Capital of Feedback: Cedric Price’s Oxford Corner House (1965–66)

The body of work by British architect Cedric Price (1934–2003) is largely concerned with architecture’s relationship to technology and its impact on society. As contemporary architecture finds itself confronted with similar issues today, Price’s designs are being revisited and hailed for their prospective and inventive visions. As such, it seems timely to ask if Price’s designs can be regarded as precedents for future projects that aim to couple participation and technology through architectural design.


In this article, I depart from the economic logic of today’s digital platforms to analyse the participatory elements Cedric Price designed for Oxford Corner House (1965–66) to be ‘self-participatory entertainment’. As user participation has gradually been capitalised on through the evolution of digital technologies, I argue that the conditions for what participatory architecture entails have changed in turn. Whereas Price regarded the transfer of information as an activity for users of the Oxford Corner House to engage with freely, the operation of today’s digital platforms instead suggests that such activities are entirely facilitated in order to retrieve information from its users. In order to make this argument, I look at how Cedric Price envisioned digital technologies to sustain participation and in turn how he understood the concept of user participation and its relation to the architectural programme.

where users are referred to as 'participants'. 15 Here terms such as leisure, education, fun and knowledge are related to the concepts of emancipation and transformation through learning. 16 Price's projects from the 1960's respond to the situation created by the economic aftermath of World War II that prompted a social transformation in British society. As the automation of labour through technological advancement came to mean more free time, post-war workers were buying TV sets and going on holiday. 17 Work was no longer restricted to 'making a living' and instead provided the means to individualise workers through what they consumed. 18 However, due to the lack of industrial renewal, Britain's work market was offering few opportunities for highly skilled workers. To Price this was above all a crisis in the education system, which he believed to be completely detached from any 'economic usefulness'. 19  to the school's educational programme. 13 In her book on Cedric Price, Tanja Herdt argues that Price drew on these ideas for laying out the organisational framework in future projects that involved responsive planning. 14 However, by not directly involving

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The field of cybernetics that emerged after World War II influenced Price's work on circularity. In an interview from 2000, Cedric Price argued that, if realised, the Fun Palace would have been the first cybernetic building in the world. 28 As a trans-disciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems in machines and animals, cybernetics has influenced all disciplines concerned with feedback and circular causality. 'Wherever the cybernetician looks he sees phenomena of control and communication, learning and adaption, self-organisation, and evolution' and in that sense, cybernetics can easily be adopted across disciplines. 29 The field of cybernetics got its name from mathematician Norbert Wiener's 1948 book

Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the
Animal and the Machine, which refers to the etymological origin of cybernetics, Kybernetes in Greek, meaning to 'steer' and the inherent possibility of gaining control. 30 In computer science, the analogous vocabulary of cybernetics illustrates the link to natural processes: storage is analogous to memory, data retrieval to remembering and computers to brains. Price's proposal for the Olympic Village of the 1972 Olympics included a 'Village Brain', shown to be 'thinking' in figure 1, to serve as a 'multimessage totem capable of informing, delighting and responding to the activities of the inhabitants', showing how he believed distribution of information to be circular. 31 Price described how the structure of the Fun Palace would be able to 'learn' behavioural patterns and in that sense 'plan' for future activities by processing accumulated data. 32 In addition to equipping the users of the Fun Palace with new skills and experiences, encouraging uncertainty and spontaneity in the programme also served the purpose of supplying the 'Pillar of Information', a punch card storage system, with enough varied data to start forming anticipation of user behaviour. 33 Using an IBM 360/30 computer to compile data in order to parents of the interwar years. 'Unfettered by tradition -scholastic, economic, academic or class', the programme for Oxford Corner House was, like the Fun Palace, designed for the socially restricted worker to overcome the control mechanisms and consumption of 'free time'. 22 As such, participation in Price's vocabulary is associated with learning as a kind of re-learning, as he believed workers would have to adapt to changing conditions to benefit society.
Price stressed the importance of large degrees of 'indeterminacy' in developing adaptability to accommodate economic uncertainties. 23    to facilitate Cedric's belief that an instantaneous architectural response to a particular problem is too slow'. 41 Characterised as a kind of self-organising organism, the Fun Palace has been similarly described as 'an abstract machine which, when activated by users, was capable of producing and processing information'. 42 The same way Littlewood hoped to wake up 'men and women from factories, shops and offices, bored with their daily routine', so that 'they no longer accept passively whatever happens to them, but wake to a critical awareness of reality', Price was generating action in user and building by avoiding boredom. 43 Other projects were also showing the influence of systems thinking. For the 1966 Potteries Thinkbelt project, Price envisioned a large-scale educational network for twenty thousand students. Emphasising the causal relationship between knowledge and production, the project linked education to human experience and 'the capacity for interaction'. 44 In a proposal for a livestock pen Price showed how physical space can be arranged as circuits, each unit depending on its relation to the adjoining one.      Afterwards 'the programme is fed first laying down the sequence for the multiplicity of calculations LEO will perform, next the standing orders from overstocking and to eliminate imprecise planning. 78 In Oxford Corner House, form was influenced by information retrieved from users, in such a way that the floorplan would be arranged according to how users would access information. Like the use of LEO for management purposes, the programme for Oxford Corner House was organised as a facilitator of reliable flows of telecommunication for the design to constantly change according to the activity of its users.

Activity is information
Price's vision to 'strategically and with minimal physical means reorganise systems toward more socially productive ends' was encouraged by clients who were eager to make use of the new digital technologies. 79  proposed that the 'the only way to work with participation would be to make it implicit in a building, to make it almost invisible'. 100 Price referred to radio shows that ask their audience for input: 'which makes for rather cheap radio but very dull listening for the rest of the population' as a way of agreeing with De Carlo, saying that 'at the moment it's almost a little dictum of right thinking people to allow everyone to participate'. 101 How Price would have responded to the prospect of smart cities and invisible data monitoring, we cannot know, but in many of his projects, he pointed towards an inbuilt and planned 'obsolesce', in order to prevent his proposals to outlive their timeliness.
Price provided his projects with lifespans of about ten years: for the Fun Palace, he stated that it 'must last no longer than we need it'. 102