The Inter-Action Centre was one of architect Cedric Price's few realized projects.[1][2] The community centre, sited at Talacre Public Open Space in Kentish Town, in the London Borough of Camden, was commissioned in 1964 by Ed Berman and the Inter-Action Trust[3] and built in 1971.[4]

The Inter-Action Centre is particularly notable for having been one of the first buildings to make concrete the ideas of flexible architecture[5] and impermanence.[6] Price's body of work as a whole had a tremendous influence on the architecture profession,[7][8][9] and the Inter-Action Centre helped realize the ambitions of his earlier, unbuilt Fun Palace[4][2] (which had proposed the fusion of architecture and information technology, entertainment and educational activities[10]) and Potteries Thinkbelt.[11] It was constructed around an open framework into which modular, pre-fabricated elements could be inserted and removed according to need.[12] It was essentially a building that could be reconfigured over time as its occupants' requirements evolved.

Often compared to Centre Pompidou and other high-tech buildings of the time, the Inter-Action Centre differed in being explicitly designed around a democratic approach to architecture.[13]

Price had been working with, and was influenced by, cybernetician Gordon Pask and used the Inter-Action Centre as a way to present an architectural approach to second-order cybernetics.[14] The Inter-Action Centre was architectural evidence that Price's radical and utopian agenda could be materialized in a built form with a clear social agenda,[15] though there is also a view that the building showed that his goals were not quite realizable in the real world.[16][17]

Price himself persuaded English Heritage not to list the building, and supported its demolition in 2003[18] because he believed it had fulfilled its purpose as a temporary commodity with a short lifespan.[15]

References

  1. ↑ Herdt, Tanja (29 June 2021). "From Cybernetics to an Architecture of Ecology: Cedric Price's Inter-Action Centre". Footprint. 15 (1): 45–62. doi:10.7480/footprint.15.1.4946. ISSN 1875-1490. S2CID 240538537. ...the Inter-Action Centre is one of the very few projects where the architect put these ideas into practice.
  2. 1 2 Pérez Martínez, Sol (2019). "In absence of...alternative narratives". Canadian Centre for Architecture. Retrieved 16 February 2023. Its main legacy is as one of the only built proof of Price's ideas... press overshadowed other narratives of the Inter-Action Centre by describing the project as 'Fun Palace Mark II', a built smaller-scale version of Price's vastly referenced project, Fun Palace.
  3. ↑ "Inter-Action Centre – Cedric Price fonds". Canadian Centre for Architecture. Retrieved 8 February 2023. ...a completed project for a community centre commissioned by Ed Berman and the Inter-Action Trust, for a disused site at Talacre Public Open Space in Kentish Town, Camden, London.
  4. 1 2 Melvin, Jeremy (15 August 2003). "Cedric Price". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 16 February 2023. ...the Interaction Centre, built in London's Kentish Town in 1971, put some of these ideas into practice on a reduced scale...
  5. ↑ Achten, Henri (March 2019). "Interaction Narratives for Responsive Architecture". Buildings. 9 (3): 66. doi:10.3390/buildings9030066. ISSN 2075-5309. The Interaction Centre, Kentish Town, by architect Cedric Price, realized in 1971, was one of the first contemporary examples of kinetic and flexible architecture.
  6. ↑ Williams, Rhiona (5 September 2018). "Cedric Price : Events in Time". Retrieved 16 February 2023.
  7. ↑ "Spatial Agency: Cedric Price". Spatial Agency. Retrieved 16 February 2023. Cedric Price (1934-2003) was an architect whose oeuvre, though mostly unbuilt, has had a marked influence on contemporary architecture.
  8. ↑ Smith, Otto Saumarez (17 May 2017). "Cedric Price's mission to make architecture amusing". Apollo Magazine. Retrieved 16 February 2023. Cedric Price (1934–2003) has been described as the most influential architect you have never heard of
  9. ↑ Wilken, Rowan (2007). "Calculated uncertainty: computers, chance encounters, and 'community' in the work of Cedric Price". Swinburne Research Bank. ISSN 1444-3775. Retrieved 16 February 2023. Iconoclastic British architect and theorist Cedric Price is noted for the comparatively early incorporation of computing and other communications technologies into his designs, which he employed as part of an ongoing critique of the conventions of architectural form, and as part of his explorations of questions of mobility.
  10. ↑ Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). "Inter-Action Centre – Cedric Price fonds". Canadian Centre for Architecture. Retrieved 16 February 2023. Cedric Price had been engaged by the concepts of flexible architecture, indeterminacy, impermanence, and the fusion of information technology, entertainment, and educational activities in earlier unrealized projects such as Fun Palace.
  11. ↑ "'Anti-building' for the future: the world of Cedric Price". St John's College, University of Cambridge. Retrieved 8 February 2023. The high-concept ideas behind the Fun Palace and the Potteries Thinkbelt found an outlet in one of the few structures of Price's design that actually got built: the Inter-Action Centre, a unique multipurpose community centre in Kentish Town. This was something of a scaled-down and more static version of the Fun Palace, but was still extendable and flexible. The Inter-Action Centre illustrates Price's insistence that buildings should not be monumental but mutable. He believed that buildings and institutions should not be preserved forever, but rather that obsolescence and demolition were a natural part of any building's 'life cycle'.
  12. ↑ "InterAction Project". Architectuul. Retrieved 8 February 2023. The InterAction Centre building constituted an open framework into which modular, pre-fabricated elements can be inserted and removed according to need.
  13. ↑ Bonfante, Francesca (2021). "The 'Machines' of knowledge: Cedric Price's Topicality" (PDF). International Journal of Architecture and Urban Studies. 6: 124–133. Retrieved 10 February 2023.
  14. ↑ Herdt, Tanja (29 June 2021). "From Cybernetics to an Architecture of Ecology: Cedric Price's Inter-Action Centre". Footprint. 15 (1): 45–62. doi:10.7480/footprint.15.1.4946. ISSN 1875-1490. S2CID 240538537. Retrieved 10 February 2023.
  15. 1 2 Aragüez, Marcela (June 2021). "Building Calculated Uncertainty: Cedric Price's Interaction Centre". Arq: Architectural Research Quarterly. 25 (2): 108–124. doi:10.1017/S1359135521000233. ISSN 1359-1355. S2CID 240577514. Retrieved 10 February 2023.
  16. ↑ Xu, Grace (2021). "The Contradictions of Containing the Infinite in the Fun Palace". University of Texas at Austin – Student Works. doi:10.26153/tsw/38072. Retrieved 10 February 2023.
  17. ↑ Xu, Grace (2021). "The Contradictions of Containing the Infinite in the Fun Palace". University of Texas at Austin – Student Works. doi:10.26153/tsw/38072. ...his ideas of radical indeterminacy and constant change inevitably come with contradictions that prevent the total realization of his ideals.
  18. ↑ Murphy, Douglas (5 January 2018). "Cedric Price (1934–2003)". Architectural Review. Retrieved 8 February 2023.

Further reading

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