The Architecture of Continuous Dialogue

Abstract

The British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003) is well known for his radical and visionary projects, many of which were never built, and most frequently with reference to his seminal work of the 1960s which continues to inspire contemporary practice. However, Price was also active and influential as an architectural journalist, writer, critic, lecturer, tutor, educationist, researcher, curator, polemicist, and intellectual. Although his writings and lectures have been recognised as an important part of his architectural oeuvre, they have never been the object of an independent study or any sustained analysis regarding architectural theory. The present dissertation questions this marginalisation of Price’s contributions to architectural theory by focusing on his experiments in writing, editing, publishing, lecturing, teaching, curating, as well as design, and argues that these wide ranging discursive activities may all be considered to contribute to an expanded and performative understanding of architectural theory. First, I examine the formative period of roughly the 1950s to the 1960s, in which Price explored a variety of media contexts, forms and practices, ranging from scrapbooks to television to popular magazines. More particularly, I reconstruct the multiple and varied publics that would increasingly play a key role in the development of his architectural discourse. I also retrace Price’s early reflections on architecture as they progressively connect with his first experiments in communication, but also a number of influential figures and institutions. I then turn my attention to the following decades of the 1970s to the 1990s in which Price redirected and recalibrated his discourse to address more specifically a professional community, arguing that this inflection in Price’s ongoing quest to reach a broader audience was not a form of disciplinary interiorization, but rather a much more experimental and radical phase in his discursive evolution which ultimately defined a complementary posture in which the figure of the architect was now positioned both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the traditional contours of the discipline. I therefore investigate Price’s fundamentally interdisciplinary approach to architecture and the creative entanglement of theory and practice that is at the heart of his work by resituating the meaning of his discursive practices within, on the one hand, the larger historical and theoretical contexts of architectural debate to which they contributed, and, on the other hand, the particular origins and development of Price’s highly unconventional, theoretical practice and production. In retracing Price’s discourse and intellectual biography with regards to post-war architectural theories and debates – yet, not exclusively – I argue that Price’s theories – as articulated, embodied and enacted in his discursive output and activities – were integral to his profoundly experimental approach to architecture. In doing so, I aim to clarify the theoretical legacy of one of the most celebrated ‘architect-thinkers’ of the twentieth century.