Imagegen-nation
The Fun Palace
(-1964- )
with riches when peasants occupy
Joan Littlewood's to-be project was yet another outlet for Cedric Price, whose deux-force contributions, are remembered as sporadically as the dotted lines
Popov & David (2015)
What exactly is the Fun Palace?
This is something many scholars, which ourselves, as its juniors at Concordia University, Montreal, consider
in our weekly classes (2022-2023) SOCI 650: Welcome to the Fun Palace with the Minecraft Cabal,
and unstoppables Dr. Bart Simon and Dr. Darren Wershler.
Not "by what it is, but by what it is not"
Wigley (2017)
Regenerative Potential
Developed by the people that use it
Wigley (2017)
Bonet-Miró (2021)
Planned Obsolescence
Bonet-Miró (2021)
Instrument for raising the social consciousness
In collaboration with
Three Strikes, You're In?
20:40 10/22/2022
"Anything seemed possible"
in the 60s, wrote Mathews (2003:1). He wasn’t wrong.
There was the moon landing, the colourized television, and the birth of Sesame Street (Bivins n.d.). As such, it is a shock – 58 years after its conception – to realize that when an epitome of fun, educative play, and change came along, it was not on the list of those late 60s milestones. This ‘change’ was Joan Littlewood’s Fun Palace, which founded itself on the pillars of identity, citizenship and
“education [for the working class which Joan viewed] was the key to a more egalitarian society” (Hardingham 2016:48).
Came along with her, was Cedric Price, who structured his philosophy with the enabling of human activity and the what-ifs of social life (Landau 1985). The accessibility of such project would have enabled, alongside artificial clouds and the literal modification of the Palace’s rooms to form or merge spatial enclosures, a “university of the streets” (Littlewood and Price 1968:130).
What then, were the major barrier to the success of the Fun Palace?
To understand this, I looked through a collection of news articles from the 1960s on the Fun Palace from the Canadian Centre of Architecture. Essentially, the Palace was not disliked so much because it was ‘new’, but because its existence and non-existence (being put up for 10 years to be taken down later) challenged the ‘old’. These traditions were of the repressive state apparatuses (Althusser 1970) of the 1960s, segmented here into three main oppositions of the Palace: the Church and the school, the media, and the conservative, solemn climate that was post-war England. As I will argue, the Fun Palace prevailed in its ability to answer the questions posed by these institutions, albeit without much recognition at the time of its struggle. Ultimately, these three oppositions reduced the Palace to nothing but a “spark of an idea” (McKerron 1966). It was this spark however, that is relit by newer generations, ironically with the same tools used by the oppositions that tried to take the Palace down. Eventually, a 21st century climate of accessible education, more autonomy from traditional institutions, and creativity in everyday life became reminiscent of the Fun Palace, reversing the ‘three strikes’ that wanted the project forever out of our existence and our lives.
I. The Church and the School
After multiple searches, the site of the Fun Palace was finally set for the Lea Valley. Needless to say, Littlewood and Price were not the only ones whose eyes were set for these lands. The “first battle over the £30m. Lea Valley scheme”, reports The Stratford Express (n.d.), was between the Palace and the St. Mark and St. John Teaching Training College. Promoted as a college for , emboldened by the article, the reader leaves questioning the educative contributions that a place with the name of ‘The Fun Palace’ would possess over a teacher training college. Unfortunately for them, Littlewood and Price had an answer for this. As a Palace, its halls would be occupied with activities such as rental music instrument booths, great information panels, and Japanese-ceramic workshops (Littlewood and Price 1964; 1968). The goal was to jettison learning from its “exclusive and elitist” (Mathews 2003:105) tower, grounding it into a “creative and educational outlet” (106) that, from archived notes, will have “no editing or art… [allowing us to] see what is really going on” at zoos, coal mines, Army hostels, clubs, forests, and docks (CCA n.d.). As such, the Palace would have been the “democratize[d] education” (Mathews 2003:105) whereby the entire world was the classroom, broadcasted for everyone to see and view. Eating away the space of the universally fun school for one that held just 1,000 – or rather (and offensively) its ‘playing fields’ – when Price was asked about this,
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(The Stratford Express n.d.).
