Cedric Price Dissappears | Niall Hobhouse
The article ‘Cedric Price Dissapears’ has been written as a talk given at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London and has been published at the AA files 50, April 2004
It is important to say at the beginning that I feel that I am an intruder here.
Listening to what people have to say, I know that I arrived twenty-five years too late for the real party. I did as it happens know Cedric quite well, but only in the last three years.
And I was not an architect or historian, but his client.
But its true that as a client I pretty much knew what to expect, and pretty much got it. So it seemed the only thing to say was perhaps from that perspective, and to the extent that it threw light on Cedric’s own obscured relationship to the practice of architecture.
What happened is of course that I employed an architect who had made a corner, so to speak, in not building, and together we built nothing. Both architect and client could be open to the charge of playing a trivial and irresponsible game. I would defend Cedric absolutely by making it clear that he executed the commission with great seriousness. Less dogmatically, I might defend myself by saying that the architectural discourse does need occasional patronage, but also that Cedric in his way saved me quite a lot of money.
I did come to the conclusion that he was engaged in a fairly bleak critique of himself and of the business he was in. Cedric’s own-brand anarcho-syndicalism must have been tough to maintain with the years- for sure, there was chaos enough but it was all delivered by the free-market. Even so, I don’t think that his outlook had darkened as much as one might expect with age and professional neglect.
Because I don’t want to be lynched before I get back to my seat, I must add that this remains one more contradictory account to go with the others. Since it is important -for both parties- that the client should never see any practitioner quite whole (and just bad luck that I wasn’t around in the glory years), it’s possible that my version is more occluded than sharpened by its specific and immediate focus. I’m only trying to run it to ground now because I am fairly sure that it is at least the one that Cedric wanted me to carry away.
I’ll try to say what I expected, and then what happened.
I had understood that there is generally a clear recognition amongst architects of the importance of Cedric’s contribution to the discourse.
What is a mystery is that it seems hard to say exactly why. And why do architects in particular find it so a hard to say why?
For instance, I’ve noticed that when they are asked how the Fun Palace assumed its place in the mythology they give different answers – the radical engineering, the implied politics of the programme, the absence of a real client and the readiness to allow the public to determine the building’s form, the new understanding of urban space, the reflexivity of the structure itself……… I am not attempting an exhaustive list.
These ideas in themselves seemed fragmentary and inadequate to the purpose. It was not simply that other people had had them individually at much the same moment. Of course, there were a lot of them all together at one time, and they did more or less connect with one another, if not without contradictions. But actually, as one reads the history of the project, the very strong impression is of its collapsing, rather magnificently collapsing, under the sheer weight of aspiration.
It seemed to me that really the Fun Palace was famous because it was never built. Or rather that the almost infinite broadening of the programme, and the relentless effacement of the designer that went with it, led, both in a sort of formal reductio but also in fact, to its not being built. Its message could be that, if an architect does all the things that he should do, at least as a decent left-thinking social animal, he can’t in conscience or in practice expect to build much.
I must say here that as a record of Cedric’s prescience only the first bit of the Fun Palace story holds true. All the ideas have become part of the way architects think about designing a building, and taken together they now read like a crash-course in fashionable thinking about the city.
But about the second part he could not have been more wrong. Of course its pretty unlikely that he thought architects would allow themselves to be consumed by the programme of their buildings, particularly if they then built nothing. But the pattern that has evolved is so completely the reverse – in that the programme of any building -any admired one- has become easily consumed by the issue of its authorship. And seen in the this light, all the brave new ideas about programme have somehow become merely useful tools for the authors in the rhetoric of winning a commission.
Cedric never in my hearing identified any building by the name of its architect, and I saw this as a dignified protest against the phenomenon of signature buildings. It may not be a bad thing that when the market goes to particular architects –certainly to particular successful architects- it tends to do so in the expectation that the buildings that result will be recognizable as theirs; but the point is that, to me, this seemed a very long way from the process, which everybody so admires, by which the Fun Palace was designed.
I have said enough about what I anticipated by employing Cedric, and why; here is what happened.
Eleanor Bron tells me that he used to quote the Oxford Dictionary, which he claimed defined a client as a person who comes to one in a state of distress. She didn’t tell me this until recently, but it is true that my particular distress was that I was gripped –actually am gripped- by a real building frenzy, uncomfortably allied with a feeling that any building should have a purpose. The way this presents itself clinically is that for the last ten years I have always had a project on site, and three or four more in gestation. Although nothing is ever on a large scale, the crisis that constantly threatens is of over-building or, worse, over-stimulation of architectural ideas. At root it’s a nervous pathology, and one that leaves me highly susceptible to architects.
