Blog 3_Function & Form 1 - Application of Non-plan (Irfan Fuhair)

The most influential architect you've ever heard of was Cedric Price (1934–2003). Rejecting the weighty, earth-, and monumental brutality prevailing in the 1960s when Price began to practice architecture, he imagined buildings that were lightweight, mobile, and ephemeral. His ideas and images percolated through architectural culture and beyond, most famously with Price's Fun Palace providing the visual vocabulary of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers 'Pompidou Center. He also dramatically extended the position of the architect, putting in a boundless polymath enthusiasm to ventures, fusing architecture with what turned out to be influential topics, like cybernetics, lifelong learning, and IT. Unlike much of the period's revolutionary avant-garde architecture, especially that of Archigram, Price's ideas were connected to an intense social conscience and an understanding of current political issues.

In 1969, Cedric Price with Paul Barker (writer), Reyner Banham (historian of architecture) and Peter Hall (geographer and planner) published 'Non-Plan: an exercise in democracy,' an essay in a new society journal. After a discussion about the disappointing effects of existing community development policies, the notion emerged and things grew worse because there was no preparation at all. At the period, Non-Plan infuriated many architects and designers as it was not only extremely disruptive and divisive, but it often challenged the existing structure and regulated uniformity of the built environment.

Cedric Price saw the region not as a single entity but rather an chaotic collection of structures, continuously evolving, continuously reorganizing and rearranging itself in both extension and retraction phases. Price promoted the "anticipatory architect" concept that the general public might decide, monitor and create their own climate.

The core concept behind Non-Plan was that 'professionals' planned societies they were going to care about before asking everyone how they were supposed to function, since each has their own interests and thoughts. Non-Plan discussed opportunities to include residents in their city creation by circumventing bureaucratic preparation and empowering citizens to form the world in which they choose to live and function.

I am not too sure how serious the Non-Plan was when it was implemented but, as a proposal, it initiated an oppositional dialog that is still in force today. Interestingly, in September 2003, a month after Cedric Price passed away, Paul Barker wrote that London benefited from Non-Plan ideas in the 1970's in solving what to do with urban negligence. Despite the idea of a control-free region by Non-Plan, the London Docklands may not have been transferred to the Canary Wharf.

I was fascinated by the notion of Non-Plan yet unsure as to how it would feel. One illustration that comes to mind of a self-organizing society are the favelas in Brazil, particularly in Rio de Janeiro. Much of the favelas began in the 1970's owing to a housing shortage that pushed the poor to build shanty towns outside Rio's urban boundaries. While the favela is the product of unequal distribution of resources I was intrigued by the favela's non-plan growth. Throughout the favelas, the inhabitants are interested throughout constructing their own self-built house and providing utilities, such as sanitation, drainage, and electricity.

Non-Plan investigates opportunities to include residents in their world planning-a aim that transgresses the 'right' and 'wrong' political divisions. The efforts to bypass development policy and urban tradition spread from places of free-market entrepreneurship to self-building homes, and from squatting to advanced prefabrication technology. And they have both expressed a commitment to have people form the urban world in which they choose to stay and function.

How do buildings best represent their residents' needs? How will communities render the jobs and leisure of their various inhabitants better? Modernism has proposed a functionalist solution to addressing the urban needs of the twentieth century, but the design of cities and houses still continues to contradict the interests of people that use them-their architecture and construction is heavily controlled by bureaucratic regulations, zoning restrictions and bureaucracy.

In conclusion, Non-Plan discusses the theoretical and philosophical structures through which design and urbanism worked to question existing power limits with an emphasis on the post-war architectural past to the present day. Architects, planners and students in architecture, construction, town-planning and architectural background may be involved in this insightful article.