DELIGHTFUL FUN – A Cedric Price Thinkbelt for Our Times reviewed by Bruce Peter

Conceptual and provocative, but always with social conscience, the massive influence of Cedric Price as an architect and visionary of the new from his heydey in the 60s and 70s is seen not only in the host of unfinished and unbuilt ideas he left behind, but also in the massive pieces of fun civic kit others built under that influence, including the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the London Eye. Bruce Peter reviews an exhibition where you can catch up with the ideas and personality of the great maverick Price, and declares it ‘…elegantly curated by Ana Bonet Miro, Martin Brown and Maria Martinez Sanchez with design by Luca Brunelli.’

Delightful Fun – A Cedric Price Thinkbelt for Our Times

Grace Fyfe Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art

The Cedric Price I encountered as a student at the RCA in the mid-1990s was an affable cove with the ruddy, shiny, slightly pitted facial complexion of a long-term heavy smoker and drinker. Nigel Coates invited him over from the Architectural Association as a guest critic and he evidently took a shine to me because, being particularly interested in inter-war architecture and design, I asked him about his father, Arthur J Price (apparently, I was the first student in his thirty-plus years of teaching ever to do so). The latter had worked in the 1930s for the firm of Harry Weedon, a large commercial practice in Birmingham which churned out boldly moderne designs for Odeon super cinemas. Cedric Price knew a lot about these and, in between puffs on his cigar, told me in detail about the production-line organisation of the Weedon office, his father’s inputs into the design of the flagship Odeon in London’s Leicester Square and also the details of the cinemas’ interiors. For example, the specification of peach-glass to line the walls of foyers and stairways was a frequently-used trick to increase the impression of space while making audience members think they looked rosier than was the case, having spent many hours in a darkened auditorium. Cedric Price was clear to me that discoveries made through his father had informed some of his own unorthodox approaches as an architect and theorist. No doubt money earned through the Odeon work also would have helped fund his educational journey from Staffordshire to Cambridge and thence to the Architectural Association.

Having worked briefly with leading modernists Goldfinger, Lasdun, Fry and Drew, the socially-committed Price tried and failed to find employment with the London County Council. Instead, in 1960 he set up alone, an early notable project being a new aviary for London Zoo, built using steel rods between which wire mesh was stretched to define an abstract, diffuse volume within which birds could fly and perch. Subsequently, he became better known within the architectural profession as an educator at the AA and as a ‘paper architect’, producing provocative and consequential concept schemes which attracted the attention of architectural journalists, fellow academics and students. It is two of these projects that form the centrepiece of the exhibition ‘Delightful Fun – A Cedric Price Thinkbelt for Our Times’ in the Glasgow School of Art’s Grace Fyfe Clark Gallery.

Price’s original ‘Thinkbelt’ concept arose from the Beeching closures of railways through his family’s native Potteries in Staffordshire, the proposal being to re-purpose one of these lines as a roving educational institution. But as events would unfold, the launch of BBC 2 enabled the Open University, founded in 1969, to provide distributed learning by means of late-night televisual lectures, thereby avoiding any need for costly fixed infrastructure, or even any architectural involvement whatsoever. Nonetheless, the idea of a ‘Thinkbelt’ thereafter lodged in the imaginations of would-be architectural progressives who interpreted the concept as a welcome antidote to the predictable banalities of commercial modernism. 

Cedric Price had an affinity with the stage; as a public speaker, he was droll and had a clipped but rich and brandy-soaked voice. He married the actor Eleanor Bron and befriended the innovative and high-profile theatre director Joan Littlewood. It was in collaboration with the latter that he devised a scheme for a ‘Fun Palace’ – a vast, multi-functional municipal entertainment and social centre to be built on a derelict Thames-side site in East London. Concept sketches echoed concurrent ideas for flexible, mobile structures, such as proposals by Archigram, and anticipated aspects of the high-tech aesthetics of the 1970s and beyond. Although by the late-1960s, Littlewood’s lobbying of the Greater London Council had helped the project to begin to gain some momentum, it too was doomed to remain only a bright idea. Perhaps this was just as well; even at such a highpoint of cultural permissiveness, it is hard to imagine that a public authority would have been willing to condone some of the types of riotous ‘fun’ which Littlewood and Price would have wished to have seen occurring.

Price stubbed out his final cigar in 2003, aged 69. More than half-a-century after his 1960s heyday and over two decades since his death, his architectural thinking continues to fascinate those looking for clues as to how architecture might take alternative, less conformist routes to achieve reformist ends. For his posthumous followers, his numerous concept drawings and few surviving models and other artefacts appear to have gained an aura akin to quasi-religious relics. The exhibition presents a selection of originals and copies of these, elegantly curated by Ana Bonet Miro, Martin Brown and Maria Martinez Sanchez with design by Luca Brunelli. One can study plans for both the Potteries Thinkbelt and London Fun Palace, as well as for various smaller schemes, including a design for a portable street market stall. There are also amusing cartoons and examples of Price’s witty correspondence. These latter items however emphasise the paradox of Price having been an architect of serious intent deep-down, yet with a surface pompous bonhomie that apparently rendered him incapable of presenting himself to the po-faced bureaucrats who held the public purse-strings with enough stern gravitas to persuade them to follow through. In the early-1980s, it had been Price who first suggested building a giant Ferris wheel by the Thames in Central London. Without acknowledging any debt, The London Eye opened just before the Millennium – and has been a great success.