CHAPTER 14 THE FUN PALACE PROJECT, CENTRE POMPIDOU, AND PARADOXICAL IDEAS OF FREEDOM Figure 14.1 Cedric Price, Fun Palace: detail of interior perspective c. 1960-4. ‘Ihis drawing shows infrastructure, installations, and people. Pink and green coloured pencil on reprographic copy on paper 26.4 x [Link] (DR[Link] 003.001, Cedric Price Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal).Architecture and Ritual If the Paris Opéra of the previous chapter represents an extreme version of a ritualized archi- tecture, specialized for a particular kind of event and representing a stratified and hierarchical society, each level contained in its boxes and moving in its respective foyers, and if Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonic offered a twentieth-century version socially more egalitarian but equally specific, Cedric Price and Joan Littlewoods Fun Palace project of 1964 was in contrast almost an anti-architecture, devised from the start to encourage people to generate their own social events with as little pre-framing as possible (Figures 14.1 and 14.2). It paralleled the theatrical experiments of Peter Brook, cited at the end of the last chapter, whose contempo- raneous book The Empty Space of 1968 expresses in its very title the wish to clear things out and start again. Although the Fun Palace remained unbuilt, it represents that era and two of its creative spirits particularly well, and presents a curious paradox, for the romantic ideal pursued was freedom and cooperation, yet in practice the supporting hardware turned out overbearing, for the ideas behind the Fun Palace were put to the test in one of the most famous buildings of the century, Centre Pompidou in Paris by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. It monumentalized the idea in a way Price would never have endorsed, while the intended open- endedness has hardly been exploited. That the Fun Palace remained on paper at least allowed Price’s vision to remain untarnished and left his principles intact. ‘The Fun Palace was.a serious project developed over several years in some technical detail, but how exactly it would have worked remains open to speculation, particularly as it varied in its developing versions. ‘The best known drawing (Figure 14.2) shows a great rectangular volume about ten storeys high flanked by pairs of diagonally braced service towers, further Figure 14.2 Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood, Fun Palace: promotional brochure 1964, ‘This was the drawing published with text in the end plates of Joan Littlewood's autobiography. Black and red ink on reprographic copy on wove paper 36.2 x 59.8 cm (DR1995: [Link], Cedric Price Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d/Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal). 320The Fun Palace Project, Centre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom serviced by a travelling crane across the top which could move large elements of accom- modation about. ‘Ihe space in the middle is occupied by suspended capsules and platforms of varying shapes and sizes with stairs and escalators running between them, and only parts of the volume are roofed, the rest being left open to the elements. In Price’ perspective a hemispherical conference hall lies to the left, an auditorium is under construction in the middle, a restaurant and open exhibition area lie to the right, with a ‘children’s town’ beneath, There is also a circular theatre (labelled ‘part-enclosed’) hanging in the foreground. Connecting these elements are escalators, landings, even moving catwalks, and people are milling about doing different things. Climb to the top and there is a ‘long distance obser- vation deck’ It makes an orderly perspective because the structure and supporting towers are arranged on a grid, but the entertainment units are disposed in an excitingly asymmetrical way and at varied heights. The interacting levels would have seemed more exciting in 1964, before the advent of the complex foyers, shopping malls and atria that have since become commonplace. Also shown in the drawing are suspended building components moving towards their points of installation, for a continuous state of construction and reconstruction ‘was envisaged, adding to the general sense of excitement and without today’s safety worries. ‘The drawing’s original accompanying text stresses the variety of experiences on offer, inviting joyful participation: ARRIVE AND LEAVE by train, bus, monorail, hovercraft, car, tube, or foot at any time YOU want to - or just have a look at it as you pass. The information screens will show you what’s happening. No need to look for an entrance ~ just walk in anywhere. No doors, foyers, queues or commissionaires: take a lift, a ramp, an escalator to wherever or whatever looks interesting. 's up to you how you use it. Look around ~ CHOOSE what you want to do ~ or watch someone else doing it. Learn how to handle tools, paint, babies, machinery, or just listen to your favourite tune. Dance, talk or be lifted up to where you can see how other people make things work. Sit out over space with a drink and tune into what's happening elsewhere in the city. Try starting a riot or beginning a painting - or just lie back and stare at the sky. WHAT TIME IS IT? Any time of day or night, winter or summer ~ it really doesn't matter, If is too wet that roof will stop the rain but not the light. he artificial cloud will keep you cool or make rainbows for you. Your feet will be warm as you watch the stars - the atmosphere clear as you join in the chorus. Why not have your favourite meal high up where you can watch the thunderstorm? WHY ALL THIS LOT? ‘If any nation is to be lost or saved by the character of its great cities, our own is that nation’ Robert Vaughan 1843. We are 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 last no longer than we need it. More detail on what was intended appears in articles by both authors published in the New Scientist of May 1964. Joan Littlewood called it a ‘university of the streets’ with knowledge 321Architecture and Ritual ‘piped through jukeboxes. ‘There was to be a ‘science playground; an agora for philosophers, and an ‘acting area to afford the therapy of theatre for everyone ... but the essence of the place will be informality - anything goes... the whole plan is open ... so the greatest pleasure of traditional parks is preserved’ She also wrote enthusiastically about large screens showing by CCTV ‘whatever is going on in or out of London ... it will be possible to see coalminers, woodsmen and dockers actually at work ... the comings and goings outside a local authority rest-centre ... the casualty ward of a hospital or a West End club so that ‘the curiosity that many people feel about their neighbours’ lives can be satisfied instructively’ All this was to be ‘without editing or art, so with hindsight the Fun Palace was about to embrace the coming media age, if also anticipating with na Price’ text is rather more sober, promising ‘self-participatory education and entertainment’ and declaring