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The second battle occurred, per the North London Press (1965),
on the grounds that it was to be built “beside a church.”
Love thy neighbour as thyself, a Parish preaches.
Know about what your neighbours are really up to, the Palace promotes. With the screening of third spaces (Oldenburg 1995) across England, we are all able to “instructively and innocently” (CCA, n.d.) break the boundaries between work and home, serving up what Rayner Banham, one of the figures of the Palace project, called a ‘city as scrambled egg’. With the mixing of domestic and business, the Palace offers a “network of activities that [could have] eroded” (Holdsworth 2009:294) our divisions of life. And so, for the Church, whose duty it was to enforce the divisions of the Christian in service from his parishioners and God, the Christian in the community and his respected elders, and the Christian at home with the father at the head of the table, a religion of fun and anti-hierarchy meant that one’s choices could now be devoted to a “laboratory of fun” (Landau 1985:3).
Worse, Littlewood’s beliefs that “if a new idea comes up, then [a new tech to accommodate it] is brought in and something else goes out” (Fiddick 1965) is troubling for its neighbouring institutions. It was struggling to believe that anybody was “going to put up a thing like [the Fun Palace]… and then knock it down” (North London Press 1965) anyway. What would this say about the state institutions next door? How would a school with headmaster portraits, uniforms, and books, least of all a Church, establish its power if centuries-old bibles and garments were simply ‘thrown out’ and replaced if someone found a ‘better’ alternative? As such, the Fun Palace was strongly resisted by traditional institutions not because it was an obstacle, but because it was an offensive one. As Giddens (1991) proposes, advancements that destabilizes institutional norms are a dangerous thing to both the power and core of the institution.
II. The Media
The Fun Palace had “nowhere to go”, headlined Judy Hillman (1966), except to the papers. It was a common descriptor of Joan Littlewood that she was always working on something amorphous, secretive, or revolutionary (Bolton Evening News 1969). As someone in pursuit of “science-with-clownery” (Fiddick 1965) who has no land – thanks to the Church, the school, and its people – headlines of these opposing voices commonly made appearances. As a result, “even [money] difficulties have arisen”, writes Anne Taylor, in Slow Struggle for Super Park (The Observer 1965).
Of her three essentials, Littlewood’s efforts to mastermind the non-containing ‘cover’ of the Fun Palace over its visitors (autonomy with no/minimal authority), the much resisted sell of impermanence, and attaining funds “loaned by firms” (Fiddick 1965), I would like to argue that a potential fourth was the Media. Writing on these struggles, Jane McKerron (1966) summarizes the impact of this missing essential:
Frayn (1964) wrote in his article that he “know[s] what a Fun Palace is,
but it’s damned difficult to explain to” people like Mr. Fitzgerald
what it is. A place of culture or sports it wasn’t exactly (and ironically
a place of ‘nonsens[ical]’ fun would have been a closer guess), so the
only other option was “a house of prostitution.” While this was satire,
it would be naïve to assume that no one thought this way.
