First Cedric Price Day
STAFFORDSHIRE UNIVERSITY | 11th September 2021
First Cedric Price Day
STAFFORDSHIRE UNIVERSITY | 11th September 2021
Henrion Gallery Staffordshire University College Road ST4 2DE Stoke-on-Trent
Programme
9:15 Cedric Price Day Introduction | Dr. Maria Sanchez | BArch (Hons) Architecture Course Leader | Staffordshire University 09:30 News from the British Sixties: Fun Palace’s Press Cuttings Dr. Ana Bonet | Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape | University of Edinburgh [face to face + online] 10:45 Parallel Session [EURAU2020] 12:15 Opening of the exhibition Re:imagining the Potteries Thinkbelt Co-curated by Dr.Maria Sanchez and Martin Brown [virtual tour will be available online] [11th of September to the 8th of October at Henrion Gallery] This exhibition presents reproductions of drawings, collages, and sketches from Cedric Price’s Archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal, Canada). These original materials have been put in dialogue with other relevant documents such as press cutouts, clips, films and current images of Stoke-on-Trent. 13.45 The Fun Palace: a cybernetic Cabaret. [face to face + online live performance] Directed by Aleksandar Dundjerovic | Royal Birmingham Conservatoire | Birmingham City University. Directed by Aleksandar Dundjerovic | Devised by Stephen Simms, Aleksandar Dundjerovic and Paul Sadot | Performed by Stephen Simms | Narrated by Martin Brown | Dances/ Curated by Sumit Lai Roy | Video choreography – Paul Sadot | Dance: Maria Nikolou
The Potteries Thinkbelt: sustainability, communities and regeneration
Dr. Maria Sanchez | BArch (Hons) Architecture Course Leader | Staffordshire University
‘When the next round of university building starts, perhaps we should treat education less as a polite cathedral-town amenity. We print here an architectural project for a 20,000 student campus in north Staffordshire which is built around a road and rail network, emphasises temporary housing and ties students with the community’ Cedric Price, New Society, 1966.
This year we are launching the First Cedric Price Day at Staffordshire University, bringing together a series of events that review and celebrate his work. There has been a lot said about Cedric Price. I especially would like to mention the works of Samantha Hardingham, which have compiled and presented Price’s projects creating invaluable documentation of his legacy. However, as academics, architects, professionals and practitioners, we have found inspiration and big ideas for the regeneration of Stoke-onTrent in Price’s projects. The objective of this day is, of course, to celebrate Price’s legacy, encourage reflection on the needs of the Potteries, and influence local thinking on regeneration strategies. The Potteries Thinkbelt was published on issue 2 of June 1966 of New Society. Essentially, the Potteries Thinkbelt proposes an innovative university model linked to local industries. The railway line would support a mobile educational provision based on temporary structures, with the coaches becoming classrooms. ‘When the next round of university building starts, perhaps we should treat education less as a polite cathedral-town amenity. We print here an architectural project for a 20,000 student campus in north Staffordshire which is built around a road and rail network, emphasises temporary housing and ties students with the community.’ Cedric Price, New Society, 1966. Price brings into debate questions such as regeneration and sustainability with this project. As early as the 1960s, he proposes a circular economy model for this project, where the structures can be disassembled and reused, reducing the waste and carbon footprint. He associates sustainability with the involvement
of local communities, which have as an outcome a plan for the regeneration of an area that, 60 years later, in 2021, addresses regional and global issues. Following the UK government’s declaration of the Climate Emergency in May 2019, sustainability has been put at the core of the architecture curriculums in the Schools of Architecture in the UK. The State of the UK Climate Report (2020) evidences that cities in the UK are becoming warmer, hotter and sunnier. This also raises the need for transformation and retrofitting our built environment to adapt it to different climate conditions. In addition to this, the fact that the built environment contributes 40% of the carbon emissions in the UK has put architects at the centre of climate change. This has triggered actions from several sectors to reduce its impact on the environment and build infrastructure that benefits the community socially and economically. In this context, the Royal Institute for British Architects published the Sustainable Outcomes Guide, which defines eight sustainable outcomes that are aligned to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 Climate Change Challenge addressed to