On Cedric Price
When Andrea Veglia of PAT. met with Elizabeth Diller, founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, for a conversation featured in the Italian newspaper La Stampa, the core questions shaping both practices quickly came into focus: it could hardly have been otherwise. Among them emerged Cedric Price, with his enduring capacity to unsettle established systems and overturn inherited assumptions about the city.
AV In your speech at Utopian Hours, you mentioned Cedric Price and the Fun Palace. I remember the story: Jane Littlerwood, the theatre director, went to Cedric Price to share with him their visions about space. It was really nice to hear about that.
LD When I was doing research on the Palace at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, who has the archive, I found some things, like the original… They were advertised. They made some films and they were advertising. I couldn’t really find the films, but I knew that they actually did as promotion for it, you know, because nobody sees these things. But yeah, they were trying to push that project off the ground for so long. They lost the first site, and then they got put on the second site, which was like sewage. It wasn’t very good.
And so, I don’t remember how, but it was ultimately it was rejected by the public. Yeah, they had tried all over the place.
AV Did you ever meet him?
LD Yes, I think this was in the year 1999. I believe. And I was on a jury. I was very early in the architecture career, and I was asked to be on a jury with some other really established people for concepts for Hudson Yards.
AV I remember that. I read this story in an interview book that Obrist did with Cedric Price. There is something about the story of this competition jury.
LD Yes. So, I think, let’s see, there was Richard Meier, Philip Johnson was on it? Anyway, there were some very established people, maybe Isozaki, I can’t remember, but people like that. And I was on the jury, and I was like the only one that just didn’t belong, you know. Anyway, Peter Eisenman was one of the architects.
Cedric Price was one of these architects, one of the five that presented to the jury.
And so I was sitting on the jury side this time, not the architect side. And he presented, he was drunk. And his drawings were almost empty, you know, like he had just a couple of lines on these drawings. And his whole point was to keep the site empty.
It was to be the lungs of New York, you know? I thought that was so brilliant. And I voted for him to win. And nobody else did, you know, nobody else. They had decided Peter Eisenman should win. I was totally outnumbered. But at least I represented.
