Cedric Price

Cedric Price (11 September 1934 – 10 August 2003) was an English architect and influential teacher and writer on architecture.

The son of an architect, Price was born in Stone, Staffordshire and studied architecture at Cambridge University (graduating in 1955) and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.

From 1958 to 1964 he taught part-time at the AA and at the Council of Industrial Design. He later founded 'Polyark', an architectural schools network.

As a working architect, he was associated with Maxwell Fry and Denys Lasdun before he started his own practice in 1960, working with Lord Snowdon and Frank Newby on the design of the Aviary at London Zoo (1961). He later also worked with Buckminster Fuller on the Claverton dome.

One of his more famous projects was the Fun Palace (1961), developed in association with theatrical director Joan Littlewood. Although it was never built, its flexible space influenced other architects, notably Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano whose Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris extended many of Price's ideas - some of which Price used on a more modest scale in the Inter-Action Centre in north London's Kentish Town (1971).

Having conceived the idea of using architecture and education as a way to drive economic redevelopment - notably in the north Staffordshire Potteries area (the 'Thinkbelt' project) - he continued to contribute to planning debates. In 1969, with planner Sir Peter Hall and the editor of "New Society" magazine Paul Barker, he published "Non-plan", a work challenging planning orthodoxy.

In 1984 Price proposed the redevelopment of London's South Bank, and anticipated the London Eye by suggesting that a giant ferris wheel should be constructed by the River Thames.

Married to actress Eleanor Bron, he died in London aged 68 in 2003.

References

* [http://www.designmuseum.org/design/index.php?id=92 Design Museum on Cedric Price]
* Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler, eds., "Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism", Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000 [http://books.elsevier.com/us/architecturalpress/us/subindex.asp?isbn=9780750640831&country=United+States&community=architecturalpress&ref=&mscssid=CB3HCMKLQC4A9LV0FT9QUHA1C1WS3RL1]
* Stanley Mathews, "The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture: Cedric Price and the Practices of Indeterminacy", Journal of Architectural Education, 2006 [http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1531-314X.2006.00032.x]