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Lou Lobsinger (2000, 120) picks up the negative and describes the Fun
Palace as “the quintessential anti-architectural project.” We are back with
the “antis”—with the Fun Palace facing contemporary architecture in much
the same way as Kingsley Hall faced modern psychiatry. In neither case does
the “anti” amount to pure negation. Adaptive architecture was
another
and
different
approach that crossed the terrain of established forms. If mainstream
architecture aspired to permanent monuments, aesthetic and symbolic forms
drenched in meaning, and fitness to some predefined function, the Fun Palace
was envisaged as just a big and ephemeral rectangular box from the outside
and a “kit of parts” on the inside. The heart of antiarchitecture lay in its inner
dynamics and its processes of transformation in response to emergent, not
given, functions—none of which existed (or, at least, were thematized) in the
modern tradition. Here we have once more antiarchitecture as nomad sci-
ence, sweeping in from the steppes to upset, literally, the settled lives of the
city dwellers (the Walking City!), and a Situationist architecture as Heideg-
gerian revealing—as keenly open to new ways to be—in contrast to an archi-
tecture of enframing, growing out of and reinforcing a given aesthetic and list
of functions. Ontology as making a difference. No wonder that “for those who
thought architecture had a visually communicative role . . . [Price's] work was
anathema to everything architecture might stand for.”
64
Second, we can go back to the critique of cybernetics as a science of control.
Mathews's account of Price's work in the 1960s takes a strange turn just when
Pask appears at the Fun Palace. Speaking of a 1964 report from the Cybernet-
ics Subcommittee, Mathews (2007, 119, 121) picks out what he considers a
“rather frightening proposal” discussed under the heading of “Determination
of what is likely to induce happiness” and continues:
This . . . should have alerted Littlewood that the Fun Palace was in danger of be-
coming an experiment in cybernetic behavior-modification. However, in a 1964
letter to Pask, she actually agreed with his goals, and seemed naively oblivious
to the possibility that the project might become a means of social control. . . .
The idea that the Fun Palace would essentially be a vast social control system
was made clear in the diagram produced by Pask's Cybernetics Subcommit-
tee, which reduced Fun Palace activities to a systematic flowchart in which
human beings were treated as data [fig. 7.23 above]. . . . Today, the concept of
“unmodified or modified” people would be treated with a considerable amount
of caution. Yet, in the 1960s, the prevailing and naive faith in the endless ben-
efits of science and technology was so strong that the Orwellian implications of
modification went largely unnoticed.