that ‘the activities designed for the site should be experimental, the place itself expendable and changeable. The organization of space and the object occupying it should, on the one hand, challenge the participants’ mental and physical dexterity and, on the other, allow for a flow of space and time, in which passive and active pleasure is provoked He goes on to claim that there will be ‘multi-directional movement and random pedestrian grouping, yet capable of programming’ As there are no doorways, one can ‘choose one’s own route and degree of involvement with the activities:? e innocence the current surveillance and reality TV.” Joan Littlewood Although Price briefly mentions rallies, concerts, conferences, theatre and screenings as events to be accommodated as a matter of course, Littlewood says surprisingly little about theatre, even suggesting that people will be ‘drawn in’ to spontaneously occurring events. ‘In what has been called the acting area... there will be no rigid division between performers and audience ~ a generalisation of the technique used in ‘Iheatre Workshop for many years'* As part of her life story concurrent with the beginnings of the Fun Palace, she describes an invited visit to Malmo University billed as a lecture, but which she had turned into an interactive session, inviting the students to fetch musical instruments and exchange possessions, and after a while leaving them to get on with it by themselves. This shows the degree of destruc- turing she was prepared to promote. Price’ drawing, though, is relatively more conservative, prioritizing a circular theatre as well as two other auditoria. Even so, the whole presentation stresses freedom of choice as if there were to be no performance times or ticket barriers. The emphasis on being able to do whatever you will has in the half century since the Fun Palace ‘was proposed gained a surprisingly consumerist ring, yet this was long before museums gave precedence to their shops and cafés, or indeed started to be driven by visitor numbers It was, intended as a generous socialist world, egalitarian and levelled, openly shared and with no hint of privilege. For both authors there was much ‘tradition’ from which to escape: Price didn’t think much of “The ‘Theatre, and for theatre director Littlewood, already in her late forties, the traditional theatre building with had long been a constraint, along with the polite bourgeois habits and assumptions that had developed around it. As a young woman she had visited Garnier’s Opéra (see previous chapter), and been suitably impressed by the staircases, ‘such curves, such splendour, but she later remembered finding the performance artificial and stilted: s sharp proscenium dividing producers from consumers 322The Fun Palace Project, Centre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom It was not my impression that the French company could sing, and what else is there to do in opera? Such a damn silly story could hardly be acted, except as a comedy. But if anyone on that stage had ever given the job a thought, they showed no sign of it. They just stood around looking useless, waiting for the cue to open their mouths and let out those frightful sounds.” For decades Littlewood had been working in temporary conditions across the country, leading politically radical groups such as Theatre of Action and Theatre Workshop, always on a shoestring and often down to their last penny,’ and although they had finally in the 1950s found a more permanent home in the old ‘Theatre Royal, Stratford East, successful productions there were transferred to the West End where they wilted under the dead hand of respectability, so the ideal venue had remained elusive. She sought an activist, cooperative, and political kind of theatre, and she had long been interested in its power as an educational tool. She wanted to engage the audience as directly as possible, if necessary on the street, and she had adopted new staging techniques following continental figures such as Brecht, Meyerhold and Laban. She encouraged improvisation and invention from her actors, but she was also a brilliant editor of texts, identifying new plays including Brendan Behan’ The Quare Fellow and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey which she developed in collaboration with their authors.’ Her most remembered production was Oh What a Lovely War, because it changed the way the so-called Great War was seen in the general culture. Originated at around the same time as the Fun Palace project, it was constructed around faithful but ironic use of sentimental songs from the First World War, one of which provided the title. As Nadine Holdsworth has commented: ‘The most striking aspect ... was the sheer audacity, confidence and variety of her theat- rical vision. In this one production, she successfully combined all the theatrical elements she had previously experimented with ... The traditions of popular entertainment - the seaside pierrot show, music hall, comic turns — sat alongside huge projected slides of recruiting posters and photographic evidence of trench life, whilst a ticker-tape newspanel flashed official death tolls, and statistics of battles fought, won and lost. These living newspaper techniques functioned in dynamic interplay with multi-faceted live action: a Master of Ceremonies’ jocular interjections and actors performing satirical sketches, vaudevillian scenes of trench life... ‘The overall result was a show that succeeded in being at once ‘epic and intimate, elegantly stylized and grimly realistic; comic and tragi-comic, didactic and entertaining, educational and pleasurable, uproarious and deeply moving.” and realisti Cedric Price ‘The first meeting between Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price was contrived by a mutual friend, journalist and Labour MP Tom Driberg, at a party in 1962. There the idea of the Fun Palace emerged, and she later recalled telling Price of: my idea of space where everybody might learn and play; where there could be every kind of entertainment, classical and ad lib, arty and scientific; where you could dabbleArchitecture and Ritual in paint or clay; attend scientific lectures and demonstrations; argue; show off; or watch the world go by." ‘This varied and ambitious programme appealed to the young architect, twenty years her junior, and as it came from someone already so well known in the theatrical world, it suggested every hope of realization, though they had to finance its development themselves. Like Littlewood, Price was outspoken, energetic, something of a maverick, and a committed left-winger, even though his roots were middle class. Born in 1934 into an architects family in Stoke-on-Trent, he had studied architecture first at Cambridge and then at the Architectural Association (AA), finishing in 1958. He reached maturity at a time of great social change in technology and society following the Second World War: a levelling of class and privilege, a willingness to work together for a better society and the welfare state, and a sense of urgent