Angelos Floros

Presented: 2nd Workshop, Mental, Virtual and Physical Spaces in Digital Design, Department of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 7 June 2005

Published: Floros A., in S. Vergopoulos and A. Kalfopoulos (eds), Architectural Design and Digital Technologies 2, Ekkremes Publications, ISBN 978-960-7651-57-0, pp. 19–21

During the 1960s architecture shifted towards the field of interfaces. The working distinction was between a controllable and a responsive environment: in the first, the user's choices are embodied in a prototype that helps them do what they want; in the second, any desire or need can be materialised as it arises.

The clearest application of that idea is Cedric Price's Fun Palace, begun in 1960 on the logic that we build the thing afterwards. By 1961 it had become a pilot design for the Theatre Workshop at the Theatre Royal Stratford in London, and by 1964 Price was working on a complex for the East End that its makers called a university of the streets, or a laboratory of entertainment — music, dance, science, film studios, drama therapy, workshops and model-making, and more generally an open-ended machine for research and experimentation.

What Price actually designed was an open steel frame, fitted with movable walls, ceilings, amphitheatres and walkways, capable of serving any function whatever. The building was not a form but a stable armature for the reconfiguration of environments, and the architect within it stopped being a form-giver and became a provider — of the occasion for an experience, and of the means to change it. Fun Palace is the project through which architecture began its passage from hardware to software.

Archigram took the argument commercially. Architecture became a product, the object became architectural hardware, and what Archigram added was the experience of an environment made of hardware and software together. The exhibition Plug'n Clip followed in late 1965; then, in Archigram 8 of 1968, Peter Cook set out a final design method under the title Control and Choice — whose conclusion was that the environment is no longer in the hands of designers, but is determined by the user. The Plug-in City of 1964 built the megastructure as a carrier for whatever services were wanted; Instant City turned provincial culture into a metropolis of national networks.

The questions raised, and the projects realised, by Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Archigram and others make a good starting point for treating the city as software, architecture as plug-in software — made for connection — and the architect as an indirectly involved programmer, or instigator.