric Miralles, 1992–1995

Hösten 2008 var jag involverad i en mindre utställning där fotografen David Bestué presenterade en subjektiv tolkning av några av Enric Miralles och EMBTs byggnader och parker. En bildvärld som tog avstamp i en berättelse parallell med de medialiserade och anpassade bilder som i massor publicerades under 80- och 90-talets EMBT-vurm. I en av få reaktioner på utställningen beskrev en äldre man, fd funktionalistisk stadsplanerare, ofta iklädd mörka plastglasögon och sportjacka, i ett brev (epost var inte hans medium) hur han först nu och i samband med utställningen började förstå sig på och uppskatta postmodernismens formspråk och rumsuppfattningar. Även om Miralles position som just postmodern förtjänar precisering och differentiering (inte minst förhållandet till dekonstruktion och semantisk struktur) och influenserna från moderna och modernistiska arkitekter som Coderch, Jujol, Le Corbusier och Kahn att vidare belysas så delar jag i mycket den insikten. Även om den inte är utan komplikationer och visst motstånd som jag betraktar och befinner mig i Enric Miralles arkitektur.

But here the parallel between these two Europeans [Le Corbusier and Miralles] comes to an end. For while they share a commitment to nature symbolism, they divide over the issue of complexity. Miralles, like many other postmodern architects, has a preference for piling on the motifs and ideas: upturned boats, keel shapes, deep window reveals like a castle, crow-steps, prow shapes, diagonal gutters, ‘bamboo bundles’ and above all the dark granite gun-shape that repeats as an ornamental motif at a huge scale. Everywhere broken silhouettes compete for attention, just like the alleyways next door. That’s fine, and contextual, but it’s quite a meal. As a result of the complexity, the parliament is really a kind of small city, with much too much to digest in one short three-hour sitting. The Scottish parliament will take time to judge: maybe not 50 years but three or four visits, long enough to absorb all the richness and get used to those jumpy black granite guns, the most arbitrary of several questionable ornaments. (…)

Instead of being a monumental building, as is the usual capital landmark, it nestles its way into the environment, an icon of organic resolution, of knitting together nature and culture into a complex union. Perhaps the overall image, the jagged stainless steel and masonry, can be seen as a rocky outcrop. This furthers the idea that Scottish identity is closely associated with the rugged landscape and with the urban experience in which it has grown.

Charles Jencks i Architecture Today (AT nr. 154 (2005), p 32) om arkitekturens territorium och Miralles byggnad för Skottlands parlament

I en analys av ritningen till Calle Mercaders Apartment (1995) gör Carl Douglas ett försök att komplettera den symbol-, referens- och motivladdade postmodernism som Jencks tillskriver Miralles och EMBTs skotska parlamentetsbyggnadskomplex genom att beskriva Miralles ritningsteknik som operativ snarare än strikt representativ. Han spaltar upp sin analys kring fem huvuddrag:

– Ritningen saknar traditionell hierarki, vad gäller exempelvis linjetjockhet.
– Lägenhetsritningen är en beskrivning av historiska och materiella lager, som en “heterogen samling av element/beståndsdelar som interagerar med varandra”, och är inte färdig utan beskriver ett ögonblick i en successiv och oföutsägbar förändringsprocess. Han hänvisar till ett spel där alla drag är bundna till regler och förutsättningar men där utgången ändå är oviss – en mycket vanlig liknelse i diskussioner om och med olika sorters arkitektoniska frihetsgrader.
– Som ett betydelsefält vars särart skiljer sig från postmoderna referenssystem och dekonstruktionens fragmentalisering
– Och opererar på ett icke-representativt plan.
– Där ritningen är en typ av animeringsprocess i vilken de arkitektoniska elementens egenskaper inverkar på och påverkar varandra

Den operativa viljan i Miralles arkitektur är antagligen mer uppenbar och avläsbar på pappret än i byggd form. Vilket delvis också är fallet med Parc dels Colores som i form av en relationskiss (där färg och textur står för regler och egenskaper) och en planritning (icke hierarkisk) omger det här korta och ofullständiga inlägget. EMBT om parken, i vad de kallar konceptuellt minne:

Graffiti invade the walls. / The suspended walls of the Park become graffitis themselves. / They repeat the name of the place, they repeat letters, and the letters get all mixed up, one on top of the other and at the end, they serve just to cast shadows on the ground. / The changing shadows of the building create the place on the ground and small changes on the surface establish playgrounds, paths, benches, a skating rink, games areas, etc… / The main interest of this project is maybe, not directly the project itself, but in the “themes” therein. / (such as the suspension of the building,graffiti becoming architecture, the colours of a painting becoming places, the suspended spirit of the users, unexpected connections …). / That’s why we like to think that this project could be a project for the “near future”, being a more subtle conception of architecture. / Architecture in the future will be lighter, especially in it’s conception.

