Cedric Price tapes on "Communications in the Future" on Italian radio, side A. 27 August 1971. Cedric Price fonds, CCA Collection. DR2003:0008:002

Tim Abrahams is a 2011 Visiting Scholar and writes as part of the To CCA, From… series. Browse all of Tim’s posts.

An archive is not just a collection of ideas; it is an expressive physical entity. Delving into the body of Cedric Price’s archiveone realises that his role as a thinker was more complex than it first appeared. Price famously fought to ensure that his Inter-Action Trust Community Arts Centre in Camden was not listed, believing steadfastly that the building had a purpose and once its purpose had been fulfilled it should no longer exist. Price was for pragmatism and against an architecture that crystalised dominant political or social modes and determined the habits of future generations. Yet his remarkable lack of sentimentality towards buildings as physical objects didn’t necessarily extend to books.

Price’s architectural practice produced a minimal amount of built work but it did produce a prodigious amount of intelligent thought. And this seems to have found its home in the practice’s library. Everything was kept, even large numbers of the same report at different stages. Yet his former assistant Stephen Mullen once explained to me how meticulous Price was in keeping an ongoing archive and library at his practice. One could see this as a quaint anomaly, an eccentricity, or even a proof perhaps that Price’s standpoint was contradictory.

None of these are in fact the case, I believe. Whilst one can wonder why there was an encyclopedic retention of printed matter at the office, one can clearly see that the manner in which Price and his practice engaged with the minutiae of architectural production was exceptional. His research for the British construction company MacAlpine – that I want to discuss later is – a case in point. Price was concerned very much with the mundane aspects of architectural production. He saw there an area where he could have most influence. It is pleasant too to see the name of Will Alsop at the bottom of endless requests for catalogues on safety equipment and cookers.

I wanted to post this amazing document from his audio files: a cassette marked “Answers to Luciana Brevigliera’s questions 8.5.78 © Cedric Price” contains Price’s responses to a series of questions which appear to have been provided in written form by an Italian journalist. I have not been able to find the original questions. However, this adds something to the listening experience: one wonders what great question in architectural theory he is going to turn his mind to next. What is most salient about this recording to me is the manner in which he begins by outlining his radical vision and then steadily shows how this is linked to mundane problems.

To question 12 he answers, “I think from a very partial position one of the great contributions to architecture in Britain since the Second World War is the fact that it has been concerned with the ordinary or the common-place. And it has had to be.” Unfortunately, Price’s hope, which he expresses in the early part of the recording, that architecture would retain some of the anger expressed in the social movement experienced in the UK in the late 50s and early 60s, has not materialised. This recording gives some insight into why Price was such a great thinker, and I think his honest assessment of the heritage of these social changes is brilliant.

Sitting on a panel with Richard Seiffert and Norman Foster in 1974 for a BBC radio programme, Price cut through the tiresome high-rise versus low-rise, traditional versus modern divide that still dogs British architectural debate, with a criticism of architecture that still applies today. Architects, he said, are “less prepared than a whole load of designers in other industries to actually call the tune as to components, as to financing, as to the costing of land, and repayable loans, and yet they are in control of an enormous industry.”

One wonders if architects had heeded Price’s advice, would they still be in that privileged position, rather than the position they seem to crave today, self-proclaimed style pilots, arbiters of fashion and taste in the built environment?

Cedric Price died in 2003, but it feels like a long time ago, as British architecture criticism continually champions the architect’s status as a stylist. With his memory so fresh, I just don’t see how we can reconcile ourselves to the idea that because architects have had limitations placed on their professional sphere by government tick-boxing on one hand and new contractual arrangements on the other, they should make a virtue of it. Price shows what a massive cop-out that position is.

download the mp3 from here

> via The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA)