saladofpearls

In 1964 Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood made plans for a ‘Fun Palace’ to be sited in the Lower Lea Valley  just outside the zone. This zone, shaped by successive waves of redevelopment that have assailed its wild, industrial and ludic nature, is currently the largest building site in London, if not Europe, being developed for the 2012 London Olympics. Responding to the aims of the 1951 London Development Plan and the Civic Trust’s 1964 plan for A Lea Valley Regional Park, the Fun Palace was to be the culmination of Price’s idea of architecture as ’social means’ and Littlewood, the socialist theatre director’s dream for a flexible theatrical space open to all and shaped by its users interests: a space where, in her words;

the latest discoveries of engineering and science can provide an environment for pleasure and discovery, a place to look at the stars, to eat, stroll, meet and play.

Like many radicals of his time, Price was influenced by the expectation of the ‘new windfall of leisure time’ provided to workers by the introduction of mechanisation and automation. He applied himself to the problem of the ‘brain drain’ that Britain faced in the Post-War years – skilled and educated workers were leaving the UK for employment in Europe and America.  While government planners were concerning themselves with reproducing workers with more free time as ‘workers’ by disciplining them, introducing credit and loan schemes, Price was devising new forms of training and education disguised as ‘leisure’.

The difference in scale between the Fun Palace plans and those of the Olympic Park may seem to make it irrelevant to compare the two, but there are significant overlaps. Price’s plans for the Fun Palace in the Lea Valley Regional Park remained unrealised, yet like many of his projects it became hugely influential. His approach to planning for contingency and spontaneity is shared by Peter Cook (Archigram) currently a consultant for the Olympic stadium. Their architectural principles of flexibility, interdeterminacy, mobility, openness have become the cornerstone of recent building techniques attuned to the political economy of our times.

Price followed through his explicit challenge to existing State-sponsored culture by finding corporate sponsorship to support the Fun Palace project. His (unbuilt) architecture anticipates the turn from an industrial to a service economy. The celebration of this ‘creative economy’ is central to the framing of the London 2012 Games. Price fully intended to nest his vision of the future in the shell of (what was quickly becoming) the industrial past. The ODA designers’ approach has been to erase any industrial heritage along with much of the amateur sports and activities that, until recently, energised the area.

Upon his appointment as head of the Cultural Olympiad, Keith Khan said ‘he was keen to embrace the “iPod generation” with the use of digital technology and concepts used by websites such as MySpace and YouTube.’ The buzz-words of participation and user-generated content are, as with the Millenium Dome, deployed to give a democratic feel to what is ultimately a top-down process of creative branding devoid of any real content or culture. Whilst Price was to employ cybernetics and early computing to enable users to move and programme elements of the building and the activities within it, the ‘flash mobs’ who are expected to populate the Olympic park are conversel shaped by its designers interests and will at best be able to upload their pictures and videos from mobile phones to the big screens which will fill the park and public spaces around it.

Since the lead-up to the Olympic bid the conceptualisation of the building around the games has focussed on the regenerative effects of the games upon East London. The emphasis is upon what will happen after the three weeks of athletics. The plans and extensive composite drawings made by the Olympic Delivery Authority for the Olympic Park in legacy mode do not refer to the concrete outcome but remain only ‘indicative’ of what might happen. However, neither the Park nor the buildings in it respond to its users’ desires, instead, this in-built contingency is predicated on shifting economic conditions, government agendas and the vapidity of its designers’ aims.

In projections for the Olympic Park one views an official playground; managed nature, organised and safe exercise, communication technologies, mobile phones, big screens and water all set against the backdrop of the Docklands and the City – centres of global financial flows. These images are characterised by a multiculturalism peculiar to the visual creations of urban planners – the dream image of difference without conflict, an endless playscape without work or workers. The cleaners and security guards upon whom these spaces depend are placed firmly outside the picture. Whereas Price’s model disposes of labour through automation, the ODA’s vision hides labour in dream-like reflections, screens, glass, water, smoke and mirrors.

As the ongoing financial crisis unravels, there are signs that the liquidity fuelling the building boom in and around the Olympic site is drying up. On Monday 30th June 2008 ODA chief executive David Higgins explained to the Public Accounts Committee that the number of apartments to be built had already been reduced from 4,200 to around 3,300 because of trouble financing the project. Since then that figure has further reduced to 3,000. The speed with which these expectations are being revised suggests that there is plenty of scope for future problems. An indication of the degree of these problems is evident in last November’s announcement of the cancellation of a bespoke Olympics Media Centre – the creative solution is to house the world’s media in retail units for the duration of the games.

If the Fun Palace can be considered a pre-vision of the emerging post-industrial society, we can wager the London Olympics won’t be that society’s crowning success. Rather, these designs represent the return, as farce, of Price’s visionary dream – a plasticated world populated by unreal avatars repeating gestures rehearsed on TV. The very creation of this landscape will be underpinned by debt, exploitation and public bankruptcy. As the scale of the promises, hype and actual building begin to ebb there is the opportunity to reassess the post-Blair UK built landscape.What if we could think like Price and take a visionary stance towards the future? Is it possible to imagine what might be built out of the ruins of the financialised city after the new economy?