Anti-University catalogue of courses. 1968. Reprographic copies, staple bound, 16.3 x 20.4 cm. CCA Collection, Cedric Price fonds. DR1995:0320:001

24 July 2014, @6:00 pm

From 1966 to 1968, Shadrach Woods and Cedric Price, two architects and educators in Paris and London, found themselves caught up in a vortex of change in education. Like architecture, the field was searching for new models; thinkers sought to reformulate the basic problems of education, rather than simply seeking new solutions to old questions.

In the last years of his life, from 1962 to 1973, Woods was preoccupied with what he called “The Architecture of Education,” through which he sought to reformulate ideas of how universities should function and how they should be designed. His unpublished case of the Non-École de Villefranche was a radical experiment conceived in 1966 by Woods and Robert Filliou, a French-American Fluxus artist. It situated the Berlin Free University, Woods’ best-known work, in the discourse of the Non-School and the broader cultural and intellectual projects associated with Fluxus and Team X.

Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt project, conceived from 1963 to 1966, represents another significant challenge to traditional educational practice. In 1968 Price was among the guest faculty of the Anti-University, based in 49 Rivington street, London. In this seminar 2014 Visiting Scholar Federica Doglio and visiting lecturer at the school of architecture of the Politecnico di Torino, seeks to critically compare these two authors’ radical visions with the aim of enriching the discourse on contemporary education theory and offering starting points for further discussion and study.

Presented in English. The Visiting Scholars Program invites scholars at the post-doctoral level to undertake innovative research in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture during residencies of one to eight months at the Study Centre. Study Centre presentations are free and open to the public.

> via The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)