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For instance, The Observer (1963) wrote of a conference where Littlewood’s “Theatre of the Future” was portrayed as “some sort of” thing. Whatever thing it really was did not matter; the article bolded a section under “waste of time”, painted the event with confusion as certain members needed some translation during the event that was irrelevant to the pitch, and ended the column with a quote from Mr. Fitzgerald in the crowd, who saw the Palace as an “absolute bloody nonsense”. A conflict between the media and words from Littlewood and Price in their brochures did not play well for the working-class, whose opinions, won over by the media’s louder voice, “heard the Fun Palace would be open 24 hours a day” (Hampstead & Highgate Express, 1965). To their concern, this noise and activity would disturb whatever rest they had between making ends meet (Hillman 1966). If the Fun Palace relied on being understood by what it was not (Wigley 2017), then the media had failed. Understanding the role of theatre, polity, and citizenship in such a controversial structure was not a task that was of interest to them. By confusing “process with a substance” (Bankston and Zhou 2002:289), where the Fun Palace as a process of social capital was instead seen as a product of things which were “new and… did not really fit the rule book” (Hillman 1966), a “tautology in judging” (Bankston and Zhou 2022:290) was formed that arguably led to the project’s stagnation: it’s that place where people went to “get fun”, when in fact, you (already) “have fun” (Frayn 1964).
III. Serious Society
The resistance from the media and state institutions pressed on the changes that came with the Fun Palace. While novelty can be challenging, I would argue that it was the very nature of these changes in “response to the social and economic crises that plunged post World War II England” (Mathews 2003:107) that was the pedaller of this push-back. Fun was not something fun to talk about.
Concerns amidst the 60s on leisure was a serious thing, especially with sociologists who pursued the camp that leisure meant the time for crime. As a sociologist, seeing Littlewood mention us so many times in news articles and notes from the archives was refreshing (Fiddick 1965; Driberg 1965; Littlewood and Price 1968). And so, to suggest how the Fun Palace could have answered a serious society as the last publicized opposition, I will mention two key sociologists on the ‘play’ in everyday life.
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The first is Bernard Suits, whose famous tale of the grasshopper (1978) and the ants questioned the purpose of why we worked so hard as ‘ants’ during the ‘summer’ of our prime, middle-aged years. Was it worth it to “build the building first and then find the fun afterwards” (Frayn 1964)? After all, it’s not that we have to find the fun in work, since everyone is secretly a grasshopper – already knowing how to have fun – rather, it is the labour of learning how to have fun WITH the work. In any case, for the cynic in Frayn’s article (1964), the restless summer is the winter – it is not fun because we haven’t set foot in the built Palace. There is a clear barrier in the philosophy of working for the fun. However, Price operated on the philosophy of enabling (Landau 1985), meaning that architecture was a means of “believing” (6) whatever it was the user wanted to become throughout that space – even before the building is completed. How can construction workers of a to-be ballroom or an office complex ‘have fun’ from hammering their boards in a collective rhythm, inserting nails as Dracula fangs, or just telling jokes during construction? The architecture, answers Price, “enables human activity” (4) while “also work[ing] for” them (6).
The summer in this case, is the partaking, the viewing from afar, the speculating, and the imagining of the Palace.
We are the sun. As long as we are convinced that “life is not just a delayed action H-bomb”, writes Ritchie Calder (1964:17), then we are to “engage imagination and enlarge experience” (CCA, n.d.).
Then, there was Erving Goffman (1959), whose theoretical cynic of performances in social encounters gets a little further in doubting the ‘fun’ of everyday life. If one realizes we must pretend, or worse, that everyone is pretending and playing ‘parts’ in order to get things done, then what other use is this existential dread than to just engage with it? If the working class of Joan’s Palace had to be subservient and sexual in her brothel job, return home to her three young children energetic, innocent, and wholly loving, and sleep with her husband’s command, more subservient and more sexual, then what is she in this “theatre like no other” (McAndrew 2019:134)?
The key here was that the Palace was not a stage to play around “major social problems” (Popov and David 2016:11), but the set to break out the “passivity and apathy” with the tools and skills of the Palace. It was open-air, scaffolded, and exposed, leading people to enter and exit, now with self-confidence, skills, and a “place in the life of polity” (Holdsworth 2007:303). There was no containment to the social encounters or fronts people used to represent themselves (Goffman 1959). A structure of inattention, in Goffmanian terms (1961), would not persist, because the Palace was foremost not a structure but “enclosures” (Bolton Evening News 1969), and its encounters were “expendable & changeable” (CCA n.d.).
