Cedric Price

Architect-thinker who built little but whose influence was talismanic

Cedric John Price, architect: born Stone, Staffordshire 11 September 1934; Sole Principal, Cedric Price Architects 1960-2003; died London 10 August 2003.

The architect Cedric Price was frequently described, not inaccurately, as a "visionary" and a "radical". He hated the terms. "I'm only radical because the architectural profession has got lost," he insisted. "Architects are such a dull lot - and so convinced that they matter." Price built very little - the aviary at London Zoo, designed in collaboration with Lord Snowdon and the engineer Frank Newby was his most significant completed work - yet his influence on British architecture over four decades was enormous, and will continue to resonate in years to come.

He was born in Stone, Staffordshire, in 1934, the son of the architect A.G. Price and his wife Doreen (née Emery). His brother, David, also became an architect and remains in practice - a sister predeceased him. A.G. Price achieved success during the 1930s as part of the team assembled by Harry Weedon to design Odeon cinemas across Britain. After the Second World War, he worked on housing. (He died in 1953.)

Price senior was an inspiration to his son, who always believed that architecture should be enjoyable as well as useful. Even as a young man, studying architecture at a time when the social and functional gospel of the Modern Movement reigned supreme, Cedric Price was sceptical about the ability of architects to change the world. An unhappy couple, he quipped, might be better advised to get a divorce rather than build a dream house.

Price went up to St John's College, Cambridge, in 1952 to read Architecture - his drawing skills won him the praise of his tutors, but he found the reactionary ethos of the Department of Architecture stifling. Price enjoyed Cambridge none the less, becoming active in Labour politics and running the university arts society (inviting guest lecturers "who I knew liked a good drink and a good meal, not bores", he later recalled). For his diploma, however, Price went to the Architectural Association school in London, where he was taught by John Killick and Arthur Korn. The latter, a charismatic German émigré who had worked for Erich Mendelsohn, was a major influence on the young Price (and on AA contemporaries such as Richard Rogers and Ted Cullinan).

After graduating, Price worked briefly for Erno Goldfinger, Denys Lasdun, and the partnership of Max Fry and Jane Drew - he applied for a permanent job at the London County Council but was turned down. In desperation, he resorted to professional illustration as a source of income, producing hundreds of drawings for the mail-order catalogue of a big department store. In 1960 he founded the practice that he ran to the time of his death.

For nearly 42 years, Cedric Price Architects operated from offices in Alfred Place, Bloomsbury (a short walk from the AA, where Price taught part-time after graduating). Price himself worked in an all-white room (known as "East Grinstead") at the top of the building. Will Alsop, Peter Eley (later of DEGW), Paul Hyett (latterly RIBA President) and John Lyall were amongst the distinguished practitioners who passed through the office in their youth, though Price never sought to develop a large practice.

He met the most famous of his clients, Joan Littlewood, via an acquaintance, the Labour MP Tom Driberg (later Lord Bradwell), whose country house he refurbished after an outbreak of dry rot. The Fun Palace project (1961) that Price developed in close collaboration with Littlewood was seen as "a people's workshop or university of the streets", a highly adaptable kit of parts building that strongly foreshadowed Rogers and Piano's Pompidou Centre. Price was convinced that the Fun Palace could have been built and was furious with the GLC for reneging on its promise of a site. His interest in the theatre led to his meeting the actress Eleanor Bron, who subsequently became his lifelong companion.

The more modest (indeed, extremely low-cost) Inter-Action Centre in Kentish Town, north London, completed in 1971 and initially run by Ed Berman, equally reflected Price's conviction that art should reach out to the community and be made by people, rather than for them. When proposals emerged a few years ago to demolish the centre (never intended for a long life) Price dissociated himself from those who wanted it listed. Vehemently anti-conservation, he felt that Britain was becoming "a generous repository of buildings for nervous minds rather than a three-dimensional manifestation of a current optimistic civilisation". His Non-Plan manifesto (1969) proposed a laissez-faire (indeed anarchistic) approach to planning that anticipated the enterprise zones of the Thatcher era.

Cedric Price was an optimist to the core. In common with his contemporaries in the Archigram group (of which he was never a member, though he shared many of its aspirations) and with the American designer and guru Buckminster Fuller, whom he respected hugely, Price believed that technology, responsibly applied, had the potential to greatly enrich people's lives. Even Price's most ardent admirers conceded that elegance was not a characteristic of his work - indeed, aesthetic issues were for him an irrelevance.

