Cedric Price Interview

[edit] Question 1 — What do you do and where do you do it?

• NF So firstly, Cedric, what do you do?
• CP Well, it's nominally an architect but yes I do 'architecture' and 'planning' but it extends to a lot of advice - giving advice to other bodies - not necessarily self-contained efforts you know and I like to think what I do is work on a degree of anticipation of situations - improving situations. I'm not a problem-solver - I think architecture is too slow for problem-solving. You can - it's almost an instantaneous response to an immediate problem - it's almost too late. And so it's architecture and planning and a little bit of designs of objects but in relation not to panic or emergency but having to think about the future. Yes.
• NF You - it's been attributed to you that you were in the business of problem-solving but you just said not?
• CP No - I don't know who attributed it - no I don't think I am. Problems I think - shortage of money - I can't cure - or anything else. No I think that the trouble with architecture and planners - that the gestation period of having an idea, testing it, working with others to produce a product or a condition, naturally takes a long time - even before you start building - and that takes a long time therefore you're talking about anything from a year to five years, to be honest, in even giving you ideas chance to work - so problem-solving is - unless you said you're solving problems of the future but problems of the future don't make themselves known that far in advance - I think it's more anticipation - anticipatory design.
• NF For example, there's one possible problem - I think about things that you've written and you wrote in the Learning AD about "the need to learn" and technology is often seen as a response to human needs ...
• CP Ah yes I see. But I don't see - this might be semantics - I don't see isolating a need as a problem. The whole question of literacy - both visual and literate literacy - and the business of learning rather than being educated, I don't see as a problem. I see it as an unused resource or an underused condition for all of us throughout life - so you can scarcely say that's a problem - you can say the lack of learning is a shortage or the lack of conditions in which one can learn or - it's not only conditions in which one can learn it's conditions in which one finds oneself learning automatically. The difference between the schoolbook and the back of the cornflake packet I often give - one finds there's no compunction to read the back but if there were more interesting things on the back of the cornflake packet then I think schoolbooks could be more selective. So it's that way round - it's not a problem - underused resource not a problem.
• NF I probably can't respond properly to what you're saying...
• CP Well no no just go ...
• NF Let me see ...
• CP Because we'll come back to this later.
• NF OK perhaps I can ... I want to come back to that. So - where do you work?
• CP Here, generally speaking, on these four floors. I do travel to other offices and - but I'm very unwilling to. Now I did some work for British Rail on the Channel Tunnel link as a consultant - in fact a consultant to consultants - some engineers - because they were so numerous and had become, the engineers, had become involved in the design even before I was brought in. It was worth me spending some time down in Basingstoke with them because their team was there - so that was logistics. I never spent a night - I think largely because this office is small and it is in fact my resource centre so that I work here but in relation to other jobs there may be other people working elsewhere on it. The most constant is my engineer whose office is just up the street ...
• NF Is this Frank Newby?
• CP Frank Newby ... but I call in. It's more on the American lines - you form a team as a response to a request for work - I mean in my time I've had Yehoudi Menouhin as my acoustic consultant but I don't go to his concerts and he doesn't mind - and therefore you get people who normally you couldn't have in your office - you'd have a second or a third rate version. You can get the people you want to work with you - they, it they are interested themselves and this applies to a job we're doing in Strasbourg where the director of a thing called SILSO, but it was the farming engineering research establishment at SILSO House which changed its name - he worked with me at Strasbourg but I couldn't - vis-a-vis - afford to employ him in this office and so the teams are very varied and we keep as small a team in this office as we need to work on - I always have one - Potteries Thinkbelt was a case in point - I always have one programme, at least one programme that isn't generated by anyone except this office because it is generated by an anticipation that there's a solution - not a solution, I suppose, but a result will be needed at some time. I mean at the moment we're working on the coastline and moving resources and people along the coast sometimes by land and sometimes by water rather than having a spinal ••• (inaudible) ••• Like a tree which this country is from furthest out to the edge.
• NF And this is something you've determined?
• CP Yes and I've written a programme for and - it's in the year two and a half - quite a big thing - and of course as far as numbers go the recession has hit me like everyone else - this office is half empty - really I only use two of the four floors at the moment. the other floors I go into because I can put stuff in and get stuff out but when I was working on the railway station, which was delayed because of the recession, I had eight people in the office. We're now down to ...
• NF Is the connection with the Channel Tunnel?
• CP No no - this was quite a separate thing - this was direct British Rail appointment for a mainline railway station.