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In all of these sociological takes on ‘play’, the championing promise of the Fun Palace was its non-seriousness. Easily adjustable, vibrant, and impermanent, seeing such “buildings of heavyweight [being dismantled meant the same for] tradition and promises of future glory” (Vodanovic 2016:134). Outside the Palace, people had played so much seriousness from the norms of conservativism, the roles of the War, and the divisions of institutional and private life. The Palace was therefore a chance at taking off the “straitjacket [of the city prisoner] to total use and enjoyment” (Littlewood and Price 1968:129).
Three Strikes – You’re In?
After three opposing forces, the Fun Palace project stopped its building. Today, sewage storm tanks rest on the original site, won over by the engineers of the Greater London Council who pitched its importance of “public health [over] public pleasure” (Hillman 1966). Today, we know better with mental health that opportunities of pleasure are as important as the ones for health. Seriousness in society continues, but there are moments of fun to be had without the impositions of the institutions. With a “theatre like no other” (McAndrew 2019:134), we have phones and tablets where information and entertainment sources in equal measure allow us as “audiences [to] change the course of [our] play’s action” (Daily Mail 1965). For the school, we have pushed for holistic and digital learning into classrooms without walls – things the Fun Palace would have offered – and now ‘playing fields’ no longer ate up space of other construction. They are integrated into textbooks as class activities and classrooms as mats and corners for play. For the media, we have achieved the ability to do citizen journalism, where funsters of the Palace would have “enjoy[ed] a sense of identity with the world about him” (Price and Littlewood 1968:131) through the unedited screens of “what is really going on” (CCA n.d.). Ironically, it is this repressive state apparatus (Althusser 1970) that has recently been used to expose the controversies of another repressive state ideology: the Catholic Church.
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Perhaps it is the eventual changes of these once immovable institutions that is the Fun Palace’s strongest testimony for its cause. Although the Palace never set its foundations on the grounds of the Lea Valley, the foundations behind it has grounded the world stage. With the myriad of fun we can now have in the 21st century while partaking in “creative and educational” (Mathews 2003:106) activism and change,
we have not only brought the Palace
back, but we ourselves are arguably
now, back in it.
– CONCLUSION
Stairs to Know Where
19:57 10/26/2022
the Fun Palace still had to contend with what Ozkoc (2009:27)
identified as two “major social issues” during the 1960s:
“education and productive use of leisure time”.
While Littlewood made clear her distinction for an education
with the “learning out of it” (Hardingham 2016:48), things were
less clear for Price, who still found learning a “preferred term…
as part of an on-going self-directed process”. This was not the only time Price held strands of convention and revolution together.
By coming to redefine the role of the architect, Ozkoc (2009) argues that Price held some variation of Nathaniel Coleman’s utopia, where the architect designs based on their critical interpretations of what is observed. Simultaneously, the process from design to building must not perpetuate the needs of capitalist society, such as elitism, inaccessibility, and inequality. This was Tafuri’s (1976) call to abandon such utopia from architecture entirely. As such, what Ozkoc (2009) calls the ‘social imagination’ for utopian architects can no longer “utiliz[e] contemporary potentials… in service of” the architect, but instead for those who will use and live inside this architecture. Thus, Price came up with the balance to address these architectural conflicts through the use of pathways, as “lifts and stairs and… steel walkways” (Hardingham 2016:55).
In this essay, I examine the use of pathways in helping Price figure out his social imagination (Ozkoc 2009) through architectural dilemmas, which then provide for the mobility of the public’s social consciousness, and finally, to pave the way for engaging socialization amongst the funsters. In essence, these paths on their own are like stairs to nowhere. Yet through Price’s efforts, they became stairs to know where – to possess a mobility with meaning – for those whose designs, usage, and play is possible because of such pathways.