modernization. ‘The growing prosperity brought pop music and the invention of youth culture, along with unprecedented changes in technology and communication. If Cambridge provided an elite arena of debate where Price could hone his intellectual and rhetorical skills, it also showed him the post-war British establishment in all its stratification and hierarchy, prompting a sense of rebellion that grew at the AA. He regarded the Cambridge teaching as old-fashioned, but even at the AA his projects were controversial, and he reported that Peter Smithson, leading progressive of the previous generation, walked out of his final review swearing in disgust. ‘This confrontation reflected perhaps an implicit threat to the creation of buildings as beautiful objects, still the goal of Le Corbusier-lover Smithson despite his well-rehearsed connections with pop-art and popular culture. Smithson claimed Price ‘couldn't design; and Price was also criticized for having no taste. But in his personal dress, always the black and white shirt with detachable collar,” he was fastidious, in his presentations carefully edited, his rhetoric larded. with a ready wit." The confrontation at the AA was rather due to Price sensing and objecting to the aesthetic predisposition of Smithson and others. He wanted to be more open-minded about what kind of building came about ~ if indeed there were to be any building at all. For Price went beyond architecture, becoming an identifier of problems and a seeker of solutions, his aesthetic bent leaning towards the conceptual elegance of ideas rather than any resulting object. Perhaps no building was needed at all: the client should buy an old warehouse, or divorce his wife, or move to another city; that there could be some alternative strategy without, constructing anything was the enduring legacy of Price's teaching at the AA. Anti-establishment Price could perhaps be counted among those whom Christopher Booker designated as Neophiliacs'® — in love with the new, and therefore at the same time iconoclastic - and he had close personal connections with personalities involved in the satire boom of the early 1960s. His long-term partner was Eleanor Bron, the actress whose reputation was made by the television show That Was the Week ‘That Was of 1962-3," and he frequented the ironically named Establishment Club," started by comedian Peter Cook, whose career had begun with Beyond the Fringe, the runaway success of 1960." It lampooned the War, the Church, Prime Minister Macmillan, and much more besides. Cook was also one of the founders of Private Eye, the satirical fortnightly started in 1961 that poked fun at politicians and published fearlessly 324The Fun Palace Project, Centre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom about corruption and scandals. There had been humorous attacks on the establishment long before 1960, and there had also been a steady erosion of the old social hierarchies: for example the last year of the presentation of upper-class debutantes in 1957,” but only in the early 1960s did rebellion against the establishment become a popular wave, and with hindsight the Fun Palace marks its crest. Price’s immersion in this social revolution as a fully paid up member of the Labour Party explains why, even though he recognized its power to shape society through social rituals, he saw permanent architecture as a constraint and a straitjacket. Price’s embrace of change also made him a pioneer in the matter of time: how long should a building last, he asked, for it becomes a burden after it has outlived its usefulness. As a champion of flexibility, he remained consistently outspoken, for example taking a perverse pride in the fact that the gutters of his computer centre in Southall were starting to fall off when it was eleven years old, for he had agreed with the clients a life of only ten years.” Ten ‘years was also the intended lifetime of the Fun Palace, which seems rather short considering the estimated £5 million cost of the intended hardware. Price also constantly argued that architects must design for ease of demolition, and joined the society of demolition contractors. He took a consistent and extreme stand against conservation and historic listing,” and when some of his fans later argued for the retention of his Inter-action Centre, he refused his support, claiming it had served its purpose He is said to have dismissed Harvey Court, the new, and for its time progressive, Cambridge College by Leslie Martin, Colin St John Wilson and Patrick Hodgkinson designed in 1960, as ‘the middle ages with 13 amp power points.” It ‘was monastic in concept and inward-looking despite the open site, but the permanence and old-fashioned wet-trades made it the butt of Price’ criticism, for it was carefully constructed of brickwork and intended to last indefinitely2* Later, when working on his Potteries ‘Thinkbelt Project, a university on rails, Price questioned the very existence of such halls of residence, criticizing them as ‘monumental structures devoted to eating and sleeping.” For him it was not merely a glorification of the unnecessary, for he saw only too keenly how institutions and their rituals could condition young minds in a set direction: Education is today little more than a method of distorting the individual’s (mind and behaviour) to enable him to benefit from existing social and economic patternings. Such an activity, benevolently controlled and directed by an elite can... do little more than improve on the range and network of structures it already has under its control.”” The ‘White Heat of Technology’ ‘The atom bomb, the space race, television, Technicolor, fast cars and ever proliferating gadgets made the late 1950s a time of evident change, and Price shared with the Archigram group and the historian Peter Reyner Banham a fascination with the liberation promised by new technologies. It had been a general mantra of the Modern Movement that factory production was coming, and that Henry Ford's economies would soon be applied to the construction industry. There were obvious economic advantages to making buildings in series as varia- tions on a theme, lightweight and quickly assembled, for bricks and mortar construction was slow, depended on a dwindling supply of craftsmen, and was often curtailed by the weather. So former weapons factories were turned over to building components, moving the process 325Architecture and Ritual indoors and speeding up assembly times. Prefabrication meant repetition and standard- ization, leading to the adoption of a regular grid as the means of coordination, which became a dominating discipline. Designing a system required concentration on standard joints between, elements, and standard ways of handling corners. A key example was the Hertfordshire schools programme of the late 1940s and 1950s, which led on to further programmes across the country such as CLASP, all based on repetitive lightweight component systems.