Architect: Cedric Price
Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette
18.11.2024
Cedric Price: Parc de la Villette18.11.2024
The following account looks into the drawing DMC 1438 related to Price’s Parc de la Villette competition entry, to quest for the modes in which this media object resituates his design approach of design for pleasure, not only as the evolution of his practice, but crucially as part of an… Read More
Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables
06.03.2024
Artful Trades: Into a Market of Consumables06.03.2024
The following text is an excerpt from the guide that accompanied the exhibition ‘PRINT READY DRAWINGS: Composites, Layers, and Paste-ups, 1950-1989’, installed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles between 11 November 2023 – 4 February 2024, and curated by Sarah Hearne. Despite predictions of the… Read More
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price
21.11.2022
Joan Littlewood’s Memos to Cedric Price21.11.2022
In this text, Ana Bonet Miró reflects on the memos written by Joan Littlewood addressed to her company of actors, and to Cedric Price during their collaboration on the Fun Palace project. For more on Littlewood and Price’s collaboration, listen to Ana Bonet Miró and Matthew Blunderfield in conversation for… Read More
Power & Public Space 9: Ana Bonet Miró – Fun Palace
03.08.2022
Power & Public Space 9: Ana Bonet Miró – Fun Palace03.08.2022
– Matthew Blunderfield and Ana Bonet Miró
Power & Public Space is a podcast from Drawing Matter and the Architecture Foundation hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. You can find the full podcast series here. Or listen now: Since its conception in the 1960s, the Fun Palace has circulated widely in architecture culture, and mainly through its provocative collages, characterised… Read More
The Evolving Role of Drawing
29.04.2022
The Evolving Role of Drawing29.04.2022
This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman
22.03.2021
Cedric Price: Urban Spaceman22.03.2021
Laid down facing upwards and spread evenly on a neutral surface, 13 tin toys pose for a shot. Cedric Price’s robot collection – battery powered or clockwork, says the caption – includes a mechanical bird and rabbit, several spaceships, spacemen and robots. Their distinctive features intimate specific names, makers and… Read More
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids
11.03.2021
Lauretta Vinciarelli: Homogeneous and Non-Homogeneous Grids11.03.2021
The following text is excerpted from Rebecca Siefert’s recent book Into the Light, the first comprehensive study of the work of Lauretta Vinciarelli. The book is available to purchase here. The grid is loaded with symbolism and history: it is emblematic of origins, order, systems, utopias and dystopias, and the inevitable susceptibility… Read More
Cedric Price: Westal Market Stall Prototypes
01.03.2021
The Fun Palace: Light Adaptation
08.01.2021
The Fun Palace: Light Adaptation08.01.2021
Techniques of architectural drawing have been developed according to the physics of light and our perception of its effects. From the origins of two-dimensional representation – often mythologized in the act of tracing a projected silhouette on a flat surface – to practices of atmospheric simulation in rendering, recognized patterns of light have become essential in the communication of architecture’s spatial… Read More
Library of Babel
29.06.2020
Library of Babel29.06.2020
In its most rudimentary form, a LIDAR scan is a simple act of call and response. Thousands of beams of light leave the scanner and receive a measurement based on the distance and intensity (essentially a value of reflectivity) of the objects they collide with. The fascination in these scans… Read More
Battersea Redevelopment
22.01.2020
Battersea Redevelopment22.01.2020
In Bat-Hat, our project for Battersea Power Station, we have divested the existing building of all that froze the immediate site, leaving only that which is considered important – its height and familiar profile. Excerpted from Cedric Price, Works II (London: Architectural Association, 1984), p.90.
