Cedric Price: Potteries Thinkbelt

Author: Kester Rattenbury
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100015842X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
The Supercrit series revisits some of the most influential architectural projects of the recent past and examines their impact on the way we think and design today. Based on live studio debates between protagonists and critics, the books describe, explore and criticise these major projects. This first book in the unprecedented series examines Cedric Price’s groundbreaking Potteries Thinkbelt project from the 1960s, an innovative high-tech educational facility in the North Staffordshire Potteries. Highly illustrated and with contemporary criticism, this is a book not to be missed! In Cedric Price: Potteries Thinkbelt you can hear the architect’s project definition, see the drawings and join in the crit. This innovative and compelling book is an invaluable resource for any architecture student.

The Changing of the Avant-garde

Author: Terence Riley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780870700040
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
Featuring 165 expertly reproduced visionary architectural drawings from The Museum of Modern Art's Howard Gilman Archive, this collection brings together a selection of idealized, fantastic and utopian architectural drawings.

The City and the Architecture of Change

Author: Tanja Herdt
Publisher: Park Publishing (WI)
ISBN: 9783038600459
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Presenting a broad selection of projects covering a twenty-fi ve-year period, this book provides an overview of cedric Price s work for the fi rst time."

Cedric Price - The Square Book

Author: Cedric Price
Publisher: Academy Press
ISBN: 9780470851463
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 116

Book Description
Cedric Price Architects was established in 1960 and this book features works from its early years - iconic projects such as The Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt, built projects such as London Zoo's Aviary, and many less well-known schemes and writings. Additional essays are contributed by eminent architectural historians Reyner Banham, Royston Landau and Robin Middleton and colleague/critics such as David Allford, Peter Cook and Warren Chalk. The Square Book is a faithful reprinting of an original book entitled Cedric Price: Works II, published in 1984 by the Architectural Association (AA). Ron Herron and AA Chairman Alvin Boyarsky had invited Price to make the book to coincide with an exhibition of the work of his office at the AA in June the same year. Price complied "as a favour" to his dear friends although he has always been resistant to the crystallisation of his work in book form, being more inclined towards the immediate and ephemeral nature of magazines and journals. Price states that "there is a point reached where if too much time is required to produce something its operational integrity is marred." This remark is central to Price's thesis that Time is the fourth dimension in architecture and that Change is its champion. It is timely that such a book should be reprinted. Its purpose is not to provide material upon which to reflect but to serve as fuel to students and practitioners of architecture - a profession that continues to institutionally resist change at the beginning of a new millennium. We are reminded, as Peter Cook writes, that "Cedric is our reference. Our conscience".

From Agit-prop to Free Space

Author: Stanley Mathews
Publisher: Artifice Incorporated
ISBN: 9781904772521
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Book Description
Cedric Price proposed radically new concepts of architecture and redefined the ways in which the architect might enhance human life, extend human potential and promote social change. Price perceived architectural possibilities amidst the apparent cultural anarchy of post-war Britain where many pundits and social critics saw only the waning of an old order. Forsaking tradition, he dealt with variable structures, firmly believing in impermanent constructions designed for continual change; that architecture should "enable people to think the unthinkable". From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price tells the story of Price's architecture, how his thinking expressed the changing character of life and society, and how his work has shaped architectural discourse today. It focuses specifically on two of Price's major unrealised works. The Fun Palace and The Potteries Thinkbelt. Not buildings in any conventional sense, these two projects were instead socially interactive machines, highly adaptable to the shifting conditions of their time and place. From Agit-Prop to Free Space is the result of extensive research based on vast quantities of unpublished archive material, including letters, memos, notes, drawings and interviews. It paints a portrait of an architect who was a true radical, and who overturned conventional ideas of what architecture means, having a major impact on architecture across the world from Japanese Metabolism to High-Tech.

