3.5. Potteries Thinkbelt by Cedric price

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

all too easily avoid in the stratified spaces we build into our campus lives. The Thinkbelt is

premised on a different social and political settlement for higher education to that which

we labour under today; in its own time, it did not attract the attention of policy makers,

falling as it did by the margins of planning for the University of the Air – later to become

the Open University. Yet its focus on place remains of interest.

The Thinkbelt was designed for 20,000 students, but with provision for 40,000 residential

units that were flexible in form and adaptable to possible relocation and aggregation;

Price wished to see student housing combined with local council tenancies. The four

different forms of residential units were crudely named as sprawl, capsule, crate and

battery housing, using terminology specifically intended to irritate professional designers.

Figure 16. Pre-fabricated Crate housing

Figure 17. Classroom modules