[edit] Question 2 — What training did you have?

• NF Could I ask you what training you had?
• CP Ah yes - professional training?
• NF Yes.
• CP Cambridge first - the degree course. There wasn't a facility for going more than three years there and then the last two years in Bedford Square - the AA, the Architectural Association - and the two years' professional study I spent eighteen months with - I didn't split between three and four - Fry, ••. (inaudible) .•• , and Lasdun - largely working on African and Persian work, but never going abroad because I was 'lowest of the low', and another eighteen months of which six months went into that two years' qualification. I set up an office with Michael Pearson with ... for C . B. Pearson of Lancaster in London then I started this office June 1 1960 and I did a little bit of pre- - but it was only during the summer holidays - I worked in an architect's office before I went to Cambridge in Burslem but again 'lowest of the low'.
• NF And then would you say that ever since then you ... part of your work has been self-training?
• CP Yes - always really. I think it rather interesting that 'continuous professional education' or whatever it's called - I'm very often questioned on that or give some sort of advice and yet my own form wouldn't be approved. It's a wonderful situation now with the de-regulation of the architect, I think. I think it really means that the architect must justify himself as useful to society. He can - it's no use any longer finding his usefulness in commerce or industry or wheeler-dealing and then hiding behind a gentleman's club with a badge.
• NF So how would you perhaps define that usefulness?
• CP The new usefulness? I think it will - I don't know whether it will affect me because even I am getting fixed in my ways - but someone coming in to - well first of all they're doing away with the Board of Architectural Education therefore I think the education of architects will broaden and will fragment and will bring in a lot of people who never had the opportunity or never even thought they had the opportunity or that it was a lifelong interesting career - so it'll change the intake.
• NF So perhaps people in later life?
• CP Oh yes oh yes - well you can see like the rest of society you see the professions are now the slowest-changing group in society, I mean, and yet people of equal skill or expertise - whether they be bankers or pastry cooks -chop and change two or three jobs in a lifetime and therefore far from being in the vanguard of thought and liberal - if not liberal, advanced action - professions - doctors, lawyers, architects - they've become the sluggards - they've become at the end of the line - they're always being caught out - they've got to respond to the the use of drugs or they've got to respond to holidays or they've got to respond to adapting for others away from the Protestant ethic of 'hard work is good for you' to 'a life of idleness might be all that's offered'.
• NF Is there a particular architectural response that you ... perhaps ..•immediately springs to mind?
• CP Well yes - I think - I mean I have to speak from a position of bias because it's all I have - I think that the work by architects on anticipatory design which at the moment is done by scientists and statisticians, demographers, and logicians, and a certain amount of politicians will move and should move into architecture. Even farmers and health people are more forward-looking than architecture at the moment so I think that will be acceptable and will not only change the intake but will be a continuous process so you learn throughout your life and an immediate or pretty quick change will be the quality and nature of staff, of so-called teachers, and I think - that is the student teacher in schools of architecture in effect it happens but no one will admit it but it's the intake of students that really affects the nature of staff in a very short time and so people might find architecture rather interesting to teach. I don't ... I haven't taught for ... since 1964, I think.

[edit] Question 3 — What kinds of knowledge, understanding and skills do you have?

