From Cybernetics to an Architecture of Ecology: Cedric Price’s Inter-Action Centre

Tanja Herdt

doi:10.7480/footprint.15.1.4946

Authors

Tanja Herdt TU-Delft

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.15.1.4946

Abstract

This article discusses the impact of systems thinking and cybernetics on architectural design by examining the example of the Inter-Action Centre (1970–1977) of British architect Cedric Price. The centre reflects Price’s view of architecture as part of an extensive social and environmental system, or ecology, that influences the inhabitants’ mutual interactions and their relationship with their physical surroundings. Emphasising the link between material resources, technology and individual action, the project design implied a change both in the understanding of architecture and the architect’s role: from the designer of present-day artifacts to the designer of system interventions.

Influenced by the cybernetician Gordon Pask, the systems theorist Buckminster Fuller, and the biologist and town planner Patrick Geddes, Price developed a relational approach in which architecture functions as an instrument of change within a larger system such as the city, neighbourhood or region. Following this approach, space was no longer perceived merely as a container but as the product of social interactions. Accordingly, the architect’s work represents a fundamental change in the conception of space in the arts and sciences during the 1970s, which is essential for understanding today’s design and planning practice.

Author Biography

Tanja Herdt, TU-Delft

Tanja Herdt is an Associate Professor of Theory and Methods of Urban Design in the Department of Urbanism at TU Delft. She is both an academic and a practicing urban designer with an emphasis on urban transformation, methods of urban analysis, and history and theory of the city. Tanja received her doctorate from the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, where she also worked as head of research for sustainable settlement design at the research centre ETH-CASE. In her work she focuses on theories and methods that uncover the dependencies of social practices and urban form, the future design of housing and public space, and the influence of digitalisation on city design. Her work on Cedric Price was published under the title The City and the Architecture of Change (Park Books, 2017).

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