Although a pioneer
in its time,
I. Walking the Middle Path
Ozkoc (2009) remarks that patterns, from 1960s architectural wisdom, are a “system of interrelated ideas that function as guidelines for the development and organization of design concerns” (7).
In order to realize this, a form must be produced. The key difference is that patterns “do not require total or actual realization” (7-8), being used interchangeably as ideas and representations of the project, whereas the latter requires a concrete realization because it is physical the moment it is drawn on paper or built on land. With a concern that architecture feeds onto the evolution of capitalism, Tafuri (1976) argues that architecture must be stripped from any political intentions which can later come to influence and instill political power (Winner 1980). By this logic, Price’s intended pattern for the Palace as a “transformable structure of human activity” (Mathews 2003:9) meant that the transformation was the human activity itself, and not the structures. In other words, a social imagination informed by a philosophy that enabled human activity (Landau 1985) was not enough – it also had to be enabled by design. As such, “form production and imagery had been a rather delicate subject in Price’s designs”, Ozkoc notes (2009:19), feeding off views like Tafuri’s (1976) that creations must possess a “sublime uselessness” (100) or else they will continue to perpetuate capitalist hegemony and, in order to protest this, nothing should be built.
Building nothing was impossible for Price and Littlewood, whose dreams it was for the Palace to be built as a useful “instrument for raising the social consciousness of the working class” (Popov and David 2015:11). Instead of abandoning patterns, Price made people themselves the pattern. This allowed for the form of the Palace – whatever and however political it may be – to truly reflect “the requirements of the social actors” (Ozkoc 2009:19). People would be able to find their “place in the life of the polity” (Holdsworth 2007:303) with and without the Palace. This way, the form of the Palace is not contained to politics, because without the funsters, the Palace is not a form, but simply remains a pattern – it is a large amorphous scaffolding with booths, flooring, and semi-rooms pegged together by the idea of what could be political, could be social, could be fun.
With “moving walkways, catwalks and radial escalators” (CCA n.d.) installed throughout the Palace, this mobility ensured that “movement and random pedestrian grouping [reigned free] yet [this was also] capable of programming” (CCA n.d.). Alike the famous dotted lines of the Fun Palace pamphlets, this balance between form and pattern provided a guideline rather than an instruction, reflecting what Price practiced as creating order through social design (Popov and David 2015). Through participation inside the Palace the funsters are building the building with their social patterns (Ozkoc 2009), as they are individually the forms that give the Palace its Fun-ness, echoing Price’s belief that clients’ social organization is itself the building (Popov and David 2015:13). After all, people do not ‘get’ the fun from the Palace as a form, as Frayn (1964) notes; they already have it in them as funsters (Hardingham 2016) of the Fun Palace, whence they “have [fun]” (Frayn 1964) together. Therefore, since the objects, booths, and activities are up to the shaping of those who use it, it is natural that a vagueness of the Palace’s form leaves outsiders asking
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(Lewis 1965)
Fig. 1 Hardingham (2016:59)
While cranes and scaffolding are obvious answers, radial escalators are one of the more noticeable forms which archived notes and sketches provide (see Fig. 1). Although the escalators are a physical structure, the mobility it has in itself (being radial) and provides (funsters can travel up and down) perfectly embody the dotted lines: it is Price’s calculated uncertainty of an embodied “progress that… never wants, a particular goal in any physical terms” (Bonet-Miro 2021:36). While the escalator is conjoined and based on physical floors and walls, its intrinsic quality of a mobility without a destination liberates it from having a “particular goal” as utopic forms were criticized to possess (Tafuri 1976). Simply put, for the escalator, it is stationed by its mobility. For funsters, they are mobile by being stationed into situations. Staircases and pathways are only “blueprints for achieving social objectives” (Popov and David 2015:11), so it is not responsible for the formation or completion of these objectives. It is the funsters who leave these steps possessing a mobility with intentions in “physical terms” (Bonet-Miro 2021:36). With places, people, and things to see and do, it is the pattern of the social funster that is being motioned by the form of the escalators, hammering Price’s belief that a client’s social organization is itself the building (Popov and David 2015:13).