* ‘These ideas fitted the revolutionary altitude of a younger generation of architects returning from the war who had absorbed Pevsner’s enthusiasm for Walter Gropius, his grid-based rationality, and his belief in anonymous teamwork. Price was also particularly influenced by Buckminster Fuller in the United States and his ways of rethinking houses, cars, and ways of life using lightweight technology. Price even collaborated with Fuller on a project for a small domed theatre in Bath that would let people in and out by rising off the ground,” but the geodesic dome was too self-determined a form for Price, even if making it movable did fit in with his idea of variability. Allied with prefabrication was the growth of services, documented in Giedion’s book Mechanisation Takes Command and then in Banhamts cri de coeur The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment." Until the late-nineteenth century there had been no wires and few pipes, and daylight provided most of the necessary illumination, so the only services to make themselves visible in buildings were the chimney stacks. All this changed quickly with lifts, electric lighting and air-conditioning, and deep plans became possible with the help of fluorescent tubes and electric fans, radically changing the massing of buildings. Although services had played little visible part in the works of the original modernist masters, Louis, Kahn in the United States took servicing as primary theme in his Richards Laboratories of 1957-60, which was composed of alternating towers of served and serving spaces. He went on with buildings like the Kimbell Museum of 1958 to ally the servicing rationale with the primary structure, giving the pipes and wires logical and systematic locations within the geometric scheme, and even confining staircases to ‘servant’ bays. Much of the point, even 80, was to have noble unblemished ‘served’ rooms, and to provide a monumental structure to which the service elements could be subordinated, tidying them up as it were, Kahn was often criticized for this monumental tendency, but it now seems the strength of his work. In contrast, Price’ great innovation with the Fun Palace was to get rid of these permanent rooms altogether, letting the servicing become the entirety of the building, so that the addition and subtraction of services became the essence of its variable life. He also negated the traditional assumption about primacy of shelter, setting everything in the open and adding roofs only where necessary. He intended to avoid thresholds by providing closure with invisible air curtains. Development of the project Price developed his ideas with leading engineer Frank Newby, and since complete variability with large elements was the goal, travelling cranes running on linear tracks became the main discipline, the spans being made as large as possible. This glorified a physical version of the Cartesian grid as the primary structure, both physically and intellectually. The developed version had fourteen 60-foot (18.3-metre) bays, each defined by four lattice columns flanking, 326The Fun Palace Project, Gentre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom SERVICE TOHERS oe acter halo enw Gedy Cope Dectesad Gh seme eee mt ¢. so Beaute sats rind cat prover Figure 14.3 Cedric Price, Fun Palace: sketches for service towers c. 1963. The towers are shown as nodes in a universal grid that can extend equally on either axis. Graphite, red and purple pencil, blue and black ink on paper 38 x 25.3 em (DR[Link], Cedric Price Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien diArchitecture/ Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal). Figure 14.4 Cedric Price, Fun Palace: sketches for vertical circulation or service towers c. 1963. This drawing shows service structures in plan, but also walkways and ramps in between. Graphite, red and purple pencil, blue and black ink on paper, 38.2 x 25.3 cm (DR[Link],, Cedric Price Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien dArchitecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal). two larger spans of 120 feet (36.6 metres) within which main elements such as auditoria could be suspended (Figure 14.6). Not only did the moving and removing of such large and heavy elements produce many problems to be solved, but also the provision of access and the appli- cation of fire-proofing. The supporting towers had to be designed to lend structural support in a variety of ways, with pipes and wires in the corners, and lifis or staircases within allowing possible connections in any direction (Figures 14.3 and 14.4). The whole way of thinking about the hardware was dominated by a systematic rhythm and systematic connections that could be made and remade. As Littlewood wanted to get away from West End theatre and all its associations, an East End site was sought, and both she and Price agreed that the Fun Palace should be set by the river. ‘Ihe first site considered was on the Isle of Dogs, taking over some derelict dockland. It seemed ideal, and Littlewood managed to gain local support, but grey bureaucracies prevailed. After that fell through, locations in Battersea and the Lea Valley were found (Figure 14.5), researched, and argued over, but despite serious and intensive lobbying from influential friends, planning permissions officially applied for, constant work to make the project more feasible and appeals to influential politicians, it all fell through, evenFigure 14.5 Cedric Price, Pun Palace: perspective for the Lea River site 1961-5. Photomechanical 3522, Cedric Price Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien dArchitecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal). print of a photomontage on Masonite board 63.3 x 121.5 cm (DR1995:018 Figure 14.6 Cedric Price, Fun Palace: typical plan 1963. his plan drawing shows the service towers, two main spans, and some secondary elements, including diagonal escalators. Ink, screentone appliqué and graphite on translucent paper, 39.4 x 69.4 cm (DR[Link], Cedric Price Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Cana I). Centre for Architecture, MontrThe Fun Palace Project, Centre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom sub-projects for pilot versions.® Such a large and controversial project requiring public funds proved vulnerable to every kind of political chicanery and bureaucratic delay; but there also seems to have been a failure of credibility owing to the sheer open-endedness of its identity as a place, In August 1964, Reyner Banham wrote: [The] Fun Palace [does not offer] any kind of monument ... It really is a kit of parts, and for months now Cedric Price, the architect involved, has been driving architectural journalists mad by steadfastly refusing to release any picture of what the Fun Palace will actually look like. He may well not know, but that doesn't matter because itis not the point. Seven nights of the week it will probably look like nothing on earth from the outside: the kit of service towers, lifting gantries and building components exists solely to produce the kind of interior environments that are necessary and fitting to what is going on.