• NF What kinds of knowledge do you have?
• CP Well first of all my knowledge has to be updated all the time. I don't have a very large core of, or I don't think I have a large core of, unquestionable and unquestioned knowledge that reinforces me wherever I am and whatever age I'm in - so I have a great deal of knowledge in a statistical form. You see I read things other people find very boring - I read government reports, I read social surveys all the time - not with any particular thing in view but updating oneself so that's one field of knowledge. Computer knowledge has moved from knowing the mechanics which I am very rusty on now to knowing quite a lot of worthwhile questions to ask those who are skilled at the mechanics of computerisation so I use - I have an agreement with at least one school of technology - although it's probably a university now - but I have an agreement whereby I can set them problems as long as I'm always telling them those questions I have even if I don't want all the answers - so it's a sort of three times removed programmer.
• NF Presumably the questions arise out of your work?
• CP Well they arise out of the work and about thinking about it. I mean about anticipating what I might be involved with were the conditions slightly more favourable - so I mean they're very often on the edge of my work.
• NF Are they to do with environments or artefacts ...
• CP Well yes I mean I've put in for a research grant which doesn't require me to leave this room but in relation to various forms of purification of the land - land and water - using things such as membrane technology, layer technology - various means of an intermediate stage turning from useless into something which is useful without necessarily requiring it to be used for that new use all the time and that I mean I'm amazed by the technology there is around at the moment - various extraordinary magazines on synthetic membranes and nutrients and things like that which interest me - I'm a member of this SILSO place which is engineering agriculture here and abroad - it's not just in this country. The Underwater Technology Society - which was a branch of the Civil Engineers at one time - I was a founder member of it already has moved into, it was largely to do with oil and oil production really and things like that - pipelines. It already has formed another magazine and technology which is just - I forget what it's called - but it is just on Underwater Technology - which might just be remote control of things beyond one's reach so to speak. I mean why I mention that rather vaguely is that I'm constantly - because I'm a member of these things - I'm constantly being posed new situations which I find very attractive. There's a poster which I've pinned up just for other people who visit the office which is advertising 'Robot Pigs' but it doesn't mean either really, its a term in Underwater Technology. So there's that there's I am a member of the Royal Agricultural Society - again I don't offer them much but I can use their research department at Stoneleigh and I used their research for instance in my work at Strasbourg but the work in Strasbourg I wasn't asked to go in for horticulture - I think I - they originally thought I'd just design a bridge for the Rhine - they're still deciding whether they're going to take it any further but I'm taking it further and so there's that. Let's see what other ones? I'm - I don't know whether it comes with knowledge but through - I'm a member of the Institute of Structural Engineers' History Group. Now it may b e history to them but it's all new to me, you know, and I go on their funny little trips looking at rusting cast iron in the Midlands, clamber over roofs and things - but it's all new to me and it's bread and butter to them so they know about how that was cast and various things like that. So I - they tend to b e historians - they tend to be reminding themselves just how marvellous Brunel was or something like that but when I go and look at things by Brunel and go down to the actual foundations of the Clifton Bridge and things it's first time for me and that's a very easy way of obtaining knowledge from other disciplines because ...
• NF Is it just curiosity or is it ...
• CP Well it is yes I mean it's curiosity and it's interest - it's exciting - yes yes.
• NF Yes it's obviously enormous and you've got a lot of energy and so on to do this ...
• CP Yes - well I don't do anything else - I don't have a hobby, I don't have a wife, and I don't have a family and I don't have holidays.
• NF So this is really back to what you do isn't it?
• CP Yes and I hate the sun you see so - and so they - I see it as - I'm sure I can think of other things but the question of information technology is, always interests me because it's always altering and one or two aspects in relation to retrieval interest me very much and I was in Houston recently and spent quite a bit of time at NASA and I was interested in NASA and how they got rid of accumulated information that they almost certainly won't ever need again and normally people don't get rid they say "Oh no we - it's somewhere" you see but in fact it isn't memory that fades it's the retrieval system that becomes so outdated that in fact you can't retrieve it. I mean...
• NF Was your concern that ...
• CP No no my concern isn't that it should all be retrievable but my concern is that there should be more rationality and logic in determining which you don't mind being lost and which you must work on to be retrievable - you know there aren't many books on alchemy at the moment and it doesn't matter. Now there are other things - there aren't many books on solar energy - they were lost because of the ... atomic energy came at about the same time so although there's quite a lot there's a lot been lost there and you don't necessarily gain - you can't necessarily catch up with information by just putting more money into it. Particular ... a climate has to occur and brains have to be fired by that and a lot of the ... it's gone, I mean it'll come in another way so I mean I'm not worried about that sort of loss but the early days of atomic energy a lot of other things were dropped. The whole question - I mustn't go on too long - but the ... there's something which I can't really see the use of - it's sort of medieval - but technology or learning in relation to the horse as a means of transport and a means of traction - traction/transport - so it was information and power - horse power - was lost quite recently. We had vast libraries - turning circles, adhesion of horseshoes on granite as opposed to something else, the angle of an incline - things like that - and they aren't retrievable because they were thrown away. They were lost and the people - so that's a bit sad and I - one thing that worries me because I'm not sure that mining though it doesn't necessarily mean people going underground but those aspects of mining and the library in relation to the Royal College of Mines which is now part of Imperial College, I think that a certain amount of mining technology - it's not just technology - it's a mass know-how - may be lost. But I ...