chartered practices laying out a series of targets to reduce operational energy, embodied carbon and potable water. Infrastructures play an important role in the regeneration of wider areas, for which the Government is investing £100 billion in his campaign Build Back Better. But as well as creating new infrastructures, it is important to think of how to reuse and transform the ones we already have. Projects such as the recently announced Manchester High Line are great examples. This project will transform the Grade II-listed Castlefield Viaduct into a linear public park following the successful High Line in New York. The reuse of outdated infrastructures is especially important in deprived areas with an industrial heritage and brownfields that
need rethinking to return them to the local communities. And here is where creativity comes into place; how can the industrial heritage be transformed and reused to become an active part of our cities again? By levelling up the use of materials, installations and urban infrastructures of deprived areas, sustainability helps to address issues such as poverty and inequality. This is thoroughly explored by the human geographer Edward Soja, who defined Spatial Justice as ‘the fair and equitable distribution in the space of socially valued resources and opportunities to use them’. Therefore, sustainable urban strategies are essential to tackle spatial justice. Research around the use of local materials such as ceramics can reduce the carbon print and could result in the development of innovative designs. Another strategy is the consideration of the trace the buildings leave on the environment. What would happen when the building is not in use anymore? Can it be disassembled and recycled and leave no trace? These strategies were already present in Price’s project. Engaging communities in the design of architectural and urban spaces is an essential part of the sustainability of the designs. Price’s collaboration with Joan Littlewood in the Fun Palace project highlights how the versatility of buildings as a response to the users’ needs can shape the design of spaces. This is also essential from a sustainability point of view. If the buildings adapt to the changes through time, they will be in use and integrated, reducing waste and implementing economic growth. However, taking into account the temporary aspect of buildings and accepting that they may just be needed for a certain period of time can also positively impact the design and technical considerations of the building. An excellent example of this is Price’s Inter-action Centre, which was designed to be disassembled once it was no longer needed.
We have decided to launch this first edition of the Cedric Price Day to coincide with our first cohort of architecture students joins the new BArch (Hons) Architecture at Staffordshire University. The course has strong links with the local region, focusing on interdisciplinarity, sustainability, and regeneration. Price’s work embeds the principles of our course, and it is essential for us that our students are familiar with his proposals for the area. Our students will be the architects of the future, responsible for reimagining and designing the future of the region. Therefore, this annual event will be a crucial part of the curricular activities for the course, constituting a platform for debate and critical thinking around Price’s legacy and the tangential areas that his work articulates.
Cedric Price | Perspective and detail for Potteries Thinkbelt, North Staffordshire between 1963 and 1966. Porous point pen and graphite on tracing paper. Cedric Price fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
Cedric Price. Perspective sketch of transfer area for Potteries Thinkbelt, North Staffordshire1966. Gelatin silver print of photomontage. Cedric Price fonds Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Cedric Price (b.Stone 1934, d. London 2003) was one of the most innovative architects of the 20th Century. He was a visionary concerned not only with design but also with current issues such as sustainability. This exhibition revisits Price’s much admired Potteries Thinkbelt (1964), looking into the project with new eyes and reviewing it from a contemporary perspective. The Potteries Thinkbelt was an extremely innovative project which proposed a mobile university through the use of the local train lines across the North Staffordshire conurbation of Stokeon-Trent and Newcastle-under-Lyme. If implemented the project would have had an impact not only on the local economy but also on pedagogies in Higher Education. The idea of a university in which classrooms move to get the students closer to the local industries has a presence in the live projects and collaborations with external partners that we currently have in - universities. Price also envisaged use of the railway lines for bringing in modular housing to the area.