™ Price and Littlewood’ idea was that the users themselves should decide on which facilities were needed and when, and how they should be deployed. Obviously single individuals could not in a moment of whimsy move large auditoria about with travelling cranes, nor assemble halls with movable floors, walls and ceilings. Such things would require procedural planning, and Price sought to devise predictable systems that could be followed, enacted by the guardians, but without their assuming responsibility for every decision and reassuming the paternalistic model. With the help of cybernetics expert Gordon Pask, Price devised a programme based on mass user decisions determined by a punch-card system. It would calculate the preferences of the majority, changing the accommodation from day to day. The building would ‘learn’ what it wanted to be.* It would change its nature like a chameleon, even though it would have to start with a prescribed programme, with the danger that control could be manipulated by the technicians in charge. Price was ahead of the game in perceiving Figure 14.7 Cedric Price, Fun Palace: typical short section 21 April 1964. The section is dominated by the travelling crane; there was to be no gencral roof. This drawing is at a larger scale than the plan, and runs vertically through it, identifiable by the five ranks of towers. Ink, screentone appliqué and graphite on translucent paper, 38.1 x 75.1 cm (DR[Link], Cedric Price Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal).Architecture and Ritual programming as a crucial discipline and in understanding the importance of algorithms when computer-usage was yet in its infancy, the PC still twenty years away. He also prefigured the operations of today’s facilities managers, for whom the time schedule is as important as the space. The kind of popular choice he envisaged is also with us today in the running of the mass media. For example, to assess the reach of advertising, the relative popularity of commercial televis which all public schedules are designed and programmes commissioned. Today's interactive technology allows viewers to choose material and to vote in contests, even if these are narrow choices. So-called ‘reality TV’ sustains the viewers’ dreams about stepping through the screen, while the ‘celebrities’ made and perpetuated by television have become leading figures and role models in society. So in the virtual worlds of television and the web, where instant change is no problem and indeed is always expected, many aspects of the Fun Palace have come about without bodily participation. In the physical world, though, the dream of a great variable hardware was stillborn and remains largely restricted to container ports and building sites. jon programmes began long ago to be sampled, but this has now become the basis on Centre Pompidou ‘The link between the Fun Palace and Centre Pompidou is not direct, though Pompidou's architects, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, freely admit to having been influenced by Prices ideas. Both are now world figures, but in 1971 they were just young architects scratching a living with small projects, struggling to keep small offices in London and Genoa going. When the competition for an Arts Centre at Plateau Beaubourg in Paris was announced they were even reluctant to enter, considering the odds too great. ‘Ihe essential catalyst was engineer Ted. Happold, then working for Ove Arup and Partners, the world famous engineers responsible for building the Sydney Opera House. Happold saw the opportunity, persuaded the architects to join in, and paid the fee for the conditions personally. He thought they could at least make the top thirty out ofa likely entry of more than 500, and thus obtain the recompense of a token fee. The site was a then run-down area of east-central Paris adjacent to Les Halles, the great vegetable market that was being moved out to the suburbs. The ground had been cleared for use as a lorry park but could be reclaimed, allowing reconstitution of the city fabric without much need to defer to historic monuments. It was a personal initiative by President Georges Pompidou, who possessed the singular power to bestow an arts centre as a state-funded project and as a markedly populist gesture, avoiding the bureaucratic brake of local politics. From the start it was intended to include both an improved Museum of Modern Art and a major library, but it also embraced other institutions such as a design centre and the Musical Research Institute IRCAM intended to lure Pierre Boulez back from the United States. Although flexi- bility was not a primary consideration of the brief, it was on the agenda, and wholehearted embrace of it by Piano, Rogers, Arups and their team certainly helped avoid the difficulty and potential confusion of articulating a complex and constantly changing programme. Instead the architects absorbed everything within one large and generic whole, and the strong, simple idea stood out among the 681 competition entries, so that they won almost unanimously (Eigure 14.8).” The moment for the idea had come, the technical utopianism of the image having been around for a decade not only with Price but in the publications of Archigram and others,* and the idea of a big media wall had already been much discussed but was yet unbuilt: 330The Fun Palace Project, Centre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom indeed projected film had been a tool of the Russian Constructivists. Without the backing of Arups the technical plausibility of the project would almost certainly have been in question, but the young architects who turned up in jeans to see the President seem to have represented for him the new youth culture, and a notional reconciliation with the events of 1968.” Both Piano and Rogers had been interested in prefabrication and component systems: a world of grids and joints and shiny factory-made elements. This enthusiasm was shared by Happold and Peter Rice, the other main Arup engineer involved, though they took it to a larger scale, interested in the world competition in engineering large span structures like the tent roofs by Giinter Behnisch and Frei Otto for the contemporary Munich Olympics. What one might call the techno-fetishism of the Centre Pompidou was therefore present from the start, in contrast with the more purely conceptual and aesthetically reticent stance of Cedric Price. But there were certainly also echoes of the spirit behind the Fun Palace, even if the social and political engagement of the architects was looser than that of Price and Littlewood. This is from a report by Rogers: ‘The image of culture is static and elitist; our problem is to make it live to both entertain and inform ... We must all participate, not as separate watertight departments either more or less elegantly organised, but as a total centre, a new experiment ... Our building and what is around is a tool, not a rigid tailor-made architectural monument. It is fluid, flexible, easy to change, full of technical resources ... It is our belief that the people