5 Cedric Price: Responsive Architecture and Intelligent Buildings

“Technology is the answer, but what was the question?” asked British architect Cedric Price (1934–2003) in a lecture he gave by that title in London in January 1979—a question that is one of the best lenses for both understanding his work and framing its relevance. The iconoclastic architect argued that the point of architecture should not be to lock people down, but rather to open them up: “to ease up the choice, to free the opportunities of the individual user as to what they would do next,” he told his audience.1 How might architectural proj ects “generate new thoughts” in the minds of the people who interact with them?2 How might architecture and technology work together, not for clarity and usability, but for some dif fer ent purpose that the architect or technologist didn't predetermine? “I feel that the real definition of architecture is that which through a natu ral distortion of time, place, and interval creates beneficial social conditions that hitherto were considered impossible,” Price said.3 He concluded the lecture saying that “it's worth mentioning that with the advent of the micropro cessor and the silicon chip more and more people are going to be in the situation where they themselves, have to decide what to do. Society, economic circumstances, will make no demands on their time, but they'll live just as long, unless they kill themselves through boredom.”4