Cedric Price

Author: Cedric Price
Publisher: Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Konig
ISBN: 9783865600936
Category : Architects
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Hans Ulrich Obrist met the great visionary and architectural theorist Cedric Price several times between 1999 and shortly before his death in 2003 and spoke with him about his architectural concepts and most important projects. The result is a spirited and vivid description of Cedric Price's life work. English text.

Neoliberalism on the Ground

Author: Kenny Cupers
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987376
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Book Description
Architecture and urbanism have contributed to one of the most sweeping transformations of our times. Over the past four decades, neoliberalism has been not only a dominant paradigm in politics but a process of bricks and mortar in everyday life. Rather than to ask what a neoliberal architecture looks like, or how architecture represents neoliberalism, this volume examines the multivalent role of architecture and urbanism in geographically variable yet interconnected processes of neoliberal transformation across scales—from China, Turkey, South Africa, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, Britain, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia. Analyzing how buildings and urban projects in different regions since the 1960s have served in the implementation of concrete policies such as privatization, fiscal reform, deregulation, state restructuring, and the expansion of free trade, contributors reveal neoliberalism as a process marked by historical contingency. Neoliberalism on the Ground fundamentally reframes accepted narratives of both neoliberalism and postmodernism by demonstrating how architecture has articulated changing relationships between state, society, and economy since the 1960s.

Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech

Author: Todd Gannon
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606065300
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech reassesses one of the most influential voices in twentieth-century architectural history through a detailed examination of Banham’s writing on High Tech architecture and its immediate antecedents. Taking as a guide Banham’s habit of structuring his writings around dialectical tensions, Todd Gannon sheds new light on Banham’s early engagement with the New Brutalism of Alison and Peter Smithson, his measured enthusiasm for the “clip-on” approach developed by Cedric Price and the Archigram group, his advocacy of “well-tempered environments” fostered by integrated mechanical and electrical systems, and his late-career assessments of High Tech practitioners such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Renzo Piano. Gannon devotes significant attention to Banham’s late work, including fresh archival materials related to Making Architecture: The Paradoxes of High Tech, the manuscript he left unfinished at his death in 1988. For the first time, readers will have access to Banham’s previously unpublished draft introduction to that book.

The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture

Author: Pier Vittorio Aureli
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262515792
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
Architectural form reconsidered in light of a unitary conception of architecture and the city. In The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Pier Vittorio Aureli proposes that a sharpened formal consciousness in architecture is a precondition for political, cultural, and social engagement with the city. Aureli uses the term absolute not in the conventional sense of “pure,” but to denote something that is resolutely itself after being separated from its other. In the pursuit of the possibility of an absolute architecture, the other is the space of the city, its extensive organization, and its government. Politics is agonism through separation and confrontation; the very condition of architectural form is to separate and be separated. Through its act of separation and being separated, architecture reveals at once the essence of the city and the essence of itself as political form: the city as the composition of (separate) parts. Aureli revisits the work of four architects whose projects were advanced through the making of architectural form but whose concern was the city at large: Andrea Palladio, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Étienne Louis-Boullée, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. The work of these architects, Aureli argues, addressed the transformations of the modern city and its urban implications through the elaboration of specific and strategic architectural forms. Their projects for the city do not take the form of an overall plan but are expressed as an “archipelago” of site-specific interventions.

Obsolescence

Author: Daniel M. Abramson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022631345X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
Things fall apart. But in his innovative, wide-ranging, and well-illustrated book, Daniel Abramson investigates the American definition of what falling apart entails. We build new buildings partly in response to demand, but even more because we believe that existing buildings are slowly becoming obsolete and need to be replaced. Abramson shows that our idea of obsolescence is a product of our tax code, which was shaped by lobbying from building interests who benefit from the idea that buildings depreciate and need to be replaced. The belief in depreciation is not held worldwide which helps explain why preservation movements struggle more in America than elsewhere. Abramson s tour of our idea of obsolescence culminates in an assessment of recent tropes of sustainability, which struggle to cultivate the idea that the greenest building is the one that already exists."