of today and tomorrow, the curators, the specialists, the amateurs, must have the possi- bility of designing their own changing needs into the building, as far as possible freed from the limitation of the architectural form. Perhaps the most important decision made by Piano and Rogers was to leave the west half of the former city block vacant as a public square (apart from the parking underneath), something attempted by hardly any other competitor. Not only did this produce the arena for public interaction that has since been lauded as an example for reawakening life in cities: it also gave their box-like building a clear front to contrast with its sides and back (Figure 14.10). Although, as with the Fun Palace, there were to be at first no doors, it allowed a degree of celebratory approach, and set some distance from which to read the intended media wall. In the official drawings originally published as part of the Architectural Review’s 21-page coverage of Centre Pompidou in 1977 - about as much page space as is ever given to any building - there are no plans of the five upper floors, only a single generic one without partitions (Figure 14.11). The reader therefore cannot tell what is library and what art gallery or design centre, how they are disposed and how partitioned, or imagine progress around the building. ‘Thus what we might for the purposes of this book call the ritual information is entirely missing, but this seems to have concerned neither the editors nor the architects, content to present the generic empty container. The essence of the design was that Piano and Rogers decided on five essentially identical upper floors each 7 metres high, and sought to achieve maximum flexi- bility with clear spans across the building's full 45 metre width (somewhat more than the Fun Palace’ intended 36.6 metres). This was achieved with gigantic trusses, which deposited the structural loads on single external columns to each side (Figure 14.14). In the other direction the great box was divided into thirteen bays each of 12.8 metres, seemingly without concern for the number, or whether it was odd or even, since the middle went uncelebrated.** InitiallyArchitecture and Ritual Figure 14.8 Piano and as submitted for the com, of Centre Pompidou with the activity square in front, are, showing the structural cage and some applied elements, milar in conception to the Fun Palace (courtesy of Richard including variable signs and Rogers). 332The Fun Palace Project, Centre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom the whole was to be sheathed in glass, set in the same plane as the structure, but fire problems and detailing issues forced a separation of layers, and Arups invented a system of ingenious structural cantilever brackets called gerberettes which allowed the development of an open external aisle on each side and permitted the main trusses to be hung on pin-joints. Within the front aisle facing the square the whole apparatus of circulation was applied, with escalators in transparent tubes climbing the fagade. On the back, in contrast, was the whole servicing system in great pipes and ducts celebrated in bright colours. The entire building and its large basement was air-conditioned by this machinery, so Banham’s ‘well-tempered environment’ ‘was a fundamental assumption. Rogers has always argued that the positioning of such sei elements on the outside makes them easier to replace, and that this can therefore be done without disturbing the interior, but it also means that the ductwork has to be fully weather- proofed and designed for show rather than thrown together in the usual expedient fashion. Although he has continued with this policy in many later projects, it has not become standard practice. Nathan Silver, in his monograph on Centre Pompidou, gives a sympathetic but sometimes harrowing account of the construction process with its uncertain budget, changes of programme, tight deadlines, and bewildering array of bureaucracies to contend with.® This taxed the young architects and their engineers to the limit. A particular French problem was getting around the system of the Bureau d'Etudes ‘Techniques, specialist offices whose role was to deal with detail and control construction, removing such duties from the architect. In a building as innovative and dependent for its identity on detail, submitting to this would have been disastrous, but the necessary presence of Arups mitigated it, though they struggled over fees, and Happold, who had started the whole thing, eventually gave up and went home. ‘There were problems of pricing the steel, tendered initially at 60 per cent over, but finally negotiated with Krupp.“ There was a need to find specialized firms of service engineers to make the pipework both weatherproof and displayable, and difficult fireproofing issues which even threatened at one stage to change steel to concrete. ‘Ihere was the potential problem of the basement rising like a boat on the water table and the possible need to flood it which violated insurance provision. The most threatening blow of all was the death of the patron, Georges Pompidou, and his replacement by Giscard d’Estaing who wanted to cancel the project, then relented with the demand that it be reduced by a floor and that the exposed services be covered.” ‘Ihe removal of the top floor was resisted on grounds of engineering integrity, and the overcladding of the services was declared possible at extra expense. In the end it did not happen, so the building came to fruition in all its expressed mechanized glory, but the ‘tention of having moveable floors had proved impossible, even the planned mezzanines between main levels were cancelled, and the intended open and doorless ground floor was closed off for security, with people queuing up to buy tickets at one main entrance. And finally there was little in the way of a media wall, because of not only expense but also issues of content and control. When first opened the building was a sensation, but it was also controversial, soon dubbed the Pompidolium because it looked like an oil refinery. Visitors flocked to it not only for the exhibitions, but especially to ride the escalator to the top and look out over Paris (Figures 14.16 and 14.17). Since it stood just above the historic height limit of 31 metres which had long ago been dictated by the capabilities of fire-fighting equipment," it gained the privilege both of seeing across the rooftops and of being visible from a distance, the twin advantagesArchitecture and Ritual Figure 14.10 Centre Pompidou as realized, seen from the well-animated square in front (author's photograph ¢. 1983), Figure 14.11 “Ty Architectural Revie al Upper Floor Plan’ with central open span and servicing in the side bays (The 977), Figure 14.12 ‘The Musée d'Art Moderne in its Figure 14.13 The entrance hall in its initial Initial form (author's photograph c. 1983). form (authors photograph c. 1983). 334The Fun Palace Project, Centre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom enjoyed in a more extreme way by the Fiffel Tower.