The City and the Architecture of Change. Cedric Price and the Concept of Micropolitics in the Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s

In the early 1960s the UK experienced the onset of the first consumer society modelled after the US in which automation and communication technologies placed the individual in a new relationship to the community. The works of young architect Cedric Price reflect the emergence of the mass market and mass media, and demonstrate the influence of a technologically orientated architecture on the idea of social networks. Based on central projects the dissertation processes the ideas and concepts of Cedric Price in the period 1960 to approx. 1980, to demonstrate the change from an object- to a process-oriented architecture concept, which prompted a rethinking in the planning and design methods of architecture: from an object-based approach to architecture to the concept of a demand-driven environment. Assuming the technological approach taken by Cedric Price in his projects, the work examines the influence of system thinking and social organisation on the start of a sustained concept of architecture and demonstrates how the influence of information technologies, automation and the science of cybernetics in architecture produced new concepts of spatial organisation. Cedric Price saw the city and its architecture as part of a total system in which social, political and economic processes created a culture of permanent exchange. The idea of exchange and interaction divert the focus of architecture to the organisation of participative, open-ended processes.