Obsolescence and Exchange in Cedric Price's Dispensable Museum
Lucia Vodanovic
© 2007
Abstract:
Cedric Price's legend is well established even though his projects can rarely be seen, with the exception of the handsome Aviary of the London Zoo and some office buildings dispersed in a handful of cities; paradoxically, he has become an important architectural figure despite his aims to relate architecture to other practices that are not really distinct from the work of an engineer. This paper discusses how Price's proposal to dissolve architecture can address issues such as heritage, conservation, and the museum space. By examining a number of his less known projects, I argue that the architect reconfigures the meaning of notions such as retrieval, access, and interval, and therefore that he rethinks the notion of exchange between the museum and its context.
Price formulates the built environment as contingent and hence able to establish a non-static relationship with the past, opposing the institutional consecration of the outdated and the arbitrary politics of historicism. His attention to the building capacity of the interval can be read productively as an attempt to create from an in-between space because, being fully contingent, the interval is free from any pre-determined use or past function. This restoration of the past's unresolved character is precisely what generates an alternative discussion on the function of the museum.