ARCHITECTURE: Redefining it as progressing

Figure 1. Working study of the Cedric Price Progress Chart in Inkscape. Source: Norman Fellows fonds.

• "In placing Price within this time and setting (the 1960s), one can identify in his work a strong belief in the new solution and a confidence in the future sustained by his full commitment to rationality and progress. But it was to be on the crucial question of what for him constituted this progress (that is, which architecture might be said to be progressing and which degenerating) that he was to draw away from his contemporaries."
• (Royston Landau (1984) 'A Philosophy of Enabling', in Cedric Price Works II)

Thus this article assumes:—

• ... that there are two classes of architecture, namely:— 'progressing' and 'non-progressing' or 'degenerating'.

The purpose of this article is:—

• to redefine architecture as progressing or to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Current working state of the polar-grid and spiral framework used to map the selected Cedric Price projects. Shown as an active research drawing and updated iteratively as the thesis develops.

[edit] How can architecture be redefined as progressing?

The PTb Spiral is introduced here as a working diagram of evidence rather than a fixed chronology. The selected projects of Cedric Price are positioned as successive moments in the redefinition of architecture from static object toward temporal, procedural, and systems-based progression.

[edit] Defining “progressing”

The present enquiry begins with a distinction articulated by Roy Landau in his introductory essay to Cedric Price Works II. Landau’s terms — progressing and its implied opposite, degenerating — establish the conceptual field within which Cedric Price’s selected projects may be examined. The purpose here is not immediately to classify architecture into fixed categories, but to ask by what criteria architecture may be understood as progressing, and whether Price’s work provides evidence of such a redefinition.

[edit] Projects as evidence

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[edit] BMI and Medikit: diagram as epistemic instrument

The question of architectural progression becomes most explicit in Cedric Price’s Progress Chart for the Birmingham and Midland Institute and in Dugdale et al.’s Systems Diagram for Medikit. These figures are not merely illustrations of projects but instruments through which architecture reflects upon its own procedures, blindspots, and developmental possibilities.

[edit] Diagram as epistemic instrument

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--Archiblog 18:03, 01 Apr 2026 (BST)