Aureli

08/10/2011

Pier Vittorio Aureli

Labor and Architecture

Revisiting Cedric Prices Pottery Thinkbelt

In her book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt distinguishes between the spheres of
labor, work, and action, which together constitute the vita activa.1 While work designates
the sheer unending variety of things whose sum total constitutes the human artifice,2
labor is the process of biological survival and thus never creates anything permanent.
Labor refers to activities such as eating, sleeping, cooking, cleaning, and taking care of
the household, which are required to support the mere existence of human beings. For
this reason, the sphere of labor designates the private sphere, the silent realm of the oikos,
or household.
Arendts definitions of labor and work also designate two kinds of subjects,
respectively: animal laborans and homo faber. Animal laborans works with his or her
body and leaves nothing behind, while homo faber produces human constructs of semipermanence. Arendt notes that with the rise of modernity and its emphasis on production
as the fundamental task of society, the boundaries between labor and work dissolved. The
increasing division of labor, through which society was organized and managed for
greater productivity, further divided work into specialized activities with no possibility
for controlling any finished product. Unlike artisanal production, where homo faber can
see the finished product of his or her work, the industrial worker is part of a vast
productive organization in which work has been reduced to a generic process of labor. In

Aureli

08/10/2011

this situation products are the outcome of larger social processes and as such do not
derive from individual craft. For Arendt this condition was caused by the rise of the
social: the organizational framework in which peoples lives were systematically linked
with the imperative of production. The rise of the social imposed on people a law of ever
increasing productivity and the consequent accumulation of surplus value. Increased
productivity also implied increased consumption; most of the products of work were
meant not to last, but to fulfill the immediate needs of the labor force. This condition
promoted consumption as the ultimate goal of production and progressively blurred the
line between work and labor.
The consequences of the expanding domain of labor in contemporary civilization
is the subject of a seminal article by the architecture critic and historian Kenneth
Frampton, in which he applies Arendts analysis of the human condition to the status of
architecture in modernity.3 For Frampton, Arendts distinction between work and labor is
already contained in the ambivalence of the term architecture, which designates both the
art or science of constructing edifices for human use and the action or process of
building. The first definition addresses architecture as a work that finds its raison dtre
in the creation of a lasting human world, while the second definition addresses
architecture as a process comparable to the never ending process of biological labor.
When architecture is an edifice, it is not simply because it is an object, but because its
appearance in the physical world is charged with the intent to build something whose
meaning goes beyond mere instrumentality. With the rise of the social, architecture loses
its relationship with public space and becomes an instrument for the fungibility of the
world in the form of viaducts, bridges, and systems of universal distribution. For

Aureli

08/10/2011

Frampton, such artifacts constitute the worldlessness of the animal laborans in which
architecture has been as much affected as urbanism by the substitution of productive or
processal norms, for the more traditional criteria of worldliness and use.4 Frampton
writes:

Increasingly buildings come to be designed in response to the mechanics of their erection

or, alternatively, processal elements such as tower cranes, elevators, escalators, stairs,
refuse chutes, gangways, service cores, and automobiles determine the configuration of
built form to a far greater extent than the hierarchic and more public criteria of place.
And while the space of public appearance comes to be over-run by circulation or
inundated at the urban scale by restricted high-speed access, the freestanding, high-rise
megaliths of the modern city maintain their potential status as consumer goods.5

Framptons analysis remains one of the fundamental critiques of the way the dissolution
of work into labor and the rise of the social have fundamentally undermined the existence
of a true public sphere. Following Arendt, Framptons critique especially addresses what
he sees as the realm of modern suburbia, in which an urbanized populace [has]
paradoxically lost the object of their urbanization.6 From the parade of monuments in
the Ringstrasse criticized by Camillo Sitte, to the non-places of communities without
propinquity celebrated by Melvin Webber, Frampton described the assimilation of a
production-oriented society into the phenomena of unlimited consumption: [E]ven the
worldly category of use is to be absorbed by consumption inasmuch as use objects in
this instance, tools become transformed by abundance into disposable throwaway