Co-curators: Dr. Maria Sanchez | Martin Brown Exhibition assistant: James Bridley
In an area where the ceramics industry and coalmining have left such a trace, a strong response is needed to transform infrastructures that need to change and adapt to the needs of contemporary industries. There have been many approaches to the transformation of industrial heritage across Europe. An example of this is the project developed at the former Zollverein coalmine in Essen (Ruhr, Germany).The mine site has been converted into a museum and a park, recovering that space for the communities in the area. Also, the ‘High Line’ in New York is a good example of how the neighbourhood came together to save an elevated train line, and it was transformed into a public park for community use, becoming one of the urban icons of the city (and with similar projects proposed for Camden in London and at Castlefield in Manchester).
One of the most innovative elements of Price’s projects was the idea that his buildings would only be in use while they were needed and then they would disappear. This took him into a wide investigation of construction techniques that allowed for the disassembly of the buildings once they were not in use. One example of this was his Inter-action centre in London (1972), which was disassembled and removed in 1997. Another key element of his architecture was interdisciplinarity. This is clearly seen in the Fun Palace (1961-4), a project he did in collaboration with the celebrated theatre director Joan Littlewood. The Fun Palace displays a series of new approaches to an architectural project in which the use of the building and the desires of its users are at the centre. The articulation of the different spaces and their manipulation by the users respond to the intersection of disciples such as theatre and now cybernetics. This exhibition presents reproductions of drawings, collages, and sketches with kind permission from the Cedric Price archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal, Canada). These original materials have been put in dialogue with more contemporary documents such as press cuttings, clips, films and images of the current state of the area of the Potteries. The objective of this exhibition is to stimulate, through critical thinking and re:imaginings of Price’s projects, proposals for meeting the region’s current and future needs.
Cedric Price. Overall plan for Potteries Thinkbelt, North Staffordshire1965. Cedric Price fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
Cedric PriceHousing types, sprawl housing for Potteries Thinkbelt, North Staffordshire between 1963 and 1967. Black ink on tracing paper. Cedric Price fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
Cedric Price. Axonometric of the Madeley transfer area for Potteries Thinkbelt, North Staffordshire1964. Cedric Price fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
Cedric Price. Cut-away axonometric view of housing for Potteries Thinkbelt, North Staffordshire1966. Black ink on wove paper. Cedric Price fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
Cedric Price. Housing types, capsule housing for Potteries Thinkbelt, North Staffordshire between 1963 and 1967black ink on tracing paper. Cedric Price fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
‘News from the British Sixties: Fun Palace’s Press Cuttings’
Dr. Ana Bonet Miro | Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape | Edinburgh College of Arts
‘The name Cedric Price receives much the same reaction in the company of respectable architects as champions of Galileo must have received from the Vatican. Which makes him very happy. “If all that lot thought I was right, it would be time to scrap everything and start all over again”. But who among that lot would approve of his major project at the moment, Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace? (…) There is little doubt that fair and square behind Fun Palace – “the name is deliberate, it means nothing save vague entertainment to anyone, as it should”– stand Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood. Hers the concept of ends, and his that of architectural means to those ends’. 1 A portrait of a young Cedric Price illustrates this piece of news of the Fun Palace in The Guardian of 4 July 1964. Ian Finch’s ‘Fun Palace architect’ points at Price’s optimistic and untamable character when situating the ambitious and open Fun Palace project within his concurrent practice – the client-less Potteries Thinkbelt Project, the Regent’s Park aviary and his collaboration with Fun Palace trustee Yehudi Menuhin for Bath Festival. Over eighty press cuttings from mid-60s held in Cedric Price fonds at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal describe the history of the public reception of the Fun Palace in the period. Drawing on this, a remarkable chronicle of the rise and fall of the project has been produced by Stanley Mathews in what constitutes one of its first scholarly retrospectives, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price2. Yet the Fun Palace’s press cuttings exceed in my view this historical 1 Ian Finch, ‘Fun Palace architect’, The Guardian, 4 July 1964. 2 Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publ. Ltd., 2007).
