Description
In this talk I will open up three seams of discussion between CP and the architectures of fairs and markets more widely. In the first section I will sketch out some connections between (visionary) architecture and fairgrounds that were made during the 1960s. The Second takes up CP’s market stalls by looking at fairground rides; and the third on networks of mobility.To give a little more detail, I will introduce a range of architectural interest in fairs from the mid 1960s, and detail some of the tensions that are overlooked in these initial interests in the image of the fair and fairground. Such interest came from a variety of directions, ranging from Archigram’s well-known but ‘fairly mindless’ reading of fairground and other technological imagery, to David Braithwaite’s 1968 Fairground Architecture (still the only book on the subject), to an AA Journal Special Issue on ‘Buildings for Pleasure and Leisure’ from 1964. The latter is interesting in the context of this symposium, less for the half dozen projects it contains than for the focus of John Smith’s ‘Introduction.’ Smith reports somewhat unusually on the ‘general problems of the increasing rate of free-time as such’ that the UK Parliament had debated two months previously.
I will then follow something of CP’s prompt (to the Supercrit organisers): ‘What is useful about it now, for you?’ With half an eye on CP’s Market Stalls in the exhibition, I will look more closely at the practices of fairs, particularly as these are legible in small objects, such as rides and attractions. Fairground rides tell stories, twice over: most obviously and directly in the ride’s decoration, but they also tell a peripheral story of change over time, adaptation and animation, light-touch installation and levelling; in other words, a story about their mobility as objects and about the agency of their operators, and how this engenders interactions with the immediate world in a minor architecture of chocks, blocks and improvised tie-backs.
In the final section, I will zoom out from the mobile object and consider less visible aspects of fairs. Again, I’m mindful of CP’s willingness to critique his own back-catalogue: ‘A lot of it [PTb] is useless… but the mobility, the community change, the reuse of land and the whole attitude to communications’ promises ‘real value.’ Direct material work on market stalls must be read within a larger network of control or enabling. (Owen’s Book of Fairs is put into relief when read alongside his Book of Roads, both first published in the 1770s.) Lessons from the fair remind us that these are actually very regulated, despite the appearance of fun and mobility. But there’s a further tension here with CP’s anti-establishment, anti-identity critique, along with claims that ‘[e]ntrepreneurial instinct will rapidly satisfy demands for greater flexibility,’ that has with hindsight been recognised as almost libertarian deregulation (think Canary Wharf and FreePorts). While ‘regeneration’ in large scale post-industrial landscapes like Stoke has introduced a very different version of flexibility, we have also arguably moved away from an excess of free-time (that never materialised) to a post-crash, post-covid excess of unused city-centre space that might respond to a different aspect of the PTb, one that points towards degrowth: there’s something in the non-Plan and non-section of CP’s direct critique that can perhaps be taken up in the idea of the event as an alternate generator.
| Period | 15 Nov 2024 |
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| Held at | University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom |