Fun Palace – Cedric Price
October 19th, 2005
CEDRIC PRICE (1934-2003) was one of the most visionary architects of the late 20th century. Although he built very little, his lateral approach to architecture and to time-based urban interventions, has ensured that his work has an enduring influence on contemporary architects and artists, from Richard Rogers and Rem Koolhaas, to Rachel Whiteread.
The Fun Palace was one of his most influential projects and inspired Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s early 1970s project, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Centre Georges Pompidou
Initiated with Joan Littlewood, the theatre director and founder of the innovative Theatre Workshop in east London, the idea was to build a ‘laboratory of fun’ with facilities for dancing, music, drama and fireworks. Central to Price’s practice was the belief that through the correct use of new technology the public could have unprecedented control over their environment, resulting in a building which could be responsive to visitors’ needs and the many activities intended to take place there.
As the marketing material suggested, there was a wide choice of activities: “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.”
Using an unenclosed steel structure, fully serviced by travelling gantry cranes the building comprised a ‘kit of parts’: pre-fabricated walls, platforms, floors, stairs, and ceiling modules that could be moved and assembled by the cranes. Virtually every part of the structure was variable. “Its form and structure, resembling a large shipyard in which enclosures such as theatres, cinemas, restaurants, workshops, rally areas, can be assembled, moved, re-arranged and scrapped continuously,” promised Price.
he died in London aged 68 in 2003.
Entry Filed under: Interactive, Kinetic
10 Comments Add your own
1. juliette | October 19th, 2006 at 9:46 am
hello
i’m a french student , with very bad english , but i’m working about this project: fun palace , i would like to know where i can find more information , archivs , plans…
THANKS for your websides
2. Ruairi | October 19th, 2006 at 10:37 am
There isnt a huge amount of info although it is referenced a lot by many artists. You could start by looking at his ’square book’
3. Serge | November 21st, 2006 at 5:01 am
RE : Fun Palace
Actually, check at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, in Montreal. Where the Cedric Price ’s archives (including the Fun Palace) are located.
For more info: http://www.cca.qc.ca, 514-939-7026
4. i-eclectica.org » B&hellip | April 7th, 2007 at 11:48 am
[...] A seemingly a not acknowledged enough forerunner of interactive architecture is the well-known British architect Cedric Price, who was the first person to see the potential in interactivity combining with reconfigurable architecture. His 1960s ‘Fun Palace’ was an enormous flexible environment for infinite possible events to occur in. Fun Palace was based on a constantly varying design for a new form of leisure center. Aesthetically it looks like a factory but was designed for the public to play around and engage with the architecture. It was an improvisational architecture in which common citizens could entertain and educate themselves by assembling their own environments using cranes and prefabricated modules. “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” (Cedric Price on Fun Palace) – how inspiring. [...]
5. negin | December 17th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
hey ruairi!
my dissertation this year is about the fun palace, and in one of the paragraphs above it says “the idea was to build a ‘laboratory of fun’ with facilities for dancing, music, drama and fireworks.” I was just wondering where you got that information/quote from – particularly the part about fireworks, as I haven’t been able to find it written anywhere else yet.
thanks!
negin
6. amy | January 28th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
“from Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price” by Stanley Mathews is a book I used to look at Cedric Price, as well as his Square book. The latter is more expensive and may be found in a University library.
7. Velvetpark - Dyke Culture&hellip | May 13th, 2008 at 3:53 pm
[...] Cedric Price’s “Fun Palace“? [...]
8. rosalie | April 7th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
juliette, je fais egalement une recherche sur le fun palace de Price, ca m’interesse de savoir si t’as reussi à trouver des info et si oui, où?
9. Room With A Grue | Tap-Re&hellip | June 3rd, 2009 at 12:10 am
[...] want to mention one of the coolest architectural projects that never got built. It’s call the Fun Palace and it was dreamed up by the visionary architect Cedric Price. Price had one of the worst [...]
10. Desert(ed) hotel | Studen&hellip | March 18th, 2010 at 6:36 pm
[...] “War is replaced by play, but not forgotten.” Hasan makes a kind of Cedric Pice’s Fun Palace reinterpretation of an hotel in the Nazi times. The task was to design a hotel on the site of a [...]
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