Prefabrication experiments - 273 - fabricating worlds - 04 - The Fun Palace

Sometimes referred to as twentieth century cathedrals, skyscrapers spanned precipitously and used materials to their limit states, in the same way the ribbed vaults and flying buttresses of the middle ages did. Technology evolved significantly during the first half of the twentieth century making possible the construction of commercial buildings at never before seen scopes and scales. New materials and methods offered potentials for a burgeoning service economy demanding agility and flexibility. The open and free planning of floor plates resulted directly from the removal of load bearing walls replacing them with distanced slender posts and beams. Moreover, spans made from mass produced, repeatable and scalable components could be expanded in all directions. The tall buildings’ modular skeletons were adaptable to any use and inspired new urban visions based on office blocks as great evolving machines for a serviceable urbanity. 

This type of programmable urban and civic infrastructure inspired even further reflection on technology’s role in the construction of civic infrastructure. Cedric Price's Fun Palace is perhaps the emblem of using technology to shape adaptable social interactions free from classic civic conventions. A metallic cathedral erected to unite folks to learn and experiment with developing techniques and theories. Even its name denotes great exhibit palaces of the 19th century; The Crystal Palace (1851), a conservatory showcased the way forward for modern building culture. In the Fun Palace, Price along with theatre director Joan Littlewood conceived an open framework for exploring and communicating knowledge.  

Cedric Price argued for a common architecture that reformed archaic civic and social conventions. In Price's work, technology was the backdrop, an open building framework for stimulating spatial and social possibilities. The Fun Palace's reticulated skeletal megastructure was proposed as a completely open plan that could be assembled on any suitable site and disassembled to be erected later in another context. The prefabricated kit-of-parts contributed to constructing the ideal of adaptable structures: flexible, malleable and mutable. The Fun Palace's skeletal structure was a complete revolution and foreign from the massive and classic civic buildings of the past; architecture was stripped of its permanent monumentality and represented a way forward to adapt to a constantly shifting world.

Cedric Price's Fun Palace rendering