Aureli

08/10/2011

goods; a subtle shift whose real significance resides in the intrinsic destructiveness of
consumption as opposed to use.7
In what follows I would like to go beyond both Arendts and Framptons
critiques, not by negating them but by showing to what extent labor has become a totality
that involves all aspects of human subjectivity, from political action to what Arendt
defined as the most contemplative dimension of life, the life of the mind. For both
Arendt and Frampton the problem with labor is that it concerns humans necessity of
subsisting, thus animal laborans cannot produce a world, only life that is, existence for
the sake of ones reproduction. But what happens when, in late capitalism, labor pervades
all human faculties and goes beyond the mere necessity of subsisting? What happens
when production is not just the repetitive laboring processes in the factory or the office,
but takes the form of all cognitive, creative, and even political faculties of human beings?
What happens when even public space becomes instrumental to economic production in
the form of cultural and social interaction? And finally, what are the consequences of the
omnipresence of labor on architectural form beyond the most visible design emblems of
consumerist culture?
In an attempt to offer some preliminary answers to these questions, I will first go
back to Karl Marxs definition of labor, then discuss how architecture responded to the
need to manage labor power as capitals fundamental source of value, and, finally, revisit
Cedric Prices proposals for the Fun Palace and Potteries Thinkbelt as extreme examples
of how the labor has been enabled by specific architectural spaces that have anticipated
our contemporary modes of production, in which knowledge, cooperation, and
information play a fundamental role in producing economic value.

Aureli

08/10/2011

Labor Power
In formulating her definition of labor Arendt criticized Marx not only for blurring the
distinction between labor and work, but also for addressing labor as the very core of
human subjectivity. Arendt acknowledged the decisiveness of Marxs identification of
labor as the source of capital, wealth, and power, but she interpreted his definition of
labor strictly in her terms, as a simple process of reproduction of ones life. Indeed, for
Marx, there was no distinction between labor and work. In an age that made productivity
the fundamental goal of society, Marx saw productivity not in the finished products but in
the capacity for labor, in human power whose strength is not exhausted when it has
produced the means of its own subsistence and survival but is capable of producing a
surplus, that is, more than the necessary for its own reproduction.8 Yet, Marx saw
labor as the very anthropological portrait of human nature, which revealed not only what
man had already achieved, but also its potential for production. Marxs great discovery
was the understanding of labor as labor power, which he defined as the aggregate of
those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living
personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces
a use-value of any kind.9 What is remarkable in this definition is that Marx understands
labor not only as physical potential but also as mental or intellectual capability. Long
before mass labor would shift from the realm of the factory (in which laboring efforts are
mostly physical) to the realm of tertiary and creative labor (in which labor power consists
mostly of mental and intellectual capabilities), Marx included the latter as a fundamental
asset of the productive power of society. Labor power is, above all, potential, of which

Aureli

08/10/2011

Paolo Virno, in his book A Grammar of the Multitude, writes: Potential, that is to say,
aptitude, capacity, dynamis. Generic, undetermined potential: where one particular type
of labor or another has not been designated, but any kind of labor is taking place, be it the
manufacturing of a car door, or the harvesting of pears, the babble of someone calling in
to a phone party-line, or the work of a proofreader.10 Unlike Arendt, who went back to
the traditional understanding of labor as just one aspect of the human condition, Marx
saw in labor the very core of human subjectivity, its totality, and thus what generates
value in a capitalist society. The importance of labor in adding value to the goods it
produces had already been presumed by the great theorists of the bourgeois economy,
Adam Smith and David Ricardo. Yet these theorists measured the value of labor in terms
of the abstract duration of the labor process, as a pure quantity of time without any
qualitative or sensible connotation. Marx noted that it was impossible to talk in terms of
the value of labor when labor itself was understood as the sum of physical and
intellectual capabilities. As embodied in the life and in the world of the workers, and not
in time, labor is the origin of the value of commodities.
As Marx understood it, in a capitalist system labor power is a fundamental
commodity. The paradoxical nature of this commodity is that it does not exist as a thing
or as a specific, recognizable activity. Labor power exists only as the potential embodied
in the generic faculties of human nature. This dimension of labor and its importance in a
capitalist system is at the origin of biopolitical techniques of government. Between the
1960s and the 1990s in Italy, the operaism and post-operaism movements rediscovered
the Marxist definition of labor power by analyzing how capitalism was forced to
transform its apparatus of power under the pressure of class struggle. Virno remarks on

Aureli

08/10/2011

the equivocal nature of the now-fashionable Foucauldian concept of biopolitics when it is

disconnected from its true goal, which is not simply control for the sake of control, but
rather the governance of human life as the potential for production. As he explains:

