"Cedric Price"
2001-01-17 until 2001-02-23
Institute of International Visual Arts
London, , UK

This is the latest exhibition of drawings by the visionary British architect Cedric Price whose projects push against the traditional physical limits of architectural space and map out the trajectories of time. Since he set up his practice in 1960, his focus on time-based urban interventions, rather than on finished buildings, has earnt him heroic status among both contemporary architects and artists.

The show at inIVA, selected by Hans Ulrich Obrist, will include a retrospective presentation of Price's Magnet City project, which comprises a series of short-life structures. Developed throughout the 1990s and occurring between urban spaces - incorporating stairways, walkways, elevators, arcades and piers - the function of these 'urban triggers' is not to occupy space, but to stimulate new patterns and situations of urban movement in the city.

The exhibition will also address Price's seminal ideas about the urgent need for museums as places of transitional dialogue and cultural production, as exemplified by his 1999 project with the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, which resulted in the production of personalised badges for museum staff. As the antithesis of the inflexible institution, Price developed the Fun Palace project from 1961, a proposal for a building whose lifespan would be limited to no more than twenty years.

Price's conviction that buildings should be able to be adapted by the occupier to serve the needs of the moment reflect his belief that time - alongside breadth, length and height - is the fourth dimension of design.

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