® ‘The concentration of visitors brought life to the square below, which was soon full of acrobats, fire-eaters, ice-cream sellers and flaneurs, becoming a magnet to public life for the whole surrounding area. It created a vivid reminder of the street as public space, just at the time when architects’ interest in ‘the city’ ‘was being rekindled, with much discussion on the virtues of Nolli’s Rome plan which had included public interiors.® ‘The urban street had always been the place of public exchange, with markets, displays, entertainments, demonstrations, and every kind of public interaction, It was traditionally flexible, allowing one thing to happen one day and another the next, but modern life had reduced most city streets to domination by traffic and moved activitis indoors, often simultaneously privatizing them. ‘The creation of an open reservoir of public space outside Pompidou remains the most effective legacy from Piano and Rogers’ project, and the closest thing to fulfilling Joan Littlewood’s ideas, even though the Fun Palace had no square, since freedom of use was meant to make it politically all ‘street? ‘The Musée d’Art Moderne and library moved in to the new Pompidou and were well patronized, but the museum required queues, tickets and security staff like any other, and the prestigious modern art collection seemed rather provisionally housed (Figure 14.12). Set on free-standing screens in the great open floors without much sense of route or progression, it was dwarfed by the huge trusses looming above, and lit almost entirely by artificial light. Neither the public nor the curators were much convinced by this Spartan arrangement, and within a decade the Italian designer Gae Aulenti, later author of Paris's Quai @’Orsay Museum, ‘was brought in to effect a makeover, in other words to create the interior felt to be lacking within Piano and Rogers’ shell. As she belonged to the image-driven world of fashion and interior design, her work was at odds with Piano and Rogers’ mechanistic integrity and Arups’ structural rigour. Later just before the millennium, another much larger makeover of the museum was undertaken, closing it for two years, including the addition of new circulation routes in the centre of the building that fundamentally violated the initial concept (Figure 14.18). Some would argue that these changes proved the innate flexibility of the building, but they traduced the expected pattern of variations and possibilities. More importantly perhaps, the interchangeability of the component system ~ that dream of easy reconfiguration that lay at the centre of Price’s thinking - was not fulfilled either. Furthermore, the building has spawned no progeny but remains a one-off monument, for neither did it become the model for arts centres elsewhere, nor did it turn out to be the demonstration of an economical component system that was repeated. ‘These unfulfilled promises beg the question of whether the entire architectural philosophy was worth it, for there were undoubtedly alternatives to the abdication from questions of context and content that Piano, Rogers and Arups considered so necessary a sacrifice in pursuing the project. For example, two art museums completed just as Pompidou was first conceived provided conditions much more conducive to the display of the kind of modernist paintings possessed by the Musée dArt Moderne: The Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum at Aalborg in Denmark by Alvar Aalto (1958-72), and the Kimbell Museum at Fort Worth in the United States by Louis Kahn (1966-72) (Figures 14.19 and 14.20).** Late works by two modernist masters, both buildings reflected the optimism of a period in which there had been a harmonious relationship between abstract painting, sculpture, and architecture, when the art gallery had become a cultural building with almost sacred connotations. Both offered sequences of white rooms with variable partitions, but their dominant concern was daylight,Architecture and Ritual Figure 14.14 Centre Pompidou, cross-section, showing the long central span and side bands of servicing, but also the scale in relation to adjacent buildings (The Architectural Review 1977) Figure 14.15 ‘The entrance hall (author's photograph 2012) Figure 14.16 The escalator, now mainly used for the view of Paris, (author's photograph 2012). Figure 14.17 Sculpture court and rooftop view Figure 14.18. Refurbished gallery (author's (author's photograph 2012). photograph 2012). 336The Fun Palace Project, Centre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom long considered the optimum illumination for paint tradition of northlight windows for artists’ studios. ‘Ihe problems of colour rendering with artificial light are still unsolved,” though conservators prefer it now because the level can be precisely controlled, and exhibitions are now almost universally plunged into gloom under the assumption that all art objects are highly vulnerable to light. But the great virtue of both Aalto and Kahn's buildings is not just the inspiring quality of the light ~ that unfortunately hardly comes across in photographs ~ but that some relation to the outside world and the changing sky is perceptible, that the building exists as a kind of variable filter. Analysing the way sun angles changed through the seasons, Aalto devised claborate sections employing deep curved reflectors to bounce light from clerestory roof lights onto the display walls. Kahn, building for a lower latitude and needing greater light attenuation, devised a system of concrete vaults to allow double reflection. Both buildings are admired as much for the atmosphere they produce as for the way they present the art, and each is orientated and well related to context. Concern for sequence of display and light has given each a purposeful character that differentiates it from other building types, and from the universal kind of ‘well-tempered environment cut off from the rest of the world. This is not to claim that the architects of Centre Pompidou should have concentrated on daylight or imitated Aalto and Kahn, just to point out how the pursuit of specificity allows engagement with the expectations of users and the rituals of use, in contrast with universal buildings that in claiming to be the Jack of all trades too often turn out to be the master of none. ‘Itis internationally accepted that the use of a large open space can offer 10% to 25% more usable space than a more articulated, broken-up space” claimed Rogers, for large spans had become the holy grail of many archites ngs, and exemplified by a venerable following the universalist statements of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and his famous collage of a ‘concert hall’ superimposing a few planar walls against the photographed interior of an aircraft factory. Factories and hangars certainly need big spans to accommodate the aircraft wingspan, but nothing in Centre Pompidou forced a 45-metre span. A single line of columns down the middle could have halved it, and the columns could easily have been absorbed