I had suggested to Cedric that I needed a master planner not an architect. It was a fairly quixotic idea, and was more so once we had agreed that the best masterplan was always dead on arrival, instant victim of its own self-consciousness.
I had described to him something that amounted to the reinvention of a working agricultural estate. There was already some public access, but I wanted more people to come and more engagement with what they found. There were new jobs, new kinds of jobs, and a shift of hierarchy away from the old servicing of a big house. I also wanted to demonstrate-to the local planners in particular- that the careful introduction of a few good contemporary buildings makes it possible to move past the feeble historicism that the regentrification of Somerset is making the norm. There was a bit of the privileged rentier in this, but also enough of Cobbett to galvanize Cedric into action. To give you more of its flavour, and of the collision between their two different kinds of socialism, I should say here that Peter Smithson’s joke about the whole enterprise was to describe himself more than once, as he got off the train, as visiting a ‘big playpen’ .
Into the playpen came Cedric and I could see that it was a horrible temptation for him. What happened was as much as anything the triumph of conscience over the urge to draw.
His engagement was surprisingly formal and very energetic. There were appointments in the office every other week, always at nine in the morning, endless urgent requests for surveys, maps, photographs, drainage routes over a thousand acres.
But after this everything did become a kind of extended, solemn, play.
For a start, there was no brief, just a sheet of paper with strings of adjectives that didn’t change much but became a much more powerful document with time. There were lots of drawings, each one beautifully concise in its imprecision; and they never showed anything I could possibly build. There were flurries of activity devoted to ideas that had been discussed by the two of us long before and gratefully forgotten by me. Two months were spent on a set of fortifications for the main entrance, an idea that came out of our both admiring Vanburgh’s ramparts at Seton Delaval. At the end of this Cedric pointed out that, by the middle of the seventeenth-century, improvements in armament technology far outpaced the building process; the bigger the fortress the more certain it was to be redundant before it was completed.
There was an occasional precise small-scale comment on what was being built – a window-cill too high, a door that opened the wrong way. I remember a really long and complicated lecture on chimney design, and one afternoon we were asked to dig a hole to locate the water table.
There was a terrible day for both of us when he called something I had done since his last visit ‘an error of taste’.
In all of this it was impossible not to rise to the enthusiasm and curiosity, nor recognize its authority. I felt most like Pierre on the field of Borodino. In a daze, he gallops for hours from redoubt to redoubt behind Kutuzov, who just nods as he listens carefully to his Generals reporting on the progress of the battle. At the end, Pierre realizes that there is something only he was in a position to know- throughout the day the great commander-in-chief, the fate of Russia entirely in his hands and the French outside Moscow, had not once issued an order.
Peter Smithson’s elegant response to what I was up to had been to propose a tower so nearly functionless as to be best described as a folly. Cedric didn’t dislike the building but moved to defend his client by leaving it off the site plan. When I told him that I was building it out of admiration and affection for its architect, the folly started to appear on the plans all over the place, even after it was built, and often in several places at a time. Cedric explained that in view of what I’d said, it didn’t much matter where we put it.
I couldn’t help noticing that he was at his most direct and in his way helpful when volunteering solutions to problems that were nowhere near the site. He gave me his two-sheet submission to a competition I was organizing for a new museum building in Bath. The first read: “THERE ARE ALREADY SIXTEEN MUSEUMS IN BATH”.
The proposal itself showed a hoarding on the site, supported by a familiar system of gantries. Apart from a large, very courteous, arrow it read simply:
“THIS WAY TO LEAVE BATH”.
The other characteristic of Cedric the designer was that while the energy did not diminish, the volume did, or appeared to. This was a product of our getting to know each other- the aesthetic of architect client relations developing near perfect economy of means. There was a remorse attached to actually producing a drawing, and in the end when he didn’t feel that he could convey an idea by raising an eyebrow, he didn’t bother.
So how was I to interpret this?