II. Social Mobility
As such, these pathways helped Price to establish a social imagination (Ozkoc 2009) that is inspired but not imposing. The pathways give mobility, but the people are the ones who do the moving. Logistically, in an effort “to coordinate ‘variable’ learning… for up to 55,000 people daily”, Hardingham (2016:56) proposes that carefully “positioning the enclosures to create the necessary ‘affinity’ of activities” (56) was possible with the use of rotating escalators. For Littlewood and Price, a “responsive, improvisational architecture” (Mathews 2003:7) would help “people find their own routes… [to and] for enjoyment” (102).
This was the use of “junctions as a decision point” (CCA n.d.), whereby an “intersection of… [reflecting one’s position by] stopping observation and [achieving a self-direction from this] decision point” (Hardingham 2016:69) allows for two kinds of social mobility.
The first is the mobility of social consciousness, for which escalators would have answered Littlewood’s search for an “instrument… to release [funsters] from the grip of passivity and apathy” of a life with increased leisure time (Popov and David 2016:11). It is noteworthy that social class was not what was to be raised and realized here, but one’s awareness of all things social, which included class. During the 1960s, the Left’s growing popularity and critique against affluence (Middleton 2014) meant that class was to be determined by whether one pursued a better life with snobbery or humbleness. A common belief was that the working class’ betterment of life was seen as an attempt to be bourgeois because of affluence.
Interestingly, when two sociologists John Goldthorpe and David Lockwood interviewed these families in their Luton Study, they did not focus on dispelling the ‘bourgeois’ title – which came with a negative connotation of ungratefulness – but instead, they focused on arguing that affluence was not the cause. Eventually, the transcripts were weighed with a “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” (Lawrence n.d.) when researchers found themselves torn between deciphering affluence from amicability: did this interviewee’s housewife provide for me an afternoon tea set and a sandwich tower because they are being polite, or because they wanted to portray upper-class politeness? Perhaps it was both, but this did not matter because the “meticulously recorded… workings [of] who appeared to display middle-class taste” were dichotomized into the ‘bad’ bourgeoise, or the ‘good’ worker (Lawrence n.d.). Instead of studying class attitudes of the families as they set out to do, readers were left with the class attitudes of the researchers.
Fortunately, this conundrum is free from the Fun Palace, where everything available – no matter its class connotations – were accessible by pathways. Rustic scaffolding for the ape-like climbers of the working class, modest restaurants for the middle, and the enclosed hall of lavish upper-class instruments were all conjoined by observation decks, ramps, and corridors. As well as removing the “exclusive and elitist” (Mathews 2003:105) judgements of class in one’s accessibility to resources, pathways provided a gradient of experience that ensured “equality on various scales” (Ozkoc 2009:25).
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No matter the activity, everyone entering, traversing, and exiting the Palace would be subjected to something arguably innate and therefore classless – playfulness (Suits 1978). More than this, a mobility in the deterministic view that class is identifiable by one’s possessed objects would have occurred. For instance, the suspended squared-enclosure in Zone 2 where theatre and music recitals were to reside also provided for those standing below in Zone 1, a place of shade, quietness, and peace. Price framed these convergences with the use of ramps, ladders, and stairs – all pathways (CCA n.d.). As mobility veined across the Palace, taking with it the diverse crowds who use them and their various social consciousnesses, the “social function [of classed things, and things as class would] chang[e], [but] not their nature” (Huizinga 1938, qtd. in Caillois 1961:59).