Capitalists are interested in the life of the worker, in the body of the worker, only for an
indirect reason: this life, this body, are what contain the faculty, the potential, the
dynamis. The living body becomes an object to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but
because it is the substratum of what really matters: labor-power as the aggregate of the
most diverse human faculties (the potential for speaking, for thinking, for remembering,
for acting, etc.). Life lies at the center of politics when the prize to be won is immaterial
(and in itself non-present) labor-power. The living body, which is a concern of the
administrative apparatus of the State, is the tangible sign of a yet unrealized potential,
the semblance of labor not yet objectified; as Marx says eloquently, of labor as
subjectivity. The potential for working, bought and sold just like another commodity, is
labor not yet objectified, labor as subjectivity. One could say that while money is the
universal representation of the value of exchange or rather of the exchangeability
itself of products life, instead, takes the place of the productive potential, of the
invisible dynamis.11

If, as Marx maintains, labor power consists of the generic faculties of the life of workers,
with their physical and mental capabilities, then Arendts spheres of labor, work, and
action are absorbed and dissolved within the late capitalisms totalizing sphere of labor.
Even those realms that Arendt viewed as antithetical to the sphere of labor, such as

Aureli

08/10/2011

political action or thinking, are absorbed by labor power; language, cooperation, and
social exchange become crucial forms of production.

Free Space
The spatial indeterminacy of a free space a space emptied of obstruction and ready to
accommodate any situation is a radical manifestation of how labor power as the
invisible dynamis of life has been exploited by capitalism. If labor power is
characterized by mans ability to adapt to any situation, and therefore by the total
unpredictability of mans actions and reactions, the only corresponding spatial form in
such unstable conditions is space ready to use and occupy according to any foreseen and
unforeseen situation. The history of capitalist spatial governance can be understood as the
possibility of accommodating the unpredictability and instability inherent to human
nature. If labor power the very object of any economic process can be understood as
the field of human potential (from body to mind), then the spatial apparatus that
correspond to this reality have to reach the same degree of openness and potential for use
and occupation. From J.N.L. Durands grid plans to Albert Kahns factory plans, from Le
Corbusiers Maison Dom-ino and Plan Libre to Ludwig Mies van der Rohes idea of
universal space, modern architecture can be understood as the approximation of a space
increasingly freed from obstacles and in which the impact of the structure in plan is
minimized in order to create space ready for any type of organization. Such flexibility
becomes even more radical when production is no longer understood as the production
of goods but as the production of immaterial facts such as services and information.
When language, cooperation, and exchange are the primary instruments of production,

Aureli

08/10/2011

the diagram of spatial relationships becomes so complex and ever changing that it
becomes impossible to translate it into a fixed spatial arrangement. As Francesco Marullo
notes, The more Labor is reduced to its most generic form, devoid of any specific duty,
the more the apparatus of fixed capital is obliged to embody the barest form of
possibility: a Typical Plan or a simple, flexible, reproducible layout able to restrain and
make productive any form of human subjectivity.12 This principle can be seen at work in
the whole landscape of industrial architecture, from the space of the factory to that of the
office. Yet with the expansion of the sphere of labor, any space of the city can become a
working space. For this reason, flexible space has become a desired quality for any urban
typology. The idea of free space open to any possible variation, adjustment, or change
seems to bring the very nature of labor to the fore of architectural space.

Life as Production
The architect who, more than anyone else, embraced the idea of architecture as a free
space open to indeterminate development was Cedric Price. His projects focused on an
idea of architecture that would change in time according to its use. A fundamental aspect
of Prices work was his concern with the possibility of enabling human creativity
through an environment devoid of the usual spatial constraints of traditional architecture.
To that end, Price often dealt with declining industrial sites for which he envisioned
social and spatial transformations toward more flexible uses.
In 1966 Price published his plan for a new regional educational network called
Potteries Thinkbelt, first in the pages of the sociology review New Society and then in
Architectural Design.13 The name of the project was derived from the site: the devastated

