10/24/11

Cedric Price: Fun Palace and beyond

Design, Architecture, City: From the Postwar to the Postmodern City
Suzanne Strum, Elisava School of Design, Fall 2010

Session 10 (3-11-2011) Postwar unpredictibility: Design and Cedric Price's Architecture (Fun Palace and beyond)
Guest Professor: Gonçalo Furtado
Context: The genesis of systems and computational paradigms in the architectural project of the 1960s and 1970s.

Cedric Price (1934-2003) explored an architecture of great flexibility, the promotion of an evolutionary environment able to incorporate the temporal dimension, with capacity to adapt and mutate steadily through the participation of users, computers and feedback These technologies ensured that the process did not have a clear product as its priority. A number of desirable conditions could be achieved in a moment and a particular place. Key to the encoded character of this development was the programmed obsolescence of the ensemble, the promotion of an impermanent architecture open to the participation of the user.
Key concepts: second-order cybernetics programmed obsolescence.
Projects: Fun Palace, Potteries Think Tank, Generator, etc

10/17/11

"On The “Architecture of Knowledge”,

Gonçalo M. Furtado, "On The “Architecture of Knowledge”, In: Susanne Schindler, Axel Sowa, Ariane Wilson (eds.), “Constructing Knowledge: Das Wissen der Architektur”, p.41-43, Aachen: RWTH-Aachen University (RWTH-Aachen Library Digital Repository / Conference Proceedings 5-6 Nov. 2009), August 2011, available in: http://darwin.bth.rwth-aachen.de/opus3/volltexte/2011/3694/pdf/3694.pdf (accessed August 2011)