account. For, as a collection, it invites questions about the material conditions within which these cultural artefacts emerged and lived in Britain at the time. The project made headlines in broadsheets and tabloids; it stretched into full-colour pages of Sunday magazines and in other specialized publications and shrank into non-headed paragraphs in gossip columns, into snippets of papers’ art sections; and it reverberated throughout commentaries in published letters to editors. The plurality of enunciations revealed in these cuttings poses specific questions not only about what has been said regarding the Fun Palace of Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price, but crucially about what the agency of this news-image of the project is concerning British mass audience in the 1960s, for which it was intended. What the collection of cuttings tells us is precisely how the Fun Palace succeeded in captivating the imagination of Britons, which had been constituted into a mass readership by means of the British press. Meanwhile, its active collection inscribes the operative ambition underpinning the project’s promotion. The paper examines the Cedric Price’s collection of press cuttings from the 1960s related to the Fun Palace held in the CCA in order to trace the reception of the project by a wider public and to interrogate the systematic use of newsprint to convey it to a mass audience. A carefully scripted publicity strategy by the Fun Palace promoters converts the project quickly into ‘news’, which is then carried by a press system whose hegemony the project was in many ways concerned to oppose. Thus, each news page becomes both a field of the active contestation that the project pursues with the British press – and the control it exercises upon society at the time – and its record. The collection of press cuttings therefore constitutes not only a reservoir of publicly retrievable anecdotes and quotations – it is also importantly a media archive which reflects social struggles around mass communication and press power in the British 1960s.
“The entire landscape was illuminated and transformed by these unique pyrotechnics of labour atoning for its grime, and dull, weird sounds, as of the breathings and sighings of gigantic nocturnal creatures, filled the enchanted air.” Arnold Bennett
Five Towns. Stephen Lawson
The Fun Palace: Cybernetic Cabaret – The Rise, The Fall, The Dream Prof. A.S.Dundjerovic, Centre for Interdisciplinary Performative Arts, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire | Birmingham City University
“We’re building a short-term plaything in which all of us can realise the possibilities and delights that a 20th Century city environment owes us. It must not last longer than we need it.”1 Cedric Price’s The Fun Palace Project was commissioned by theatre director, author and pedagogue Joan Littlewood. It was meant to be culturally complex, interactive and educational, bringing together dance, film projections, theatre performance, and music. Bringing community and culture together. The visionary architect Price created drawings for it that were published in Architectural Review in 1965. Originally, the project was supposed to be located in London’s East End and was expected to last for 10 years. However, it could have been set up in any disused location, and part of whichever working-class community across England. Even a trust was set up to oversee its development. Unfortunately, the visionary project was never realised. It was always regarded as a community aspiration providing visitors/users with interactivity with a space, making them part of cultural experience. The design for Fun Palace was as a flexible structure, envisioned as a platform for playfulness capable of changing to meet the needs of a variety of artistic and cultural programs. The architectural space was not to impose physical or any other constraints on its habitants but to allow freedom of movement and activities. Some of the questions that both exhibition and interactive performance on the first International Fredric Price Day will look at are: What are the main elements of Prices’s creative vision? 1 (from Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood. Fun Palace promotional brochure, 1964. Canadian Centre for Architecture, https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/2/what-thefuture-looked-like/32737/1964-fun-palace)
Why did ‘the short- term plaything’ remain only as a great idea on Price’s numerous drawings (CCA states there are 275 drawings of the Palace in their archives.)? What does the idea behind Fun Palace mean both for performance art and architecture, and where did it originate from? How does it affect our understanding of culturally interactive and transformation in urban communities? How is Littlewood and Price’s creative legacy, the Fun Palace project dream, translated in 21st century Britain as a performative/architectural event? Joanne Littlewood was politicly aligned with the British communist party. In 1939, MI5 requested the BBC to censor and ban her, describing her in their files, as “highly intellectual and a keen communist”2. For more than two decades, she was part of MI5 surveillance due to her political views, which were perceived as dangerous to the British establishment and regime of the time. In 1945, Joanne Littlewood created a ground-breaking and now famous Theatre