The Inter-Action Centre was one of architect

Cedric Price Cedric Price FRIBA (11 September 1934 – 10 August 2003) was an English architect and influential teacher and writer on architecture. The son of an architect (A.G. Price, who worked with Harry Weedon), Price was born in Stone, Staffordshire ...

's few realized projects. The community centre, sited at Talacre Public Open Space in Kentish Town, in the

London Borough of Camden The London Borough of Camden () is a London borough in Inner London. Camden Town Hall, on Euston Road, lies north of Charing Cross. The borough was established on 1 April 1965 from the area of the former boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn, and St ...

, was commissioned in 1964 by Ed Berman and the Inter-Action Trust and built in 1971. The Inter-Action Centre is particularly notable for having been one of the first buildings to make concrete the ideas of flexible architecture and impermanence. Price's body of work as a whole had a tremendous influence on the architecture profession, and the Inter-Action Centre helped realize the ambitions of his earlier, unbuilt

Fun Palace Fun is defined by the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' as "Light-hearted pleasure, enjoyment, or amusement; boisterous joviality or merrymaking; entertainment". Etymology and usage The word ''fun'' is associated with sports, entertaining media ...

(which had proposed the fusion of architecture and

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information technology system (I ...

, entertainment and educational activities) and

Potteries Thinkbelt Potteries may refer to: * Pottery, or pottery manufacturing Places in England * Staffordshire Potteries, the Stoke-on-Trent area, known as the after its once-important ceramics industry * The Potteries Urban Area, a conurbation distinct from, an ...

. It was constructed around an open framework into which modular, pre-fabricated elements could be inserted and removed according to need. It was essentially a building that could be reconfigured over time as its occupants' requirements evolved. Often compared to Centre Pompidou and other high-tech buildings of the time, the Inter-Action Centre differed in being explicitly designed around a democratic approach to architecture. Price had been working with, and was influenced by, cybernetician Gordon Pask and used the Inter-Action Centre as a way to present an architectural approach to second-order

cybernetics Cybernetics is a wide-ranging field concerned with circular causality, such as feedback, in regulatory and purposive systems. Cybernetics is named after an example of circular causal feedback, that of steering a ship, where the helmsperson m ...

. The Inter-Action Centre was architectural evidence that Price's radical and utopian agenda could be materialized in a built form with a clear social agenda, though there is also a view that the building showed that his goals were not quite realizable in the real world. Price himself persuaded

English Heritage English Heritage (officially the English Heritage Trust) is a charity that manages over 400 historic monuments, buildings and places. These include prehistoric sites, medieval castles, Roman forts and country houses. The charity states that i ...

not to list the building, and supported its demolition in 2003 because he believed it had fulfilled its purpose as a temporary commodity with a short lifespan.

References

Further reading