GORDON PASK - The Cybernetic Brain - page 369

output—echoing the Situationist analysis of adaptive architecture as a trans-
formative technology of the self. 61 Alexander Trocchi and his sigma project
(chap. 5) made the connection, since he was allied with the Situationists in
Paris and friends with both Price and Littlewood in London (with whom he
met regularly in 1964) (Mathews 2007, 112-14).
Visitors to London will have noticed that the Fun Palace does not exist.
Despite a lot of work from a lot of people, political support especially within
the Labour Party, and the inclusion of such notables as Yehudi Menuhin and
Lord Harewood among its trustees, the project collapsed in the second half of
the 1960s, and the building was never even begun. One can cite many of the
usual mundane reasons for this: the problems of finding a site, getting permis-
sions, and, not least, raising money. 62 But another problem more germane to
our theme came up again and again: the sheer difficulty of saying what the
Fun Palace was. Like the Dream Machine and Musicolour before it, the Fun
Palace failed to fit easily into any of the accepted architectural categories. Not
only did it deliberately aim to cut across the usual demarcations—combin-
ing the arts, entertainment, education, and sport in all sorts of guises, famil-
iar and unfamiliar, including participation in what were usually taken to be
spectator activities—the broader aim was to experiment: to see what might
emerge from combining these opportunities in an adaptive space. This, of
course, left outsiders to the project free to project their own nightmares on
it, and, as Littlewood's obituary in the Guardian put it, the very phrase “Fun
Palace” “evoked for councillors a vision of actors copulating in the bushes,”
and Littlewood's “support dissipated in a fruitless search for a site” (Ezard
2002). 63
Two thoughts before we leave the Fun Palace. The first goes back to the
social basis of cybernetics. We can think once more about amateurism. I noted
above that Pask's work on the Fun Palace was voluntary and unpaid, done out
of interest and for fun and, no doubt, belief in the worth of the project. Here I
can just add that, as Mathews (2007, 120) puts it, “like Price, Littlewood had a
'day job' and worked on the Fun Palace on the side.” Again we have the sense of
something welling up outside the structure of established social institutions
and without support from them.
We can also think in this connection about the relation between modern
architecture and buildings like the Fun Palace. The last sentence of Landau's
New Directions in British Architecture (1968, 115) reads: “So if architecture is
becoming . . . anti-building . . . perhaps it should be classified as not archi-
tecture . . . but this would signify that it had taken a New Direction.” Mary