Workshop that would radically change the traditionally male middle-class dominated and oriented theatre. Referred as “The Mather of Modern Theatre” (she created a training environment (voice, movement, expression) dedicated to the exploration of new forms, which focused more on the physicality of theatre rather than text and dialogue.3 By 1953 the Workshop found a permanent place in Stafford East End, London, a heavily bombed community being rebuilt, with low-income families cramped in overcounted housing estates. Littlewood’s interest was in working-class and community involvement in arts for all that can empower ordinary people to be actant for a political change and use art and culture for education and enjoyment. In 1961, Littlewood and Price started elaboration of Fun Palace as a next step in creative addition of the Theatre Workshop. Problems with funding and securing the land are gen2 (The Guardian, Culture, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/mar/04/secondworldwar.past) 3 RSC, “Who was Joan Littlewood” https://www.rsc.org.uk/miss-littlewood/joan-littlewood-rebel-with-a-cause)
erally cited as an explanation for the Fun Palace Project’s failure. Wilson’s Labour government (1964-1970) did not want to support it. The strength of political views and activism behind empowering the working-class and ordinary people to engage in arts and voice their perception would present a challenge for British society in the early 60s. Control of arts and culture is the crucial prerogative of those empowered. The theatre profoundly influenced Littlewood as political action, Russian agitprop performances, and the theatricality of Piscator and Brecht were her key parameters to create work in Britain. As Martínez-Sánchez observes: For Littlewood, Brechtian theatre was a place where people could experiment with the transcendence and transformation that theatre is capable of providing. The audience was no longer passive, but instead, they would become actors and active participants in the drama consisting of the discovery of their own personalities, internal conflicts, and low passions. It is through this experience that social transformation takes place. 4 Joan Littlewood was one of the leading members of a left-wing theatre movement. In the 1930s, political theatre in Britain was organised around the Workers Theatre Movement. Together with her husband, Ewan McColl, folk songwriter and actor, they formed an agitprop group called the “Red Megaphones,” which later changed its name to Theatre of Action. The group was an important part of the Workers’ Theatre Movement. After the Second World War, they formed Theatre Workshop, one of the British leading training and producing theatre companies in the 1950s and 60s. Agit-prop, as a form of political theatre, was the starting foundation of Joan Littlewood’s theatrical and pedagogical approach to performance. Agit-prop performances, which originated in the Russian revolution, aimed to promote political awareness using an emotional response to win the audience for a political cause. Using agitation and propaganda to promote issues relevant to the Soviet Communist Party amongst the 4 (Dynamic Cartography: Body, Architecture and Performative Space, Routledge (2020), 105)
mainly illiterate population of early 20th-century Russia. Theatrically, agitprop was an open and flexible form, with performers typically developing their narrative material. It was designed as a mobile performance for the outdoors, with easy use of space as in the Renaissance travelling theatres that were able to adapt to different locations – factories, streets, warehouses and audiences (working class or peasants). The performance took place in front of a rowdy audience and needed to be very physically and vocally expressive, presenting a straightforward and clear message that had to win a political alliance with audiences. The short episodic structure with short scenes, driven by themes, not by the narrative, with characters as stereotypes using simple costumes and props. It was deliberately anti-realistic. As Joan Littlewood developed throughout her career, Theatre Workshop became more refined theatrically, aesthetically, and pedagogically elaborate agitprop theatricality and essential stimulus for the Fun Palace Project. Another significant motivation came from thinking about cybernetic theatre by British cybernetician Gordon Pask, and the concept explained in his typed and circulated monograph “Proposal for a Cybernetic Theatre”. Pask transformed Littlewood theatre workshop concept, actors’ improvisation and participatory connection with audiences involved in developing a performance into a system of digital and technological platforms. He points out that “the audience should genuinely participate in a play”; and that a “member of the audience should aim to control the thoughts and actions of the character with whom he is identified at a given moment…” receiving instantaneously feedback from the audience to the actors in the ways play created.5 Joan Littlewood toured Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union with the Theatre Workshop in the 1950s. She was familiar with the Eastern Block and Soviet concept of Palace of Culture (also known as House of Culture/ Palace of Arts) that would become 5 “Theatre Workshop and System Research: “Proposal for a Cybernetic Theatre”, Gordon Pask Archives , p.1,5.
