Acts of Making / Acts of Transgression

This paper was presented on 'Delightful Fun' Conference, The Glasgow School of Art, Grace & Clark Fyfe Gallery and Bourdon Lecture Theatre, 3 December 2024 -13 December 2024 This initiative celebrates the legacy of British architect Cedric Price (1934- 2003) through a touring exhibition and associated events at several UK Schools of Architecture: RGU Aberdeen (9-31 October); ESALA, Edinburgh (11-22 November); GSA, Glasgow (December); Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent (January); BCU, Birmingham (February); and London Met (March). The exhibition’s centrepiece at the MSA features an original market stall prototype from the Drawing Matter Collection, designed by Price and never previously exhibited. Alongside this prototype, a range of archival materials—including prints of original drawings, texts, ephemera, film extracts, and audio recordings—offers a glimpse into the diversity of Price’s practice and the interdisciplinary conversations that animated it. In the spirit of Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt project, this initiative seeks to disseminate, interrogate, collect, and share knowledge on the move, thereby embodying the dynamism, expediency, and inclusiveness that characterised each of his projects. “Delightful Fun: A Cedric Price Thinkbelt for Our Times” is an invitation to think with Price on how to embrace usefulness, timeliness, and delight as key architectural values today, and how these may outline a more permeable profession that responds to current environmental and social challenges. The paper thinks through Cedric Price’s vision that a ‘building can accommodate an ever-shifting brief’ and applies to contemporary events. With the recent upheaval in Ukraine and Palestine the paper thinks through the most transgressive act of making and utilizes examples from contemporary fine art practice to discuss the potential and consequence in pedagogies that aspire to follow, comment and action current events. Utilising Slavoj Zizek’s ideas on the concept of the ‘unknown unknowns’ the paper proposes that there are classifications in the creative act and the pedagogies that surround them. Frequently escaping the confines of specialism whilst also to a large extend being defined in approach and methods by them, the creative act ( by definition or position – a transgressive act) can only come to it’s full potential when the plan is as loose in it’s approach as it is in its making and the last exit in a long-standing history of debates about the utility and actualization of change in society. The paper will consider current active projects that seek to change paradigms and can only succeed by themselves becoming transgressive acts by adopting qualities of anti-aesthetic and respond to the constant need of a shifting horizon of utility and a form that serves more than the intended purpose and function.