• NF But presumably the - it's importance is to do with future lessons is it or ...
• CP Oh yes it's always the future. Oh no no I'm not interested on recorded books. But those people - people I go with - sometimes are but I don't get told why I'm (inaudible) ... No I'm more interested in building a richer resource library for the future.
• NF And it's the access isn't it?
• CP And access yes - it is unbelievable that - I've finished - but it's unbelievable just at this time the RIBA starts introducing charges for the library and charges for students for the library and charges for outsiders for the library. Well outsiders benefit from the RIBA far more than insiders - it's the wrong way round and, of course, the other thing of closing down conventional libraries - music libraries, book libraries and video libraries - the local authorities are doing this all over the country so it's I mean it's an exaggeration - but there is a slight danger of us going back to the Dark Ages of the chained Bible and only those who have should know.
• NF Are you working on this?
• CP Oh well I'm thinking about it yes. Oh yes yes. And of course you can reverse it in a sort of modern - I mean - it sounds very - I don't mean 'of course you can' - but there is a possibility of a reversal if you look at new uses of quite old media forms and a new separation of really of self-willed time of - this is why I use the word 'learning' and keep off the word 'education' because I think people feel more at home and cornflake packets in an electronic sense are available all the time - or could be. I mean Buckminster Fuller I remember said when I first met him - which was the early sixties - he said very soon information as such will be free and it sounded a bit glib and a bit sort of ...but in fact we're almost at that situation and it's not just the lady giving you the magazine outside the tube station every morning - which has far more information in that magazine than the Radio Times or anything - free - they throw them on the floor - the place is dripping with ...
• NF But there's still a difficulty with access.
• CP Yes yes.
• NF Shall we move on? (Inaudible)
• CP No no, we must ...
• NF I don't know whether I can particularly differentiate between kinds of knowledge and kinds of understanding and perhaps deal with those and skills. What would you say your skills are?
• CP Well I'm very good - very good - at drawing - almost too good - I mean there's a danger. I school myself against all this picking up a pencil ... the ... I'm rather bad - no, positive things - there's drafting, there's writing, mathematics I like and therefore I keep reasonably fresh on that but not very advanced mathematics. I'm just a gadfly as far as science and physics go - I'm a consumer, I'm not a ... I don't think too far about it and I've improved over the years with skills of analysis - analytical skills and techniques, I think purely because I find this an advantage.
• NF (It sounded different then) (Tape recorder noise)
• CP What do you mean about skills?
• NF Well you mentioned a few there and ... what about perhaps commenting in particular on design and design method?
• CP Oh dear - you see I - post-rationalisation often - I do, I mean I've got, I do spend possibly too much but I do spend a great deal of time on analysing the situation and things that might help - I don't jump to conclusions but on the other hand I have a sort of biased appetite for some solutions as opposed to others. I'm always - and this I can't rid myself - I'm interested in the temporary - the transient - and the mobile because I think that's what we are and therefore I am interested in the skills of finding how heavy things - well not the skills - techniques of finding how heavy things are - how feasible it is for them to last a particular period of time whether for economic or technical reasons, structural or social.
• NF I feel that you have a design method - for example the progress chart and there are other charts.
• CP Ah yes I see what you mean.
• NF Do you draw all that together?
• CP I use a lot. I think - I'm working o n one at the moment and I'm not sure whether it's going to work - I'm trying to show - primarily those charts are for me and for u s in the office but they're very interesting, if they become intelligible, for others to see as soon as possible because they can add to them and I'm working on something now which is in a way - and this is because of the cheapness of various forms of reproduction - both colour and black and white photographic reproduction - that's been enormous in the speed and the cheapness in my lifetime - I mean unbelievable. I used to draw colour - I drew all the separations for the cover of Thinkbelt I mean you know and with the latest ... now I'm trying to take photographs, aerial photographs - not straight - angled things of particular sites and put on them in colour and in graphic form some of the possibilities of change but in a measurable unit way not in an architectural form. I don't ...
• NF I'm not sure ...
• CP No no well I don't know quite. I'm working on this at the moment because I think there are lots of - if you can bridge various disciplines and languages early on in graphic or written form then you get more people helping you.
• NF Do you have much input from, say, sociology ... discipline?
• CP Unfortunately ... I do - I have as much as I can but it has they've - because architecture, when it should have nurtured sociology, turned from it for a quick buck and so did the government - and to some extent the body of sociological advancement has withdrawn just it's needed from things like architecture and planning and therefore you get dreadful, dangerous, foolish people like - I've forgotten - anyhow - Imperial College and she had some oh she was at University College this woman praised an absolute charlatan who wrote a thing on 'defensible space' - a man I knew in America ...
• NF I remember the term - Oscar ...
• CP Yes yes ...
• NF Delete it. (laughing)
• CP That's him. And then this woman who's Mrs. Thatcher's favourite - I can't remember - Dr. ... you know the one I mean?
• NF No.
• CP All that. Sociology has had some terrible inroads on serious serious thinking. I personally you see found a great loss the death of Peter Cowan who was an architect and sociologist and planner who ran the Joint Planning Unit with LSE and Imperial College and which we used to have weekly meetings but they weren't sort of any form - it was really to finish the contents of a bottle - that sort of thing. It would be a Thursday or a Friday. But it's a ... and various magazines - Urban Studies which you've probably forgotten - and one was brought out in Edinburgh which was wonderful - it showed work in progress - sociological work in progress and that's where one wants to see it - in magazines not the end product always. I'm sorry.

