Good Life Now

Leisure and Labour in Cedric Price’s Housing Research, 1966–1973

Authors

  • Corinna Anderson Canadian Centre for Architecture

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.13.1.2139

Abstract

Cedric Price’s architecture approaches time and space atypically, focusing primarily on the needs and desires of the user. His ‘short-life’ housing system, designed in 1970–1972 in response to a national crisis of housing provision, takes consumer choice as the organising principle of its design. Its formal flexibility blurs the separation between the house and workplace, while its customisability and disposability reduces the family home to an expendable commodity. The short-life house accommodates a lifestyle of precarity characteristic of neoliberal society, aligning with neoliberal discourses on society emergent in Britain at the beginning of the 1970s.

Author Biography

Corinna Anderson, Canadian Centre for Architecture

Corinna Anderson is a writer and editor attentive to the political implications of the built environment. She holds an MA in Architectural History from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London and a BA in Mathematics and Visual Arts from the University of Chicago. She was 2017–2018 Curatorial Intern at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

References

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Published

2019-07-03