Cedric Price: The Evolving Image
03.10.2019
Cedric Price: The Evolving Image03.10.2019
Cedric Price: The Evolving Image opened at the RIBA’s Heinz Gallery on 8 October 1975 and ran until 29 November. The exhibition was a drawings show of mostly unbuilt works and Price was at once the subject, designer and organiser. Writing in the Architects’ Journal, Sutherland Lyall, the journal’s building editor,… Read More
Alternative Histories: Witherford Watson Mann on Cedric Price
04.02.2019
Alternative Histories: Witherford Watson Mann on Cedric Price04.02.2019
—–Original Message—–From: William MannSent: 17 January 2019 19:22To: cedric@cpa.org Cc: Stephen Witherford; William Mann; Philippa BattyeSubject: Bathat Dear Cedric, We tried to reach you by phone but gather you are still in East Grinstead. So we are sending some drawings instead, hope you are able to open the files ok. There are… Read More
Notes on the Sketchbook
19.02.2018
Notes on the Sketchbook19.02.2018
When we talk about the sketchbook what do we mean? Its complexity is reflected in the difficulty we experience – in many examples, at any rate – in straightforwardly attaching a name to it, for there are times it might seem to be equally a notebook, a journal, a diary,… Read More
Cedric Price: FIR Project
12.10.2017
Cedric Price: FIR Project12.10.2017
Tim Abrahams observed in his AR article, Shatwell Farm: Reshaping the Rural: ‘Looking into the background of the Shatwell project it is evident that one of Hobhouse’s most important relationships was with the late Cedric Price who, among other things, helped him find the intellectual and architectural grounding to imagine a… Read More
Some Thoughts on Sheds
07.10.2016
Some Thoughts on Sheds07.10.2016
In architectural terms I take ‘shed’ as a neutral word, meaning a structure at any scale open at one or two ends, devoted to storage, display or industrial activity, in which the roof providing shelter is its primary element – in effect a cover with minimum foundations and form: train… Read More
Cedric Price: Bathat
08.08.2016
Cedric Price: Bathat08.08.2016
Swiftly drawn in soft orange-red crayon, four upright fingers sit astride a flying platform. We instantly recognise the volume and mass of Battersea Power Station; but the weight has vanished with the walls. The uplift is palpable: thin red pen lines inscribe the geometry of the stripped back steels, but… Read More
Future Scenarios, Part II
31.05.2016
Future Scenarios, Part II31.05.2016
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
FRAGMENTS: THE BUILDING SITE AND THE RUIN Louis-Jean Desprez turns to another legendary city of the ancient world — Alexander’s capital in Egypt — to advocate in a dream view of Alexandria in construction what great ambitions might be aroused in the new king of Sweden, after his predecessor, who… Read More
A Lung for the City (1984)
27.11.2015
A Lung for the City (1984)27.11.2015
The following has been excerpted from Cedric Price, 1984. A lung for the city. A 24-hour workshop where all can extend their knowledge and delight in learning. From its start and throughout its construction and development, all must be welcomed to observe its continuous growth and change. No area should be… Read More
The Changing Metropolis 1940s–1980s
29.11.2013
The Changing Metropolis 1940s–1980s29.11.2013
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
Part III: Monumentalism and motion 1940s –1980s A night rendering, making cinematic use of the dynamics of movement to suggest modernity, appears in the émigré architect Vassilieve’s ideal Manhattan, his animated drawing technique demonstrating how the varied shelves and openings of a setback megablock scheme bring energy and momentum, light… Read More
Architectural Anxiety
28.09.2011
Architectural Anxiety28.09.2011
– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg
This instalment explores the rich pathologies of architectural anxiety: the nagging pressure of what architects know and admire, or have seen and rejected. Or of what it is in the work of other architects, and in their own past practice, which they are driven always to acknowledge in the buildings… Read More
Gavin Stamp: Interwar, British Architecture 1919-1939
08.07.2024
Gavin Stamp: Interwar, British Architecture 1919-193908.07.2024
– Otto Saumarez Smith
When the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner was asked to draw up an inventory of interwar buildings that deserved to be placed on the Statutory List, the so-called ‘Pevsner 50’ that resulted was almost entirely composed of the whitest of white modernist buildings. Similarly, John Summerson argued that the only thing… Read More
urban form DMC sketch theoretical & imaginary