The London Zoo Aviary (1961), Price insisted, reflected the inspired input of Lord Snowdon as well as of the engineer Frank Newby, who became a close friend of Price. The architect David Allford formed the third core member of the Hot Stuff Club which met yearly to undertake 24-hour expeditions - the members took it in turn to decide the destination - that inevitably concluded in a very good dinner. The deaths of Allford and Newby hit Price hard, though his conviviality (he was a lover of brandy and good cigars, both habitually consumed at breakfast time) seemed barely diminished by the ill-health that affected him during the last year or two of his life.

Price retained his socialist convictions throughout his life. He compared life under Margaret Thatcher to living in an occupied country. His circle of friends was, however, wide and included relatively few architects - the prominent Tory Lord McAlpine of West Green was a regular visitor to "East Grinstead". The Potteries Thinkbelt project (1964), proposing the development of a people's university along a network of disused railway lines in Staffordshire, reflected his belief that education "must be provided with the same lack of peculiarity as the supply of drinking water or free teeth". One of Price's more conventional commissions was a refurbishment of the listed 1950s TUC headquarters, conveniently close to his office.

He always denied that he was averse to the process of building and disliked being typecast as an irredeemable idealist or eccentric lost in the world of ideas. As the recent publication of a collection of his projects of the last two decades, Cedric Price: Opera (edited by Samantha Hardingham, 2003), demonstrates, ideas continued to flow from his studio - it seemed that a major bridge proposed for Strasbourg might be built and there were proposals for Marsham Street in Westminster, the National Gallery extension, the South Bank Centre and Tate Modern. A project for Paris's Parc La Villette foundered on a disagreement about fees, leading some to question Price's desire to turn ideas into buildings.

Despite his avowed commitment to technology, Price refused to use a computer or mobile phone and preferred to receive communications by post. His office fax was kept in a locked room and rarely checked. Price was, on one level, a classic English eccentric yet his view of architecture as a liberating and enabling force and ability to "think the unimaginable" fuelled the work of many younger designers, including, of course, his former assistant Will Alsop.

His name was put forward more than once for the RIBA's Royal Gold Medal but this honour, like others of which he might have been considered worthy, eluded him (though it went to the members of Archigram).

Price was not a committee man. He stubbornly pursued his own ideas and, food and drink apart, lived modestly. In a country where architecture has been seen variously as an engine of social change or an adjunct of the property market, he promoted a vision of it as an art and a component in a dynamic modern culture.

Kenneth Powell

It was mid-morning in the Architectural Association's dining room, and he sat at a corner table, dressed entirely in black, writes Jay Merrick. A glass of brandy - plainly a double, perhaps not the first - was near to hand. His notably florid face, which approached terracotta in hue, rose out of a cravat. So this was Cedric Price, the man referred to by so many successful architects as a talismanic influence, yet whose precise effect on them was hard to pin down.

Within minutes, the reason for this became clear. Price was one of architecture's genuine philosophers, and his discourse possessed its most telling quality: as soon as he began to answer a question, the apparent object of the question seemed to fractalise into something else. What, for example, had a longish story about his friend Studs Terkel to do with a question about urban regeneration?

And then the penny dropped. Price was, of course, only interested in possibility, or "activity" as he put it. His contribution to post-war architectural thought was non-declamatory, controversial, avant-garde. He was less than interested in the consideration of buildings as singular entities, however brilliant their design, and was famous - though perhaps not quite famous enough - for his observation that modern architecture had had less impact on culture than the Hush Puppies he so often wore.

Price predated architect-thinkers such as Rem Koolhaas in making textual discourse as important as the buildings or art that it provokes. He regarded most major set-piece architectural interventions as essentially turdish and, decades before Koolhaas, was promoting ideas of architectural accident, fertile discontinuity - and the need, sometimes, not to build anything at all.

Our two-hour conversation was never, however, so portentous in tone; indeed, he seemed to prefer to keep off architecture, as such. The best, and truest, moment came when I asked him what he, personally, regarded as ideal working conditions. "Butcher's shop," he replied instantly. "I can put my drawing board on the chopping block, and then I can prepare food there when I invite friends around for dinner. If you hear of a butcher's shop going somewhere . . ."