Domus issue # 868
Domus
www.domusweb.it
Sketches, notes, newspaper clippings, designs, collages, architectural projects, speeches, doodles, games, photographs…. Cedric Price (who died in London on 10 August 2003) scattered around him throughout his life a kaleidoscope of ideas. He was born in 1934 in Stone, Staffordshire, and studied architecture in London in the late 1950s. Partner for forty years of actress Eleanor Bron who inspired “Eleanor Rigby” sung by the Beatles, Price produced agile, effective systems of thought. These ideas without didactic or moral ambitions were conceived to stimulate the pleasure of living in the “here and now.” Like his Fun Palace, a building intended to last a maximum of 20 years, or the Potteries Thinkbelt project that converted a disused industrial railway into a mobile university. Or the Glasgow observatory/town hall, where citizens could follow and evaluate the decisions of their administrators by observing coloured lights projected onto the city’s buildings. From his toolbox sprung many iconoclastic projects, meant to “arouse desire rather than to solve problems.” Without ever becoming a star, building very little and carefully avoiding assembling his texts into a written work, Cedric Price used the surroundings of his everyday life as an infinite blackboard.
Domus 868 March 2004. Contents
Guided Tour: The Snow Show
In the Arctic towns of Kemi and Rovaniemi 15 architects pair up with 15 artists test their skill in building with snow and ice
3D Terragni. Asilo Sant’Elia
The photographic reinterpretation of Giuseppe Terragni’s architectural works continues with the building constructed in Como between 1936-37. Photographs by Paolo Rosselli, with a critical text by Inaki Abalos
The Mars contexts
Giancarlo De Carlo on architecture in Martian contexts
Toyo Ito. Watertrees
Parque de La Gavia, Madrid. A proposal for an ‘infrastructural landscape’ by Toyo Ito
Air Condition
Bruno Latour: politics, from now on, will be a section of the technology of climate-control
Desert Wall
In the setting of Western Sahara, a wall 2,600 kilometres long, camouflaged by the sand and surrounded by mines, has been cutting a territory in half for twenty-five years, stopping nomadism, a custom perpetuated out of necessity for thousands of years. Photographs by Armin Linke
Knit your house
Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec: from furniture to the space around it. Innovative organically-shaped modules for furnishing interiors
Wall lingerie
An unconventionally-shaped decorative radiator designed by Joris Laarman
Interview: Oskar Hansen
Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno interview Oskar Hansen, Polish architect, urban planner and teacher, known for his theory on ‘Open Form’. With a portrait by Philippe Parreno
After Affect
Philippe Parreno: a journey through an infinite urban landscape
Marco Navarra. A coloured tarmac ribbon in Sicily
Three years after its completion, three young intellectuals from southern Italy went back to visit the first section of the Linear Park between Caltagirone and Piazza Armerina; Stefano Boeri interviews them
Exposure Architects. A spider on water
In Bangkok, a structure suspended over an artificial pool of water houses the restaurant area for the workers of a textile company
Subway. Bruce Davidson
Davidson’s legendary photographs commemorate the centenary of the New York subway and the art that was born there
Aerosol Underground: Scrawl of the wild
A critical text by Mia Fineman
The control of territory and social imagery
Anna Detheridge on the risk that today wars occupy the territory of the mind
Art Graft
Olafur Eliasson. Participation City
Post-it: Book Reviews
Rassegna: Domestic technologies
El Topo. Trisha Donnelly
Edited by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnick (Wrong Gallery)
