Cedric Price Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects was an English architect and influential teacher and writer on architecture.
Background
The son of an architect, Price was born in Stone, Staffordshire and studied architecture at Cambridge University (Street John"s College - graduating in 1955) and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, where he encountered, and was influenced by, the modernist architect and urban planner Arthur Korn.
Career
From 1958 to 1964 he taught part-time at the Associate of Arts and at the Council of Industrial Design. He later founded Polyark, an architectural schools network. As a working architect, he was associated with Maxwell Fry and Denys Lasdun before he started his own practice in 1960, working with The Earl of Snowdon and Frank Newby on the design of the Aviary at London Zoo (1961).
He later also worked with Buckminster Fuller on the Claverton Dome.
One of his more famous projects was the Fun Palace (1961), developed in association with theatrical director Joan Littlewood. Although it was never built, its flexible space influenced other architects, notably Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano whose Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris extended many of Price"s ideas - some of which Price used on a more modest scale in the Inter-Action Centre at Kentish Town, London (1971).
Having conceived the idea of using architecture and education as a way to drive economic redevelopment - notably in the north Staffordshire Potteries area (the "Thinkbelt" project) - he continued to contribute to planning debates. In 1984 Price proposed the redevelopment of London"s South Bank, and foresaw the London Eye by suggesting that a giant Ferris wheel should be constructed by the River Thames.