[edit] Question 4 — With whom do you work, and for whom? How many people are there?

• NF No no no. Well perhaps they're not wonderful questions but - with whom do you work? And you've mentioned some people - your engineer and your assistants ...
• CP Yes - oh well there's - it varies a little bit according to jobs - but ...
• NF Perhaps (inaudible) it's covered?
• CP Yes I better think about it. Well I mean yes I think it covers it really. I mean the engineer, the QS - people who know a bit more about how some things work but again it depends on the job ...
• NF Again it's this loose team?
• CP Yes that's right - it's a sort of changing octopus.
• NF For whom would you say you work?
• CP Well I mean primarily it hasn't changed - nearly always local authority or government with a few good exceptions but - statutory bodies I think are it as well - so you get British Rail, you get the French local authority, Strasbourg; Germany - Bremen and Hamburg - local authority again: Westminster City Council - I'm not (inaudible) whether they're Tory or Labour - Westminster City Council. I'm trying to think.
• NF You once said "If society is ... " - I'm not quoting you here - it was something like 'if society is our employer ...' which is - you raised the question - what - would you comment on - do you think society is our employer ...
• CP Well I'm sure it is but even if ...
• NF ... in that we choose society to be our employer, perhaps?
• CP I don't know - I mean I tend to ignore big sections of society as it exists and they ignore me so perhaps I was being glib then. I mean I would love to work for various other basic industries or at least systems - I mean again I think there's an architectural contribution to be made to things like the social services, health, pensions, hardship, unemployment - allied to a postage stamp and advice you know it's mixing various resources that are still dispensed in an integrated rather nineteenth century way as far as points at which you retrieve these resources and I think architecturally and planning they can be dispensed not always visible and not always in a physical sense - I suppose banking has in some way led the lead ...
• NF In becoming invisible?
• CP Yes. I think that if you could do it in a more social and well-meaning form than banking is it's a - at any one time society is prepared to give a certain amount of trust and not always want to check that they know exactly what it's doing as opposed to knowing the benefit of the result. This ...
• NF I'm not sure if I know what you mean.
• CP Yes and it would take a long time ...
• NF ... and I can think about it.
• CP Yes yes - and think about that in relation to the use of log tables, slide rules and calculating machines in relation to advanced mathematics - secondary schools.
• NF That's a clue?
• CP Yes yes.