Aureli

08/10/2011

10

industrial landscape of North Staffordshire, which, over the course of the 19th and 20th
centuries, had been dramatically deteriorated by the local pottery industry, as well as by
the coal mining dense rail network needed to support it. With the economic crisis that
affected Englands manufacturing sector in the 1950s and 60s, the pottery industry of
North Staffordshire declined suddenly, leaving behind desolation, unemployment, and an
entropic landscape of pollution and redundant, underused infrastructure.
Potteries Thinkbelt was more than an idea to recycle an existing industrial site and
its infrastructure. Price wanted to convert the rusting railway and industrial facilities into
a vast educational network for 22,000 students. By recycling an industrial landscape as
the basis for an educational system in order to advance a post-industrial region, Price
emphasized the productive status of knowledge and education. North Staffordshire
would no longer produce material goods, but instead science and information in the form
of applied research. In Prices project, the institution of the university and of research
would no longer be seen as the ivory tower of higher education, but as a production
center in which students would not be supported by grants but hired as wage earners.
Potteries Thinkbelt was the first large-scale urban proposal to suggest a new framework
both for educational production and for production in general. The Thinkbelt not only
predated the vast reconversion of industrial sites into universities and cultural centers
that, beginning in the 1980s, became a primary trend in the development of cities, it can
also be understood as a paradigmatic example of an urban environment whose values,
forms, and ideology resonate with the great transformations that have affected the global
economy since the late 1970s, a period and mode of production that historians and
sociologists have called post-Fordism.14

Aureli

08/10/2011

11

In post-Fordism, material production was increasingly outsourced to developing

countries, where the cost of labor was lower, while the production of services,
information, and knowledge became the main focus of advanced economies such as the
US, Europe, and Japan. The advent of this immaterial production dramatically changed
the status of labor. No longer a specialized sphere clustered within the perimeter of the
factory or office, labor became an inescapable condition involving all aspects of life.
Based on knowledge and information, immaterial production involves not only the body
but also faculties such as cognition and communication that are put to work at every
moment, thus every moment of ones daily social existence is an opportunity for
production. This condition is enforced by technologically advanced communication
systems that make immaterial production possible at any time and in any place, to the
point that life itself has become the substratum of production.
In Prices Potteries Thinkbelt, production was directly linked to knowledge
understood, above all, as human experience and the capacity for interaction. The irony is
that while the project was understood as a social utopia, as progressive reform of the then
derelict and stagnant industrial economy of Great Britain, the values and ideology behind
Potteries Thinkbelt offer one of the most remarkable vantage points from which to
reconsider the way capitalism today has subsumed all of human subjectivity within its
reproductive logic.

The Fun Palace

Price first developed the idea of free space, as well as other principles found in
Potteries Thinkbelt, in his seminal project for the Fun Palace (19611965), which was

Aureli

08/10/2011

12

initiated by theater actress and director Joan Littlewood,15 whose vision of theater
became topical with the advent of the Welfare State. Under the policies of the [British]
Welfare State, in which production was more organically linked with consumption, free
time became an essential aspect of labor management. No longer understood as the
opposite of productivity, free time was an essential aspect of labor as subjectivity.
Culture, education, and social exchange were seen as at the center of the issue of free
time. Price and Littlewood imagined the Fun Palace as an institution that would shape
free time by emancipating leisure, becoming a productive factory of fun and creativity.
In this sense it is notable that Price designed the Fun Palace with the technology and
aesthetic of shipyards, and that the project was intended for a derelict industrial site along
the Thames River, where its abstract aesthetic would resonate with its context.
Price imagined the architecture of the Fun Palace as an open modular framework
like the generic, open structure of industrial buildings. Other than the structural columns
and the basement, which would contain the fixed equipment, virtually every part of the
Fun Palace was free space for changing, temporary uses. Because gantries and cranes
would be used to move partitions, ramps, and equipment as needed, Price refused to
illustrate the Fun Palace as a finished building. Instead, he presented it as a diagram, a
building made in the form of an abstract and simple structure whose content would be
defined by the conditions of its use. The Fun Palace can be understood as a space where
action always take place under the eyes of others, to use Arendts famous definition of
the public realm.16 Foregoing traditional theater space and its strict separation between
acting and spectatorship, in these spaces theatrical action would take the form of multiple