When Cedric was clearing his office last year I asked him why every cupboard contained a set of nineteenth-century child’s building bricks. For once off his guard, he said that it was important to understand the innocence and optimism of the urge to build. I couldn’t get a lot more out of him, but it was clear that he believed in the intensity of this first impulse, to the extent that it didn’t much matter how good or bad a building eventually emerged. It was bound to let its designer down in the end. I got him to agree ruefully that none of his projects were ever quite complete until demolished. Their capacity to adapt themselves to use and time was a cunning, and forlorn, bid for survival as buildings a few years longer; but it did also seem in elegiac anticipation of their designer’s disappointment. There isn’t anything to beat the image of Cedric at the Interaction Centre enquiry, giving his evidence for the developer
All of which makes more of the real mystery – what to make of Cedric the Shaman?
As a clue, I wanted to point out that he was much less forgiving of architects that he felt had started out well and then sold out, than he was of the ones who hadn’t been very good to begin with.
All the Shaman’s traits – the wilfully casual contradiction of self, the occasional casuistry, the dandification of image, the superstar capriciousness, the Delphic ambiguity, that basilisk stare - seem of a piece with the first of the questions at the beginning: why is it so difficult to arrive at a properly inclusive and precise summary of Cedric’s contribution?
But I don’t think these things are that important, or address the second question: what was it about him that worked to make his fellow professionals uneasy?
Given that this was Cedric, it seems to me possible that the answer was camouflaged by its obviousness – a riddle in itself. Actually the riddles really didn’t have any true purpose, except to confirm his status as a riddler. He’d lost interest in them, just as he’d lost interest in the intense research required by his own insistence on broadening the programme.
Cedric the Shaman had two purposes. The first was simply and effectively to exclude behind a wall of suspicion and incomprehension anybody (most people, in fact) beyond redeeming. But it also cleared a narrow waveband for him to broadcast to the thinking end of the profession something between a reproach and a warning.
Again I think at best it’s only part of the story, but the message seemed to be:
“Here comes an architect, somebody marked forever by conflict. On the one hand is the intense and innocent conviction of good as you put one brick on top of another. On the other, everything that happens when you engage with the world – the things you are obliged to think about that make a building no longer your own.”
It’s a long list, infinitely long in Cedric’s view, and it includes everything he did think about hard during the six or seven years of the Fun Palace. It begins simply enough with gravity and damp-courses, and goes on to a minute consideration of the needs and rights of clients and the public. But it ends with the witchdoctor’s parody of everything corrupt, or corrupting, that an architect learns to say or do -and comes to believe himself- to get a building built.
Of course it occurred to me while I was writing this that there are plenty of other reasonable explanations of what Cedric was up to. That he wasn’t really an architect, but a social critic to the left of the left who stumbled unexpectedly into the post-war ruins of modernism; or that he thought that he was better at provoking debate than at architecture; or that provoking was itself a duty.
I even thought that what I have recounted here as a message sent to the whole profession was just a remedy exclusively focused on the distress (as he put it) of the client of the moment.
One could argue any of these explanations, and others, but at some point in all of them, to be convincing, one has to step beyond building- even if building things is what Cedric would really have most enjoyed doing.
For any account to be complete, it ought to include the seer’s ability to convince us that there was something happening beyond the horizon which, at least for the moment, only he could see. What did the convincing was the deliberation with which he chose to tell us just what was important for us to know.
But also, perhaps, that the long-run Cedric Price project, cheerfully and continually vandalized by its own designer but for once robustly resistant to demolition, was an enquiry into the state of moral jeopardy in which he felt the profession of architecture existed. Its focus was an unblinking interrogation of himself as an architect within a system that he found both alien and hostile- and quite certainly wrong in principle.
From where I stood, it was possible to see in this some elements of an old pattern:
First, architecture and socialism were declared indivisible; programme and form were merged soon afterwards. And like the Fun Palace, the true originality of the project lay in its proceeding towards abstraction. It was always less of a building than a diagram -an open structure for the display and orchestration of ideas, on which its designer could hang new ones as he found them, and wherever it suited him. By this familiar and tireless process the fabric nevertheless did become denser and more solid by degrees - and the figure of the Architect harder and harder to make out beyond.
Eventually he has disappeared altogether behind whatever was being made, exactly, it seems to me, as planned. In doing so, of course, any uneasy question that lingered over Cedric’s diffident performance in the actual production of built form was at once finally and convincingly resolved. The market no longer had quite the same power to dismiss the un-built as unbuildable; and if it was quick enough, the profession could still catch a glimpse of itself in the mirror of its Ur-unArchitect.