[edit] Question 5 — How much responsibility have you, how is the quality of your work ensured?

• NF Thank you. To do with responsibility - how much do you have or what do you feel your responsibilities are?
• CP Well first of all I have legal - and even more with this thing - total legal responsibility as laid down by law on what one does if it's a structure or something. I think you have a responsibility to your client and always have done in having an indemnity insurance policy so that it something goes wrong there is some money somewhere to put it right but that isn't generally the profession - a lot of ... the RIBA hasn't even made it mandatory that every member - every architect (inaudible) but these small everyday responsibilities... The other ones sound too much like 'bleeding heart' but I do think that responsibility to society as an architect is that you don't have too much lying around - that is that - I'm not put off - I'm convinced that there will be a better way - after I'm gone - of some of the things that I think are the best way at the moment and therefore you mustn't clog up the earth's surface with too much dross.
• NF And - what about the quality of your work - how do you ensure that - if you do?
• CP What? I...
• NF In this context - in your context - how do you ensure the quality of your work? You must have some criteria or whatever that you judge your work against?
• CP Well yes - usually it isn't architectural criteria it's engineering criteria. The quality of my work in an emotional and aesthetic sense I think I use my own judgement on that and am disappointed by some things I do and not by others. Usually because I don't visualize them sufficiently clearly and that one is always trying to improve. I must say that I look at some other buildings and products and I wonder why I didn't do that. I'm very annoyed that I didn't get the quality I seek you know. It doesn't necessarily mean in architecture ... but how you ensure it - there's a sort of basic norm I mean it depends ondetail it depends on the detail or the subject matter - for instance in the design of these market stalls and things like that for Westminster we built and tested and rebuilt prototypes and tested them with people using them and so on and then we took them and changed them - that sort of product refinement before production is a standard way of doing it and I think - I'm interested in methods - oh and that's another agency I use - the Production Engineering Research Establishment - I'm interested in methods of production engineering and how different they are from prototype engineering and how a lot of things fall by the board necessarily because although they're easy and good and fine as prototypes they will not stand a production run and therefore they're not well-designed for what they were eventually designed for. You know Boots do this very much on testing their products - they have a miniature factory for some of their drugs and other products and a lot of things are marvellous - they're perfect - they come up but when it comes to twenty million it's not on and they scrap it - they drop it and and that's quite sensible but then ... that's on one side so that is the product but then the process ... the product requires cooperation with people who can make things working with me ... the process - the aviary for the Royal Veterinary College - the experimental aviary - it's the process when that's finished that constitutes m y quality control at the design stage so in fact I'm dealing with the doctors who are only interested in measuring the heartbeat ...
• NF Did you finish that?
• CP Yes we'll pick it up later.

