Obsolescence and exchange in Cedric Price's dispensable museum

Cedric Price’s legend is well established even though his projects can rarely be seen, with the exception of the handsome Aviary of the London Zoo and some office buildings dispersed in a handful of cities; paradoxically, he has become the ultimate architectural figure despite of the fact that he aimed to relate architecture to other areas or even to melt it into other practices that are not really distinct from the work of an engineer. Yet this paper discusses that Price’s proposal to dissolve architecture can face issues such as heritage, conservation or the museum space. Through the discussion of a number of his less known projects, it argues that the architect reconfigures the meaning of notions such as retrieval, access and interval, among others, and therefore that he rethinks the issue of exchange between the museum and its context.
Price formulates the built environment as contingent and hence able to establish a non-static relationship with the past, opposing the institutional consecration of the outdated and the arbitrary politics of historicism. His attention to the building capacity of the interval can be read as an attempt to create from that in-between space precisely because, being fully contingent, it is free from any pre-determined use or past function. This restoration of the past’s unresolved character is precisely what generates an alternative discussion on the function of the museum.

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