Architecture on Paper: Cedric Price and the Scientific Aesthetic of Diagrams

Since almost twenty years, the British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003) and his project of the “Fun Palace” enjoy the recognition of a widely international community of art and architecture critics and scholars. The Swiss Pavilion now on exhibit at the 14th Architectural Biennale of Venice is only the last tribute given to his “transdisciplinary cultural center, never realized, but emblematic of our own era”, in the words of Rem Koolhaas. Nevertheless, Price’s method of representation through diagrams and his almost incomprehensible drawings, reluctant to fix upon specific forms and functions, have been identified as the main reason for the failure of his ideas. This contribution aims at stressing the importance and the uniqueness of Cedric Price’s visual language, and at contextualizing the Fun Palace’s parabola of the mid-Sixties within the sequence of projects inspired by forms borrowed from Natural Science and Genetics, which characterized three decades of the 2nd post-war architecture.