[edit] Question 6 — Can you contribute ideas towards improving the effectiveness of your work or of the office?

• NF The last question here is about contributing ideas towards improving the effectiveness of your work and I thought perhaps 'effectiveness' was to do with 'doing the right thing' or trying to do the right thing.
• CP That worried me most of all I mean because I don't think about it enough and therefore this is the value of this morning's meeting you know when I was saying it's never - you should never be overloaded with time to avoid things like this meeting because raised right in the very last question a thing I do not think enough about that ... I like to think that it does happen but it's I mean ... you can comeback next time or give me another hint of what you mean.
• NF Well one possible thing - I'm very interested - seriously interested - in some of the ideas you've published - in particular the chain of projects - the Thinkbelt, Atom and Thinkgrid...
• CP ... and Generator.
• NF ... and others yes and sometimes - I've often wondered if you were content to - having said those things - to leave them for others to pick up and if they have internalised the reasons why and they're not just copying you but, you know, become involved, they take it forward rather than it remains your idea.
• CP Yes well I am quite happy - well not - happy isn't the word - resolved, resigned - again not in a gloomy way - to that happening one, I run a small operation, two, I tend to do things that no one has really asked for and that in a few years time - they do ask for in some cases - and also in a few years's time I have moved on to something else and so I do - I make my things quite broadcast but only if, as you say, if people understand what it's about but very often they're invisible people I mean I don't know them - it's just that if you can transfer some of your things which you will never have the time or the resources or the energy or the interest to do yourself and you still think it's a good idea it's your duty to make it available but not to make it available as a panacea but as a starter one or one of the starters for new work by someone else - yes that happens a lot - it happens more than I'd like it to you know - there are lots of things I would have liked to have kept control of and done myself but it's usually either because I'm a difficult person to get on with or because they're out of time or ... there are lots of reasons. There's a thing in Hamburg which I think is key to - because I question the existence of cities per se you know - I don't think they've always got to exist - you know man's manifestation of civilisation and all that stuff and therefore when I had a chance in Hamburg for doing a centre city redevelopment I brought - I worked in, without describing it in detail - I'll show you next time - it was in fact bringing the element of time and indecision in on the minds of the legislators, the town council, the politicians and teaching them through what was done the first time not to be embarrassed about changing their mind or indeed not making their mind up - so I was providing a physical solution of benefit to the city and the population which in a way didn't freeze the used the area but was capable of painless destruction if in fact they decided something better but in five or ten years' time and a different council and if in fact you can do this - Strasbourg was the same, part of London was the same - if in fact the legislators realise that the old the great 'when' that they have inherited can in fact have a lot of cells in it those sleeping or in their sense of the word 'standing still' can operate in some way usefully then they won't have these grand plans that require everything to be frozen for ten years while they build them or argue or get the budget or anything like that and this gives me great hope because a lot of - well not a lot but quite a number of people have seen what I'm about who are not architects - at last it's coming through. I mean - the Hamburg thing I was descended on by the German Green Party as - I hadn't decided I was being green or anything like that - but I could see the benefit - that seem quite interesting.
• NF I remember lots of things that you've said and you once said "You've got to read between the lines" and possibly one way of you being even more effective would be to explain your ideas or - and so on - more effectively - is that a point?
• CP Yes it is - well a lot of people go at me like that - you see the trouble is ...
• NF You see I like the opportunity that it's left to me to read between the lines. I like things that I can participate in and perhaps complete a little bit or whatever.
• CP Well yes but then ...
• NF ... but then perhaps it's even too slow.
• CP ... but then even - you are a rare person you see who can spend time like this on Sunday talking with me. I'm very impatient as far as writing books or writing articles and things like that and a lot is lost but on the other hand I know that if I turned into an ordered writer of papers and books they in themselves would become the end of the object and not the actual progression of design which is often open-ended and it's inherently wasteful - I'd quite like a Boswell let's say but I don't know I mean Banham funnily enough was the nearest 'Boswell' I have and that was good because he didn't do it in a cringing Boswell way but I mean the few bits he wrote about me he understood what I was doing even better than I did - the .. one article he wrote about me I ... and it was only a short little review of an exhibition and those things are very reinforcing to me but they're also bloody useful to people reading Banham.
• NF Shall we stop? Because it's gone past eleven anyway.
• CP Yes - but that, is that you see that is the same question that's Oh I haven't thought about it enough and the thing is that it's no use me laughing it off and saying "Oh well I know I'm wasteful in a little ivory tower and things like that - it's - people can't afford to waste - be wasteful you know - it's a criticism of me that item six - it's a very good one and it's one that I can't actually answer because I don't think about it enough - it's got me very interested in our next meeting. Yeah.
• NF So ... stop? Stop.

