The man who changed England - Obituary - Biography

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 2003 by Peter Cook

Cedric Price will surely be recognized as the most significant thinker in British architecture of the second half of the twentieth century. The critics Reyner Banham (who was a close friend of Cedric) and Colin Rowe have affected the thinking of many architects, but it was Cedric, operating from within, who combined a unique set of values, means and responses. Both Liberal and moral, both objective and specific, both systematic and particular, both witty and serious--it was Cedric who could simultaneously have you guffawing and pondering deeply. It was Cedric who was for so many of us the ultimate conscience.

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He developed a brilliant creativity from lateral thinking that expressed itself through ideas; sometimes simple and pictorial, sometimes tactical and political, sometimes anecdotal, but all rich in quizzical observations and often hilariously funny.

His personal style and habits lent much to the total power of his observations: the fact that he opened his office at something like six in the morning and shut it from midday. That his top floor white room was called 'East Grinstead' so that he could legitimately escape. Generous and lovable to those he respected ... a list that included the meek and the unknown as well as his extraordinary bevy of cronies in the political (both sides), theatrical, literary as well as architectural worlds.

I only once saw him without his stiff white detachable collar: at once a symbol of perpetual elegance and expendability. Such combinations were powerful: he would lovingly support a young architect or student who he would feel to be sincere and engaged, but he could waspishly send a bon mot out to a member of the audience who was leaving early.

His comments on a jury would tend to be supportive--and more and more creative as the liquor flowed. They would tend to send out to the recipient any number of curious leads that revealed that (as I know for a fact) Cedric would have read four or five newspapers before 8am and lubricated the input with the odd brandy or so.

It was his central thesis that architecture should look at circumstance and suggest an economical and immediate response. If this didn't suggest any building work, that was OK. If the devices suggested were off the peg that was OK too. If they needed to be designed, his proposals were always guileless and almost styleless. The London Zoo aviary, designed together with Lord Snowdon and Frank Newby, is his best known public monument: it (along with the now-removed Inter-Action Centre in Kentish Town) was intended as a temporary building. The restaurant for Blackpool Zoo and perhaps one or two tiny bits and pieces are his built work, but his concepts and drawings have become essential points of departure for any architect who values time, effort, resource, strategy or effectiveness.

The drawings themselves are intriguing: spare and diagrammatic. With their very telling accompaniment of captions they became, as a result, classics as diagrams. Recent architectural discussion in many parts of the world has resurrected the idea of the primacy of the diagram as a counteraction to the even greater surface complexity of architectural drawings--a position that one often felt that Cedric supported, though he had more than a grudging admiration for the ebullient--simply because he admired in all things a sense of style. His own drawings have not a little of Osbert Lancaster on the one hand and John Piper on the other: both with that English combination of deftness, humour and (again) quizzicality.

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In all his projects there were endless inventions, tricks, ideas about temporary shelter, recycling, cute tactics of insertion and plot-use, gadgets, devices, screens, banks of trees, planks of wood--whatever. The two heroic projects of the 1960s and 1970s: the Fun Palace and the Potteries Thinkbelt gave us all a ground base upon which to travel out into an alternative world to that of the fixed and institutionalized. Cedric hated institutions; he tried (even when broke) not to be pinned-down to a professorship, lectureship or stewardship of anything. The ideal was the location of his Alfred Place office and its windows onto Store Street; the Bloomsbury of the AA, Bartlett and Charlotte Street which, for most of the last 30 years of the twentieth century, was the epicentre of the architectural world.

The Fun Palace was designed together with two other legendary figures: the cybernetician Gordon Pask and the theatrical impresario Joan Littlewood, together they evolved an all-purpose activity space with infinitely movable, removable and interchangeable elements: turntable escalators, foldaway roofs and the like. The thinkbelt was conceived together with Peter Hall--another seer, and returned to an area near Cedric's birthplace in Staffordshire: the edges and rail yards of the 'Potteries' towns. Proposing a radical alternative to the conventional campus with a series of university activities on railway wagons and short life-span towers and the incorporation of mobility across a territory: hence the term 'think-belt'. Subsequent work could propose such things as a simple series of activity-boxes.