the foundation for her 1962 proposition for the Fun Palace project. The specificity of Soviet Palace of Culture is that it allows access to people to engage with different activities, whether it be sports, arts or culture. People were not merely an audience they were also producers of arts and culture. The Palace of Culture was designed to have multiple uses of the space, with rooms housing cinema halls, concerts, spaces for dance and theatre. In essence, the Palace of Culture was designed for a Soviet working class, for a community to explore creativity, engage with the arts and culture making. In this space amateurish theatre, music and film would find their presence. However, there was a very clear political and ideological message; this was about building communist political awareness and revolutionary mindfulness. In collaboration with architect Cedric Price, Littlewood wanted a different kind of theatre for her workshop, not a stage but a workspace where the audience transforms together with the space and where people could experience arts, not only as audience members but as performers. As Stanley Mathews observes: “Price had already been exploring ideas for an interactive and improvisational architecture, and Littlewood’s dream became the program for his new Fun Palace.”6 As part of the process of democratization of culture and arts, the Fun Palace created a space where everyone could develop and explore their own interests. It was a space for the people, made by the people. This unpredictability of the us, is what made it so versatile from a design point of view. It could not be a fixed space, but a dynamic one. Cedric Price’s approach to Fun Palace was not that different from Littlewood’s thinking about multiple interactive spaces in which the working-class could engage in making arts and producing culture. He wanted a space that could be improvisational, transformational and mobile, capable of bringing the technology of his time. He wanted discoveries in cybernetics and information technology to help human conditions. Fun Palace as an idea became a symbol of a space that can respond to the social uncertainty of 6 Mathews “The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture”, Journal of Architectural Education Vol. 59, No. 3 (Feb., 2006), pp. 39-48, 40.
Britain in the 60s and become a living place, being and thinking in a different way about life. Integrating technology and social activism would give to working-class and community creativity and a new sense of collective identity. In Fun Palace, Price created an architectural space where the design constitutes a playground for the audience to interact and play with the elements in the space. This idea to create a cybernetic cabaret came from the influences of interactive technology and cybernetic theatre on the ways Fun Palace is imagined. The performance will be interactive, combining elements from live to recorded and digitally mediated. The procession takes us through various rooms or rather locations that house different activities, allowing the audience to interact with the presented content. The activities would be performed live as a performance and filmed as in a cinema room, using live digital Zoom theatre. The performers participating in the Fun Palace Cybernetic cabaret come from different countries, reflecting on present-day Britain’s international position. The live audiences and the online audience following on Zoom are invited to take action with the performance structure and interact with t. The performance starts with the narrator announcing he/she will be curating the audience throughout the show. Curation is taking us through the region’s history, starting from Wedgewood and developing to Fun Palace. What are the consequences of the ideas built within Prices and Littlewood’s dream of a new design for a space that interacts and responds to the audience/performers? We invited a video choreographer, a community dance group from India, to perform live on Zoom theatre - a live performance artist creating as things were happening.
