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In-Depth Information
At a relatively mundane level, the interest in adaptive architecture could
be seen as a reaction to the failure of postwar urban planning for the future of
London (Landau 1968). If the planners could not foresee how London would
develop, then perhaps the city should become a self-organizing system able to
reconfigure itself in real time in relation to its own emerging situation. This
idea, of course, takes us straight back to Ross Ashby's ideas of evolutionary
design and, in another register, to Beer's and Pask's biological and chemical
computers that evolved and adapted instead of having to be designed in detail:
the city itself as a lively and adaptive fabric for living.
At a more exalted and typically sixties level was an image of the city as a
technology of the nonmodern self, a place where people could invent new
ways to be, where new kinds of people could emerge. Metonymically, Archi-
gram's Living City installation at the ICA in 1963 included a flicker machine
(taking us back to Grey Walter and Bryan Gysin; fig. 7.21), Much of the in-
spiration for this conception of the built environment came from the tiny
but enormously influential Situationist International group centered on Guy
Debord in Paris, which had come into existence in the 1950s. As a founding
document from 1953 put it, “The architectural complex will be modifiable.
Its aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of its in-
habitants. . . . The appearance of the notion of relativity in the modern mind
allows one to surmise the
experimental
aspect of the next civilization. . . . On
the basis of this mobile civilization, architecture will, at least initially, be a
means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view
to mythic synthesis.”
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Closely associated with Archigram and sharing its enthusiasm for adaptive
architecture while maintaining an “avuncular” relation to it, was the architect
Cedric Price, mentioned earlier as a fellow undergraduate of Pask's at Cam-
bridge (Sadler 2005, 44), and Price was Pask's link to architecture. Around
1960, Joan Littlewood “turned . . . to a childhood dream of a people's palace,
a university of the streets, re-inventing Vauxhall Gardens, the eighteenth-
century Thames-side entertainment promenade, with music, lectures, plays,
restaurants under an all-weather-dome” (Ezard 2002). This Fun Palace, as it
was known, is one of the major unbuilt landmarks of postwar British architec-
ture (fig. 7.22). Cedric Price was appointed as the architect for the project, and
“I thought of Gordon [Pask] and Joan did too. He immediately accepted the
post—unpaid as I remember—as cybernetician to the Fun Palace Trust. It was
his first contact with architects and he was extremely patient. He immediately
formed a cybernetic working party and attracted those he wanted to join it
too. The meetings became notorious—and Trust Members attended” (Price
