Project 2A: Drawing/Notation
For this research project I chose to focus on Cedric Price’s plans for ‘Fun Palace’. Although the ‘Fun Palace’ was never built I was inspired by his ideas for both architecture and the city.
Price describes two analogies that particularly stood out to me — architecture as ‘a mobile’ and as as a computer (Hardingham 2016). The ‘mobile’, in midst of depression and technological advancement in 20th century London, conceptualised architecture as a vehicle, ‘a mechanised environment’, by which the public would be able to control — from temperature through to structure (Hardingham 2016, p. 48).
“Architecture is the vechicle, that’s all.” — Cedric Price (INSTEAD 2014)
Similarly, Price compares structure and composition to a computer’s hardware, and everything in between as the programming; this means that user’s are able to use the hardware, the building, creatively to serve their own purposes — for ‘enlightened self interest’ (Hardingham 2016, p. 47). Architecture, for Price, was the tool for endless possibilities.
“The reason for architecture is to encourage, rather than satisfy, people’s appetites… to behave mentally and physically in ways they had previously thought impossible” — Cedric Price (INSTEAD 2014)
He illustrates this concept throughout his drawings and notations.






His drawings (figure 1) show much vertical movement, particularly evident in the rotatable staircases and cranes, as well as flexible internal and external structures — depicted through dotted lines, the grid, and attenuated compositions; he also makes use of pictograms and notations to show how users may choose from a multitude of possible activities. Furthermore, Price showed people in many of his drawings, not just to show dimensions, but to show how people relate to and use the space.
His designs were connected to the way he perceived the city. During the 1960s, Price’s immediate context was post-war London whereby many were unemployed and uneducated. Influenced by the avant-garde movement, and the theatre-maker Joan Littlewood’s ‘university of the streets’, Price designed a structure that would allow the everyday people to freely come and go as they choose, to play, and more importantly, to learn through self-direction by pursuing time-based activities (Hardingham 2016). He believes that time should be used for self-improvement and the improvement of humanity, to make one ‘useful’ (INSTEAD 2014). ‘Fun Palace’ was an embodiment of these ideas.
Thus, for Price, emphasis is placed on freedom of choice, in the user’s ability to transform their surroundings by limiting architectural demands (INSTEAD 2014). For my process work and iterations I drew on Price’s ideas and techniques to redesign Carriageworks situated in Eveleigh. I chose the site because it was already, to an extent, a mutable structure that served multiple purposes. Price used a variety of different architectural drawings of which I chose to do a perspective drawing to construct a ‘Fun Palace’ of my own. At first I found Carriageworks to be too extensive to draw in one go, so I decided to sketch a few perspective shots, mostly framed by looking front-on for 1 point vanishing point. I then experimented with a few of Price’s illustrations.







My first few iterations didn’t work out so well as I found the engineering and infrastructure side of things quite difficult to resolve. My supposed final iteration was scrapped altogether because I hated it. I started over and refocused on producing a grid layout that extended all around the structure itself rather than just on the floors. I found this enabled me to more effectively construct my design spatially and the building itself became more malleable as a whole. I used dotted lines to show which parts of the building could be utilised — e.g. the walls, the ground and a part the ceiling. I observed Price’s line-work in a few of his drawings to show depth in mine. I made sure there was plenty of vertical movement by including lifts and elevators and I drew a clock to show Price’s concept of time. People were added to show how they moved, used and interacted with the space in addition to the range of possible activities that could be played out.

Reference list
Hardingham, S. 2016, Cedric Price Works 1952–2003: A Forward-Minded Retrospective, AA & ACA, London.
INSTEAD 2014, Andreas Rumpfhuber. Architecture of Immaterial Labour 5/8 — Cedric Price. Fun Palace, video recording, YouTube, viewed 31 July 2017,<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wussBF_It4>.