Planritning, park och kommunhus (Civic Center), Mollet del Valles, Barcelona, Spanien, Enric Miralles och Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT), 1992–2002

Occupy London – David Harvey

Transcript of David Harvey speaking at Occupy London’s International Day of Solidarity, 12 November 2011.

Bostad och politik

Under arkitekturdagen (11 november) presenterade Sveriges Arkitekter “Bostad och politik” (pdf), en i högsta grad nödvändig bostadspolitisk fördjupning med utgångspunkt i debattinlägget “Arkitektur och politik” (2010).

One Place After Another

Thus, it is not a matter of choosing sides—between models of nomadism and sedentariness, between space and place, between digital interfaces and the handshake. Rather, we need to be able to think the range of the seeming contradictions and our contradictory desires for them together; to understand, in other words, seeming oppositions as sustaining relations. How do we account, for instance, for the sense of soaring exhilaration and the anxious dread engendered by the new fluidities and continuities of space and time, on the one hand, and their ruptures and disconnections on the other? And what could this doubleness of experience mean in our lives? in our work? Today’s site-oriented practices inherit the task of demarcating the relational specificity that can hold in dialectical tension the distant poles of spatial experience described by Bhabha. This means addressing the uneven conditions of adjacencies and distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one fragment next to another, rather than invoking equivalences via one thing after another. Only those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social marks—so that the sequence of sites that we inhabit in our life’s traversal does not become genericized into an undifferentiated serialization, one place after another.

“One Place After Another; Site-specific Art and Locational Identity, Miwon Kwon, 2002

Fun palace

Helicopter view, c. 1964. Image from the Cedric Price Archive at the CCA (The Canadian Centre for Architecture)

Image from the Cedric Price Archive at the CCA (The Canadian Centre for Architecture)

“Choose what you want to do – or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune in to what’s happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky.”

Fun Palace: Promotional brochure, Joan Littlewood, 1964

There is very little to be said about the Fun Palace, the cybernetic and unrealised gesamtkunstwerk planned between 1961 and 1965 by theatre impresario Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price, that has not already been said or suggested elsewhere. As an avant-garde architectural mongrel, crossing divisions between theatre and structure, static and dynamic, breaking with the temporal logics of the classical architectural object, weaving the social sphere together with cultural production, aesthetics and functionality in an ever-changing system of constant creativity, bridging labour and leisure in a unit of pleasurable productivity, the project has become the standard reference for any architect and architecture in search for a new avant-garde, struggling for an oppositional position, for degrees of freedom and attempting to formulate architectural alternatives.

The division between work and leisure has never been more than a convenient generalisation used in summarising conscious human activity – voluntary and imposed. Both the nature and the scale of conditions causing or requiring imposed activity have changed to such a great extent over the past 25 years that even the convenience of such a division is no longer acceptable

The present socio/political talk of increased leisure makes both a slovenly and dangerous assumption that people on the one hand are still sufficiently numb or servile to accept that the period during which they earn money can be little more than made mentally hygienically bearable and that a new mentality is awakened during periods of self-willed activity. Increase in wealth, increasing personal mobility, flexibility of labour and decreasing essential social interdependence are some of the constituents of the change rather than the cause.

Argument for Fun Palace by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price. Presented in TDR (The drama review), vol 12, number 3, spring 1968. pp. 128

Cedric Price’s oeuvre is one of a multitude of dimensions, layers and implications, but could maybe be (over)simplified – in parallel to several of his contemporaries – as a critical inquiry into the temporal finality of the building and the architectural system (as and in its various institutions) as a Foucauldian mechanism for the consolidation of power and authority. Presented as a counterproposal, promoting freedom and emancipation as an architectural priority, Price, often in cross-disciplinary collaborations, developed and introduced concepts such as non-plan, plug-in, self-organisation, cybernetics, system, open-endedness, adaptability and indeterminacy as architectural principles and in the professional discourse. At the Fun Palace those ideas manifested themselves in a large membrane roof, suspended over an interlocking service grid in which rows of functional (stairs, elevators etc) towers divided the space into smaller environments. To make able the plug-in and plug-out of flexible components, a system of gantries where suggested to hover above the free space, leaving no possible configuration of the “laboratory of pleasure” unturned. In historical reference with, for example, J.N.L Durand, Peter Behrens (AEG), Le Corbusier (Maison Dom-ino), and Mies van der Rohe (Universal space) the exterior and outside of the Fun Palace attached to its surroundings as a generic, anonymous and systemic structure. Even though a couple of London sites where considered as potential locations, the Palace rejected a traditional sense of place and expressive material belonging, instead its connections to the surrounding city, its inhabitants and urban fabric took place at a level of internal performativity, activity and mental situé. Or, in the more precise words of Stanley Mathews, as an attempt to generate a ‘matrix that enclosed an interactive machine… a vast social experiment in new ways of building, thinking and being’ (Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price, 2007).