within library and museum. At half the length, the trusses would have been smaller, cheaper, easier to bring from Germany by train and truck, and easier to crane into place. But this would have changed both the scale of the building and the purity of Figure 14.19 Interior of Nordiyllands Figure 14.20 Gallery interior at the Kimbell Kunstmuseum at Aalborg in Denmark by Alvar Museum, Forth Worth, 1966-72, by Louis Kahn Aalto, 1958-72 (author's photograph 2006). (author's photograph 1989).Architecture and Ritual the concept, precluding many of the technical headstands for which Centre Pompidou is justly famous. For it is precisely the large span, rhetorical structural details, and expressed services that made the building the flagship of high-tech architecture, even if the original aim had been closer to the flexible, responsive, generous, social institution dreamed of by Littlewood and Price. Instead it has become a formal cultural monument in a continuing French tradition, Having decided not to monumentalize the complex and changeable programme, the architects monumentalized the technology instead, and it became a brand image which serves well in the age of the icon, Would the Fun Palace too have ended up as a monument? Certainly the technical apparatus would have been on the same scale and presumably as prominent, and it would also have been too costly for the mere ten-year lifetime predicted by Price: Piano's stated expectation with Pompidou was ‘300, 400, even 500 years.** Notes 1 Reproduced on endpapers of Joan's Book, by Joan Littlewood, London: Methuen, 1994. 2 Littlewood 1994, pp. 704-S. 3 Ibid. pp. 707-8 4 Ibid., pp. 705-6. 5 Ibid. pp. 698-701. 6 It was in 1988 that an advertising campaign by Saatchi and Saatchi described the Victoria and Albert Museum controversially as ‘an ace caff with quite a nice museum attached: 7 Littlewood 1994, pp. 65-6 8 Ibid, part 2, pp. 154-212. 9A good general summary of her career can be found in Holdsworth 2006. 10 Holdsworth 2006, pp. 81-2. 11 Littlewood cited in Mathews 2007, p. 63. 12. Mathews p. 29. 13. Taken by Mathews as an emblem and used in a chapter title, see Mathews 2007, pp. 18ff. 14 ‘Style, through conscious action, exercises choice in the use of resources to translate the mundane into the generous ... Style is perceived in the sequence of time, whether evidenced, recorded, or experienced, Human involvement, together with movement in time, is therefore integral to true style. For example, style can be found in writing, cooking and dressing since the constituent parts, to be valid, must relate to an overall process requiring the passage of time ... A key field of style is that of manners. Whereas language can contain a message without style, the delivery of such a message with style requires a common code of manners to be shared by both the dispenser and the receiver, Cedric Price 1979, reprinted in Obrist 2003, number 50 of the chapter ‘73 snacks’ (np). 15 Personal experience: I was a student there from 1966 to 1972. 16 Booker 1992. 17 Produced by Ned Sherrin and David Frost (1939-2013). It was daringly loose in form and allowed the technology to show, in a way that doubtless appealed to Price. 18 Mathews 2007, p. 43. 19 The four principals were Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett, who all went on to enjoy enormous public careers and become household names: Cook and Moore 33820 21 2 23 m4 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32. 33, 39 40 41 a 43 The Fun Palace Project, Centre Pompidou, and Paradoxical Ideas of Freedom died early but the latter two have become current establishment figures and ‘national treasures’ lampooned in their turn. See Fiona MacCarthy The Last Curtsey, 2006. In an interview of 1978: I had been invited to write the entry on Price for the book Contemporary Architects (Emanuel 1988). ‘Itis socially, politically and economically more difficult to pull down a cathedral than a mountain, see Price, ‘The Case Against Conservation, lecture extract cited in Obrist 2003, number 6 of the chapter °73 snacks, (n.p.). ‘Mathews 2007, p. 191. A characteristic and fully credible quip that T was told decades ago, but I no longer remember by whom, It still exists but has been subject to a restoration cum conversion: see Peter Blundell Jones, ‘Court Circular: Levitt Bernstein updates a modern classic, Architecture Today, February 2012, pp. 40-9. ‘Mathews 2007, p. 200. Price in Architectural Design, May 1968, p. 207, cited in Mathews 2007, pp. 198-9, his brackets Prime Minister Harold Wilson's phrase in October 1963 at the Labour Party Conference. The relationship between architecture and politics in that era is deftly described in Adam Share and Stephen ‘Thornton's book Demolishing Whitehall (2013). Saint 1987. ‘Mathews 2007, p. 26 and p. 40. Giedion 1948 and Banham 1969. Sce Blundell Jones 2002, pp. 229-40: the whole chapter is on the Kimbell Museum, Mathews (2007) explains the history in detail in Chapters 2-6 of his book on Price. For Joan Littlewood's narrative see Littlewood 1994, pp. 701-19, 727-8, 731-3, 738-41 and 750-4. Banham cited in Mathews 2007, p. 140. Long before Brands How Buildings Learn, 1994. Silver 1994, pp. 13-17. Ibid, pp. 38-47. Reyner Banham put it into context in his celebratory article ‘Enigma of the Rue Renard in The Architectural Review May 1997, pp. 277-8. Silver 1994, pp. 52-5. Ibid, p. 102. ‘The Architectural Review Vol. CLXI, No. 963, May 1977, pp. 270-94. Endless bays, extendable, is the character of a mechanical system, as opposed to the significant bay numbers of the Western Classical tradition and the Chinese tradition. More than seven bays is not perceptible without counting, and odd numbers are needed for a central entrance. AA precise and helpful summary of the technical solution is given by Arups and included in Silver 1994, pp. 132-7. Steel requires painting, so colours had to be decided, and the main idea was to code them in relation to the functions of the services within, but there was much debate; see Silver 1994, pp. 150-4, Silver 1994, Chapters 4 and 5. Ibid., pp. 112-15. + pp. 123-5.Architecture and Ritual 48 49 50 sl 52. 53 54 55 56 57 58. 340 A maximum height of 42 metres was allowed, calculated on the basis of fire access, Silver 1994, p. 100. Eloquently explained in Roland Barthes’ famous essay, in which he contrasts what one can see from the Eiffel Tower with where one can see it from: Barthes 1979. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s book Collage City was published in 1978, just after Pompidou's completion. Sennett 1992. Gae Aulenti remake mid-1980s Casabella July/August, 1985. See Mary Dejevsky, ‘France confronts a blockage in the Pom Friday 1 November 1996. Blundell Jones 2002, pp. 229-40. Jane Brox, Brilliance: The Evolution of Artificial Light, London: Souvenir Press, 2010, pp. 263-8. ‘An attitude now led by the insurance industry and their automatic imposition of stringent conditions and exaggeration of risk, ‘to be on the safe side. Rogers in Silver 1994, p. 102. Silver 1994, p. 180. iou pipe dream, The Independent,