UNIT 3 - REVISITING THE FUN PALACE

AA Summer School 2012

Jorgen Tandberg & Umberto Bellardi Ricci

Subjective Fragments of the Post-Olympic City: Revisiting the Fun Palace for the 21st Century 1. Introduction The East London Olympics ground was once imagined to be the site of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace; a building of complete flexibility, responding to all of its inhabitants’ wishes, a ‘laboratory of fun’. The Fun Palace was imagined as a ‘large shipyard in which enclosures such as theatres, cinemas, restaurants, workshops and rally areas can be assembled, moved, rearranged and scrapped continuously’. It was largely conceived as a response to the post-war Fordism in Britain, pre-empting Britain’s move towards a services centered economy. We will begin the summer school with a lecture at the Queen Elisabeth Hall, hosted by some of London’s most interesting writers and thinkers, including photographer Stephen Gill who will also join us later in our studio. The theme of the lecture is the dreams and visions suspended by the Olympics on this particular East London site.

2. Post-Mortem of London Utopias The studio will start by investigating fictitious architectural projects from London such as Cedric Price’s ‘Fun Palace’ and Rem Koolhaas ‘Exodus’. Great paradoxes define these projects; they can not easily be defined as utopias or dystopias, or purely works of protest or conformity, but support all of these readings at once. Their radicality lies in pushing any concept to an extreme, and program life in detail. In the creation of ‘total environments’, architecture becomes the antidote for a system out of control. The studio will revisit this search for a contemporary architectural Gesamtkunstwerk, as an all-encompassing proposal that organises all aspects of life. We may not revel in the pop language of the 1970’s Exodus or the 1950’s Fun Palace, but will rather take a more serene approach, developing a language that addresses the current zeitgeist of disillusion, lack of master narratives, control of communication, and the cancellation of the proclaimed happy end of global market economy.

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Top: Cedric Price, ‘Fun Palace’ , 1961. Left : Rem Koolhaas, ‘Exodus, or the voluntary prisoners of Architecture’, 1972.

2.The ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ The medium in which we speculate and propose a Gesamtkunstwerk will be the space of an image: first of a place, then of a model. The initial context is abstracted into a generic space. While the Fun Palace was a provocative response to the Factory based class society of the 1950’s, we will try to address the contemporary London, that since the announcement of the Olympics has seen large scale riots and Occupy movements for months on end, as well as one of the largest recessions in a century. The studio will visit architectural ‘total environments’ in London, completed projects that have aimed to contain and organize life and consumption, human interaction, theater and play; former social experiments such as the Barbican (Chamberlin, Powell and Bon), the Robin Hood Gardens (Alison and Peter Smithson), the Brunswick Center (Patrick Hodkinson), Alexandra Road Estate (Neave Brown), as well as more contemporary built work. These ‘total environments’ account for some of London’s more impressive architectural heritage, also due to the scope of their ambitions. We will get an impression of the ways in which these works exercise power, as well as how they are flexible. The Olympic site, as the most ‘total’ environment of all, will function as a backdrop for the studio work - a public space so controlled that we are not allowed to enter.

The photographer Stephen Gill will visit our studio, review our images and talk about his in-depth knowledge of London, and especially the Hackney Olympic site. We will jointly discuss alternative London sites and visions to construct our views of a postOlympic London. We will manufacture images and produce a pamphlet that will stand in stark contrast to the hyperreal imagery of the Olympic marketing machine. Looking at the work of the artist Thomas Demand and his ability to translate news material into abstracted paper models, we will produce architectural models that abstract and estrange the places we visit, allowing new fictions to arise from the working method itself. The image will form both a critique and a proposal. The work of the group will be compiled with accompanying texts in a publication for the final jury of the summer school.

Clockwise from top: Alison and Peter Smithson ‘Robin Hood Gardens ‘ 1972. Thomas Demand ‘Diving Board’ 1994. Stephen Gill, Hackney Wick, 2008.

3. Process i. Image We will investigate 5 ‘total environments’, working in pairs to document each. Each group will produce a simple photo essay, summarizing the research and telling a story. The photo essay should consist of 5-10 carefully chosen views, and a small accompanying text. In the end, the students will choose one image, with one viewpoint and formal composition, that they wish to continue working with, that can generate discussion and define intention. ii. Model We will work with modelmaking, ending up with one final physical model. The model should be based on the photograph, and is built only to be photographed. It is in this way a completely controlled environment in itself; all decisions regarding the model can be made in order to achieve the best possible photograph. The students will experiment with texture mapping, with different types of card, backgrounds and lighting. The models should represent a small fragment of the environment the students have been investigating, but the fragment should in itself summarize or explain the project. The process will be one of reduction - using model making to reduce the fragment to a simplified, autonomous motif - a subjective abstraction. The model will serve as a testing ground for the abstracted architectural/urban fragment seen in isolation. How does the fragment read, when isolated, reduced to its essence, and taken out of its context? iii. Model photos and refinement.

The final image is one where the initial photograph is reinterpreted through a model photograph. The tutors will assist the students with photographing the model, image making, composition and retouching. We will refine our images and texts towards a final publication, that suggests a contemporary interpretation of Cedric Price’s Fun Palace in the very different social, cultural, economic and political landscape of today, as opposed to the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Images from the left: Nicholas Alan Cope, LA 30 & LA 31. Right: “Anarchy 4, A Journal of Anarchist Ideas. ‘Only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches’, 1964”.

Unit Staff: Jorgen Johan Tandberg. Studied at the AA, where he graduated with Honours in 2010, and at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. He has previously worked with and for architectural offices in London and Oslo and Madrid, as well as completing some of his own work. His work has been shown

by Architectural Review, Architectural Design, Architects Journal, Wallpaper Graduate Directory, Building Design, among others. He is currently a working in London.

Umberto Bellardi Ricci. After a first degree in Social Anthropolgy and a Masters’ in International Politics at the at School of Oriental and African Studies, Umberto Bellardi Ricci finished his five year degree from the Architectural Association in 2011. He has worked in various fields such as human rights and journalism and also in London practices such as Ron Arad Associates and Stanton Williams Architects. He has been working with Nissanke Jones over the last year and set up his own design studio, while also teaching in Foundation at the Architectural Association.

Visiting Artist: Stephen Gill. A British photographer and artist, Stephen’s work is a hybrid between documentary and conceptual art. Stephen has published a series of books on Hackney and the Olyumpic site prior to its transformation for the Olympics. Gill’s photographs have been exhibited at London’s National Portrait Gallery, The Victoria & Albert Museum, Decima Gallery, Agnes B, the Victoria Miro Gallery, Galerie Zur Stockeregg, the Gun Gallery, The Photographers’ Gallery, Palais des Beaux Arts, and Haus der Kunst. Gill’s photographs have appeared in international magazines including The Guardian Weekend, Le Monde 2, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, Tank, The Telegraph Magazine, I-D magazine, The Observer and Colors.