McAndrew, Claire; (2023) Dreams of the fun palace and plug-in city—architectural modularism and cybernetics in the 1960s. In: Hendon, Zoë and Massey, Anne, (eds.) Design, History and Time: New Temporalities in a Digital Age. (pp. 131-142). Bloomsbury Publishing: London, UK.

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Abstract

This chapter considers the neo-futurist visions of two architectural designs from the 1960s, Archigram’s Plug-In City1 designed by Peter Cook in 1964 and The Fun Palace2 conceived by Cedric Price in the same year. Each was radical in thinking around architectural modularism and in the case of The Fun Palace – the embrace of cybernetic thought. Their designs speculated on visions that were temporally adaptive and represented an idealistic belief in a better future, with an aspiration to drive flexibility and versatility from a collection of modular units that could be arranged and re-arranged, time and time again. Reversing the assumed stability of architectural form, The Fun Palace and Plug-In City were conceived as systems where human activity could control and modify the spatial form within which it was framed and so, ad infinitum. Blending modular architecture, technology and society, these two designs sought to provide liberation from modernism.

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