Cedric Price Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Cedric Price (1934-2003) was a British architect and one of the most influential thinkers of postwar architecture, more through his ideas than his buildings. His Fun Palace, designed with the theatre director Joan Littlewood, imagined a flexible, ever-changing building for leisure and learning, and inspired the Centre Pompidou. Among his few built works is the Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo, a tensile structure of aluminium and steel mesh.

Stone, Cambridge and the AA

Price was born in Stone, Staffordshire, in 1934. He studied architecture at St John’s College, Cambridge, and at the Architectural Association in London, and worked briefly for Erno Goldfinger and Denys Lasdun before setting up his own office in 1960.

Fun Palace and Thinkbelt

From 1961 he worked with Joan Littlewood on the Fun Palace, a framework of cranes, moveable decks and services that users could reconfigure. In 1966 he proposed the Potteries Thinkbelt, a mobile university on disused railway lines in Staffordshire. Neither was built, but both shaped ideas of indeterminate, adaptable architecture.

Built work and legacy

With Lord Snowdon and the engineer Frank Newby he designed the Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo (1964). His InterAction Centre in Kentish Town (1977) was a rare built version of his ideas, and the Generator project for Florida explored a building that could rearrange itself. Price died in London in 2003, and his archive is held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.