Cedric Price. Perspective sketch of transfer area for Potteries Thinkbelt, North Staffordshire1966. Gelatin silver print of photomontage. Cedric Price fonds. Canadian Centre for Architecture
Afterword: A Conjunction and a Proposal Martin Brown | Senior Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory
Living and teaching in the Potteries, and with a passion for Architecture, I recall my eyes widening with fascination when I visited the Design Museum in London in 2005 (for a Zaha Hadid exhibition) and came upon a Cedric Price exhibition showing at the same time. Without a mobile phone, I transcribed onto the spaces of a spare leaflet the exhibition write-up about Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt (1964-6). I was so interested to find out a visionary approach to the North Staffordshire conurbation, and that Price had been born a few miles up the Trent and Mersey canal in the town of Stone in Staffordshire. As a historian I was also gradually acquiring an insight into the complexities of local identities and the distinctiveness of Stoke-on-Trent, a city (from 1925) of six towns (federated in 1910), with a separate and much older (1173) town and administration of Newcastle-under-Lyme, yet contiguous with Stoke-on-Trent. The great merit to me of Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt was to consider the North Staffordshire conurbation as a whole; and to plan from that his ‘mobile’ further and higher education and movement of materials and modular housing using local railway lines. I have followed the various regeneration ups and downs of the conurbation in its separate administrative parts of Stoke-on-Trent City Council, Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, and Staffordshire County Council. In Stoke-on-Trent I recall seeing buses switching to showing ‘city centre’ as a destination, an indication of one of the six towns, Hanley, being ‘made’ the city centre, and a ‘cultural quarter’ for it followed, and an attempt at a ‘business quarter’ that now includes high rise modern apartments and a hotel. Addressing the conurbation-wide framework, the six towns/one city feature of Stoke-on-Trent, and the sub-regional relationship
linist professional persona of Price, and new forms of architectural working and co-production. Emboldened by this felicitous conjuncture of Price-Potteries-Sanchez I also propose consideration of a ‘Cedric Price Legacy Thinkbelt’. It would be a mobile and interconnected network; virtual but also with ‘nodes’ such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture, St. John’s College Cambridge with its Cedric Price Collection, and Staffordshire University, among others. The aim would be to capture thinking through and with the legacy of Cedric Price, with the format of a digital Thinkbelt linking up place nodes and bringing in other contributions and applications. The legacy would cover both the original Potteries Thinkbelt and the Fun Palace and other work and ideas of Price, and by those influenced by, or critiquing, his work. Edensor, Tim (ed.) Reclaiming Stoke-on-Trent: Leisure, Space and Identity in the Potteries (Staffordshire University Press, Stoke-on-Trent, 2000) The Portland Thinkbelt. Anna Francis
of North-Staffordshire to the metropolitan cities of Birmingham and Manchester, are key aspects to study. The setting up of an architecture course in the area, long-wished by local architecture practices, at Staffordshire University, and the major environmental and sustainability projects at nearby Keele University, augur well for the Potteries Thinkbelt inclusive conurbation ‘triangle’ of Meir, Pitts Hill and Madeley. The Price connection is further strengthened by the arrival to lead the Staffordshire Architecture course of Dr María Martínez Sánchez, whose research includes Price and the Fun Palace, with use of the Price Archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal - who gave permission for using image materials for this inaugural annual Cedric Price Day. Later ‘Days’ can draw on both the continuing international interest in Price and the range of local activists who have also taken inspiration from Price, notably the Portland Inn Project. There can be scope as well to consider critically the mascu-
Francis, Anna & Davies, Rebecca Collective Matter: The Potteries Thinkbelt for the Future at Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer, Slough. In: The Potteries Thinkbelt for the Future, 7th - 8th September 2019, Contemporary Sculpture Fulmer, Slough. (Unpublished) https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk/6906/ Hardingham, Samantha & Rattenbury, Kester Supercrit #1 Cedric Price POTTERIES THINKBELT (Routledge, Abingdon, 2007) Hunt, Tristram Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain (Allen Lane, London, 2021) Jayne, Mark ‘Imag(in)ing a post-industrial Potteries’, In: Bell, David & Haddour, Azzedine (eds.) City Visions (Longman, Harlow, 2006), pp.12-26. Jones, Martin Cities and Regions in Crisis: The Political Economy of Sub-National Economic Development (Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, 2019), including ‘Postscript: the Stoke road to Brexit’, pp.229-239. [Keele University] https://www.keele.ac.uk/discover/sustainability/ Phillips, A.D.M. (ed.) The Potteries: Continuity and Change in a Staffordshire Conurbation (Alan Sutton, Stroud, 1993) [Portland Inn Project] https://www.theportlandinnproject.com/ Martinez Sánchez, María José Dynamic Cartography: Body, Architecture, and Performative Space (Routledge,Abingdon, 2020)
Untitled Railway (2020) Catherine Dineley