The increasingly obvious reduction of the permanence of many institutions – obvious within a decade rather than, as previously, from generation to generation – allied with the mass availability of all means of communication, have demanded an almost subconscious awareness of the vast range of influences and experiences open to all at all times.

This dimension of awareness enables a questioning by all of existing facilities available in, say, a metropolis – not merely in an assessment of physical or measurable limitations. The city today works in a constipated way, in spite of its physical and architectural limitations. The legacy of redundant buildings and the resultant use patterns acts as straitjacket to total use and enjoyment. A problem of re-planning the city is one of scrapping and adapting the existing forms to enable this fuller, more random and sophisticated use of urban facilities, while ensuring that any new work will not in its turn create an inappropriate physical discipline in the future.

Not all buildings or roadways can be built to collapse or disintegrate by the end of the period for which a reasonable assessment of needs an appetites can be made, and therefore it is essential that beyond the period of social predictability the existing buildings only suggests order and not direction. (Flexibility and adaptability are only two of the required constituents.) A short-life toy of dimensions and organisations not limited by or to particular site is one good way of trying, in physical terms, to catch up with the mental dexterity and mobility exercised by all today. Its stated and designed limited life will in itself enable the palace to be used in the particular mental behaviour pitch reserved for immensely important impermanent objects of cherished social immediacy.

Argument for Fun Palace by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price. Presented in TDR (The drama review), vol 12, number 3, spring 1968. pp. 128

In what, from todays perspective, appears as a highly contradictious manoeuvre this system of spatial and individual freedom were to be supervised, controlled and monitored by technological programs. With the assistance of Gordon Pask the building was set up as an manipulable cybernetic field in which patterns of behaviour and usage could be experimented with, collected, processed and modelled (using game theoretical and organisational modelling syntax), as to later be fed back to the environment in what was intended to be a self-regulating and self-adjusting process. For Price the cybernetic syntax and feed-back processes were imagined to be an autonomous, unbiased and neutral system located outside of any ideological realm and providing information and adaptability as a democratised architecture in service of the individual subject and common good as such. Fifty years later the shadows of those distinctions and aspirations take on a different set of problematic colours.

(1) Large controlled volumes for assembly, exhibitions, etc. Inflatable structure totally or partially enclosed, opaque or translucent. Free-area or containing sub-enclosuress (2) External screens providing adjustable lighting, acoustic and partial temperature control. Triodetic space frame (al.) self-supproting, capable of adjustment and re-assembly and containing heat, light and sound reflectors and baffles (3) Varied enclosures forming rooms, galleries, shelters, walkways, balconies etc. Box units with wall, floor, stair, screen, etc. Infill panels arranged as required (4) Tent roofs and awnings. Plasticized nylon tensioned sheets (5) Flooring for particular use e.g. dancing. Flooring panels direct on site surface – internal and external (6) External flood and spot lighting. Fittings capable of manual and remote control (7) External screens for film and other projections. Weather resistant braced and tensioned screen – direct and back projection (8) Mobile kitchen or other highly equipped contained services. Vans and trucks with levelling jacks (9) Horizontal or inclined barriers as 2. Capable of control by pneumatic jacks. Image/functional scheme from TDR (The drama review), vol 12, number 3, spring 1968

Unknown image source

In the latest number of Log (vol. 23 – read the article here below) Pier Vittorio Aureli reflects on how free space has become one of the more radical manifestations of how (adaptable) labour power – “as the invisible dynamis of life” – has been exploited by capitalism; “The history of capitalist spatial governance can be understood as the possibility of accommodating the unpredictability and instability inherent to human nature.” Through the shift to a post-fordist understanding of production, space and labour, where pleasure and productivity coincides and mental and physical faculties are tangled together in an endless creation of capitalisable new and creative, the socialist ideas behind projects like the Fun Palace has been appropriated by another and radically different concept of liberating (market) freedom. And in that way an amputated legacy of the Fun Palace could be seen in the reflections of any generic shopping centre, any new university forwarding innovation, entrepreneurship and creative economy (even more true for the Potteries Thinkbelt), in the user profiling of Facebook or Google, and in the language of any contemporary art and cultural spectacle.

Hopefully our capability to apprehend, and be inspired by, the Fun Palace can transgress and address that strange development. But, to reach that level of understanding requires, as Aureli concludes, that we understand the project far better than what Price did in his own time. In all its contradictions of intent and dangerous ideological fallacies it still is a Palace of exceptionally fascinating architecture, with a potential to be reinvented as an alternative direction and a reminder of the need to liberate ourselves from our “economic function”. At the same time as Price and Littlewood made their plans for the Fun Palace, Price collaborated with Frank Newby and Lord Snowdon on the design for an aviary at the London Zoo in Regents Park (1960-63). As one of my favourite buildings, and one of only a few realised by Price, it is rather symptomatic that the passionate desire for freedom, permeability and community at the end could be described as nothing but another cage.

The London Zoo aviary, 1965. Image from the Cedric Price trust

Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt, Pier Vittorio Aureli in Log 23, 2011