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[edit] Endnotes

The author observes that the argument emerging from the first Cedric Price interview (February 1993) has the outline of a syllogism, albeit one that subverts the classical form. The sequence appears between Price’s Delft keynote speech of 1992, the author’s first reading of Cedric Price Works II (1992), and Price’s later formulation in the Architects’ Journal (September 1996). A supplementary remark from the CCA — “His modus operandi was to question” — further clarifies the operative logic.

In a standard syllogism, the major premise links the middle term to the major term; the minor premise links the middle term to the minor term; and the middle term disappears in the conclusion. This forms the conventional structure:—

• middle : major
• middle : minor
• therefore minor : major

A conventional architectural syllogism might therefore be expressed as follows: architecture (major) relates to problem-solving (middle); problem-solving relates to anticipatory design (minor); therefore architecture relates to anticipatory design.

However, the interview indicates that Price inverts the structure. His argument can be reconstructed as a ‘Pricean syllogism’ in which the middle term is introduced only to be refused. The major premise — “architecture is too slow for problem-solving” — affirms a mismatch between architecture and the middle term. The minor premise — that problem-solving does not align with anticipatory design — removes the middle term from the chain entirely. What remains is the conclusion articulated in 1996: “architecture is slow and therefore requires anticipatory design.”

Thus the syllogistic link is re-routed. Instead of architecture → problem-solving → anticipatory design, Price establishes architecture → question-asking → anticipatory design. By negating the conventional middle term, he replaces problem-solving with the operational mode that the CCA correctly identifies as central to his work: the persistent act of questioning.

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32588.88969

[edit] References

Fellows, N. (1993) Transcript - Interview of Cedric Price, X8 Mixed file: chiefly replies to students, matters of architectural education, 7 February. Cedric Price Collection, St John's College Archives. [1]

Fellows, N. (1993) Notes on Transcript - Interview of Cedric Price, Unpublished

Fellows, N. (1996) Extract from Transcript - Interview of Cedric Price, Unpublished.

Price, C. (1996) Anticipating the unexpected, The Architects' Journal, 5 September, pp. 27–41. Cedric Price Collection, St John's College Archives

[1] The Cedric Price Collection includes:—

• "photocopy draft 'Summary of Cedric Price's Keynote Speech', Delft 150/A.C.S.A., 14 May 1992 ('X14');
• correspondence from students (Norman Fellows, 24 June 1996; [..]), ' X8',
• [..] transcript of Price's interview by 'NF' [Norman Fellows?], 7 February 1993 ('X9')..."
• (ib.)

[edit] Further reading

College Sidekick (2025) Introduction to Philosophy, Categorical Syllogisms

--Archiblog 08:06, 10 Dec 2025 (BST)

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