Thus, things remain as they were, yet the transformation of it starts and ends with
the social pattern “of human activity” (Mathews 2003:9). Thus, class should not be associated to an affluence to or influence of things. This revelation would have come about for any observing sociologist, thanks to the pathways which would demonstrate this over and over again. Fixating on affluence or class as the explanation of people wanting a better life was a myopic and vain pursuit. A new social consciousness hints that people are just polite because they want to be polite, to possess things because they are meaningful and not because they are all materialistic, or to move towards nicer, upper-class-associated things with more social functions not for power, but for the same unchanging nature of the things themselves: to satisfy a need.
III. Mobilizing Sociality
This leads to the second form of social mobility, following Price’s desire for “personal growth and civil awareness of the masses” (Popov and David 2016:12). Commenting on Price’s approach to the Fun Palace, Wigley (2017) notes that everything for him was movement: the funsters, the walls, floors, and pathways all move toward each other and together. Therefore, it was important that the architecture not only served the people using them, but that they also strengthened the funsters whose social interaction and needs make the Fun Palace, the Fun Palace. Pathways invite people into focused encounters (Goffman 1961) of social interaction, and on the way towards these engagements, the walls and railings of the path outline a structure of inattention (Goffman 1961) that provides for this. The ability to bump into people with brown-clayed hands from pottery class, their neighbours, and excited strangers meant that funsters, like the Palace, were not determined “by what they are, but by what they are not” (Wigley 2017).
They were not workers or
bourgeois; everyone was a possible artist,
a possible friend, and altogether,
this formed a possibility
of a meaningful social experience.
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Anyone could with these paths, “try starting a riot or begi[n] a painting – or just lie back and stare at the sky” (Hardingham 2016:47), meaning that the stairs led them to
know where they could go if they wanted to be or do something.
Stairs to Know Where...
Pathways have been instrumental in not only dispelling the architectural dilemma of the 1960s, but also for an architect who went on to create a site with these pathways to actualize the true pillars of the project: the social patterns of the people it was built for (Ozkoc 2009). After helping Price realize his social imagination, these pathways would have given funsters a middle ground between “pleasure and learning” (Hardingham 2016:47) in the joy of walking an exciting path of ambiguity that did not exclude access to experiences based on class. As such, these paths were “stairs to nowhere” in particular, since a route pointing to the Zone 2 enclosure, for instance, will be defined of what it is by the person who will use it per their individual consciousness, and not the stipulated one of their class. Conversely, these pathways give funsters the knowledge to “know where” they stand socially. If they desired for friends, for rest, or for activities, the social encounters inside these junctions can act as a decision point (CCA n.d.) for the individual. Ultimately, the overlooking realization for Price’s solution, the escalation of funster’s social consciousness, and the conjoining of people’s sociality
makes pathways the Fun
of this resourceful Palace.
– CONCLUSION
Stages of Blocking
16:27 09/27/2022
Joan Littlewood's to-be project was yet another outlet for Cedric Price, whose deux-force contributions, are remembered as sporadically as the dotted lines
What
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- foundations of fun, grids not blocks
--- minecraft grid makes it modern (quote Simon/Wershler)
--- gives it a pulsating limit of opportunity, egg to break
--- Camden blocks were see through, inventory of this activity will occupy these many blocks. Think of chess, grid, but about moves despite not moving. Lego blocks.
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- holdsworth (2007) on space from Lefebvre (1976) that space is never always empty... it is waiting to be socially used
- meanings rise and remain in spaces
- can reinflect political meanings
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- Play grounds (connor 2008)
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- Different from Camden and 24/7 economic living toy
- Then experiment in freedom
- To FP of amorphous space, goffman defined.
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construction and scaffolding shown as part of the space
Look at Popov on play
The Crime
16:27
In sociology, work and leisure long debate.
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Look to Perera (2020): Wicked Problems, Wicked Play
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- FP was to rejuvinate and get people out; or this was its political string people pulled out of at the time (supplement photos)
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- but the palace itself was a crime, people did not like it (see news)
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- The crime here is