3.5.
Potteries Thinkbelt by Cedric price
Figure 15. Illustration of potteries thinkbelt by Cedric price.
Cedric Price’s proposal was to take the whole rusting and decaying industrial infrastructure of the Potteries, and turn it into a kind of High-Tech think-tank13. It was to be a new kind of university, called the Potteries Thinkbelt. It was not a “building”, but a kind of circuit, or network, with mobile classrooms and laboratories using the existing rail lines to move from place to place, from housing to library to factory to computer centre. Existing factories would be used for study, while new factories could be built to exploit new discoveries and theories. Mobile classroom, laboratory and residential modules would be placed on the railway lines and shunted around the region, to be grouped and assembled as required. Four varieties of modular and disposable public housing (called, with aggressive disrespect for conventional primness, "Sprawl", "Battery", "Capsule" and "Crate") would be assembled at various fixed points along the rail lines. The Thinkbelt is an experiment in conceiving of a different type of learning environment; think about the dynamics of a lecture in a moving rail carriage, and how it might bring staff and students into contact in a way that we can
13
Think tank institute, corporation, or group organized for interdisciplinary research with the objective of providing advice on a diverse range of policy issues and products through the use of specialized knowledge and the activation of networks
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