The general consensus amongst architects and historians is that Cedric Price's Fun Palace of 1964 was a primary influence on Rogers and Piano's 1977 Centre Georges Pompidou. In a sense, it was the genesis of the utopian ideal of the cultural building as playground, one that is still beloved by architects, urbanists and city planners. The lineage between the two projects appears direct, as both use a lightweight high-tech aesthetic and free floorplan, a non-hierarchical interior for various community and artistic uses. The Pompidou, although completed in the 70s, is often referred to as the quintessential 60s building, in spirit if not in precise chronological time.

We don't deny that Price was influential, far more so, in fact, than his scant built oeuvre would ever suggest. Like many of the grand figures of twentieth century art history who are undergoing a small scale revival on weblogs, flickr sets and image accumulation sites (the modern equivalent of organising for the private publication of a folio of images), Price built very little but generated a huge amount of iconic imagery (in much the same vein as Archigram, with whom Price was loosely affiliated). We once saw him get caught in a set of automatic doors on Tottenham Court Road.

Price's most interesting - and apparently prescient - concepts include the Fun Palace (see also this collection of Fun Palace images at Quotesque), a shed of infinite possibilities, lightweight, ultimately disposable but always responsive to the changing needs of a leisure-orientated culture. The title of Stanley Mathews' piece at Audacity.org rather sums it up: From Agit-Prop to Free Space, and charts how Price's ideas for the conversion of abandoned industry into zones of education, leisure and technological innovation were about ten years ahead of their time. By the time the UK woke up to its large swathes of post-industrial wasteland in the early 80s, there was little enthusiasm for any utopian, architect-led solution, so the whole problem was simply shifted over to the private sector to sort out, with predictably mediocre results.

The visions of Price, Archigram, et al, have had more of an influence on children's soft play centres than on romantic, nomadic combinations of architecture and machinery - like the Manned Cloud proposed by designer Jean-Marie Massaud ('Manned Cloud is an alternative project around leisure and travelling in all its form, economic and experimental, still with the idea of lightness, human experience and life scenarios as the guiding principles. The spiral of Archimedes is the driving force of this airship in the form of a whale that glides through the air.')

This isn't just anti-technological humbug, it's simply the observation that the best laid plans and ambitions of the more technologically determinist architects and designers have a strange way of turning round and biting us. So it goes that rather than live in a society punctuated by vast structures aimed at enhancing social cohesion and the quality of our leisure time, we've ended up with malls and Wacky Warehousess, both of which bear not only an ideological link but a visual one to Price's InterAction Centre in Kentish Town (demolished 2003, Fun Barns still extant). Isn't a ball pit just a mass-market, plasticised version of the soft environments pushed by the likes of everyone from Panton to Conran (check the web exhibition 'Conversation Pits and Cul-de-sacs - Dutch architecture of the 1970s'.

Still, influence is everything in a world of quotes, verbal and visual. The O.C. Fun Palace Project (pdf) is a quasi-tongue in cheek call for the transposition of Price's 'temporal, multi-programmed, 24-hour entertainment centre' to the mall-swamped landscape of Orange County (at girlwonder). The recent spate of public art installations, follies, panopticons and sitooteries shows that surprise and delight is still supposed to have a place in the modern world. Sadly, although Price ultimately envisioned a wholly technologised modern world, his ideals have been enthusiastically taken up by advocates of privatised play spaces, for both adults and children.

The paradox of modernism is its innate seriousness, because any form of frivolity is inevitably co-opted as a means of selling something. Sometimes this is tacitly understood - the malls of Victor Gruen, an idealist who ultimately decided to just go with the flow, or the constantly evolving amusement park aesthetic. Even Price's much-vaunted 'Magnets', the project he was working on at the time of his death, predicted the private sector's unsubtle lunge towards co-opting public space for the means of stimulating advertising. Installations and events are sponsorship opportunities, first and foremost, while the spontaneity of street happenings and theatres has spawned the genre known as guerilla advertising. The modern city is almost entirely magnetised, but we've been polarised to be attracted to everything.

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Other things. More Price online: a blog on the work of Gordon Pask, Cedric Price and John Frazer (the website of "Envisioning an evolving architecture: The encounters of Gordon Pask, Cedric Price and John Frazer", a PhD Dissertation by Goncalo Furtado Lopes at UCL) / Heresy Corner, a weblog worth a read / a gallery of images of Pimlico School, a risky building with just weeks left to live / build your own modernist pavilion / all about Trailing Spouse Syndrome / guitar notes by David Gedge at Something and Nothing / Five Unbelievably Cool Research Facilities. Mad scientists are alive and well. posted by things at 19:01