Aureli

08/10/2011

13

events and situations small performances, rehearsals, presentations, meetings, and

informal gatherings of all sorts. In other words, theater would become life, and vice versa.
The spatial and institutional logic of the Fun Palace was intended to provide a
productive environment where boundaries between work and play would be completely
dissolved. So, how are we to use our freedom from unnecessary labor? asked
Littlewood when presenting the Fun Palace. We shall be caught short again, as we were
after the invention of the steam engine, if we dont look out . . . work and leisure
overlap and merge: life becomes a whole.17 For this reason Price and Littlewood insisted
that the programmatic aspects of the Fun Palace had to remain as open as possible to
coincide with the unpredictable nature of human subjectivity. One can argue that the
radical abstraction of the Fun Palace building, its lack of image, and its perpetually
unfinished form respond to the necessity to capture life as a never-ending flux of events.
Moreover, with its insistence on performance and interaction as fundamental expressions
of human subjectivity, the Fun Palace seems to anticipate contemporary forms of
production that focus on performance itself as an end-product. Such performance
constitutes the public character of production. While the industrial worker was the
silent controller of the machine (think of the worker on the assembly line), the postFordist worker is constantly acting on the stage of communication and social interaction.
Price and Littlewoods utopian project aimed to reclaim the very integrity of life from its
alienated condition within the strict separation of activities imposed by industrial work.
But the post-Fordist (counter)revolution of the 1970s and 80s fully realized the utopia of
life at the center of production as the next form of capitalist exploitation. As Virno
remarks, The living body of the worker is the substratum of that labor-power which, in

Aureli

08/10/2011

14

itself, has no independent existence. Life, pure and simple bios, acquires a specific
importance inasmuch as it is the tabernacle of dynamis, of mere potential.18 Life as such,
life as subjectivity, immediately becomes production.
In Potteries Thinkbelt this production model is taken to the extreme.

Life Conditioning
Prices Potteries Thinkbelt project consists of several parts transfer areas, faculty areas,
and crate, capsule, sprawl, and battery housing which are linked by roads and a
railway. The three main transfer areas Meir, Pitts Hill, and Madeley are located at the
three geographical extremities of the site and act as gates to the entire system. The
transfer areas both connect Potteries Thinkbelt to national and international transportation
networks and provide accommodations for students and staff, flexible laboratories, and
classrooms. For example, in the Meir Transfer Area a series of gantries allows short-term
portable enclosures to be assembled according to different needs, while in the Pitts Hill
Transfer Area, a gigantic, generic open floor reminiscent of a typical factory plan allows
living and working cells to be assembled in ever different ways. The university facilities
were designed as mobile learning units travelling on the rail network. Departing from the
transfer areas, the units would accommodate constantly changing programs, facilitate
interdisciplinary activities, and allow students to move through the entire extent of the
network while studying. Along the railway lines, existing derelict industrial facilities
would be recycled as fixed sidings of the mobile learning units.

Aureli

08/10/2011

15

A fundamental component of the Thinkbelt was housing. Noting that students are
unwilling to spend time on housing maintenance, and wanting to avoid the
communitarian life of traditional campuses, Price designed flexible, temporary housing
units that could be assembled in multiple configurations, including 13-story reinforced
concrete frames, freestanding capsules for one or two persons, and batteries of non-loadbearing rooms sandwiched between platforms that contained a complete network of
services. Price avoided any fixed housing pattern so that it would adapt to the existing
patterns of inhabitation of North Staffordshire. Student and staff housing was to develop
freely along the railway lines and in specific areas to complement the existing towns, thus
fostering the integration of students, staff, and the local population. Eventually, the
university housing settlements would dissolve the distinction between the university and
the urban region, which, with its towns and public spaces, would become an extension of
the university itself. Price imagined that the Thinkbelts moving parts would be
orchestrated by real-time feedback based on fluctuating factors such as economic
conditions, market demands, and increasing or shrinking populations. Thus the Thinkbelt
would continually adapt, never crystallizing in one fixed form.
Price theorized this feedback between use and configuration as Life
Conditioning, a play on the environmental performance of air-conditioning machines
that, almost invisibly, can radically change the environment of an indoor space. At the
very core of this architectural and urban space was life itself, not programs or functions,
said Price, and to design was to condition life by means of devices that went beyond the
realm of architectural space and form. For Price, conditioning life meant developing an
architectural space capable of approximating lifes indeterminacy. To confront the

Aureli

08/10/2011

16

unpredictability of human actions and reactions, the flexible, modular architecture of the
Thinkbelt was designed to retain a calculated uncertainty of use and occupancy.
Reduced to its use value, life-conditioning architecture is completely reified by the
multiplicity of situations and uses it accommodates. To that end, as he did for the Fun
Palace, Price adopted the language of industrial architecture, in which the temporality of
programs and occupancy causes the architectural container to be formally indifferent to
its content, to the point of achieving a radical visual blankness. Price revealed this
aesthetic attitude through abstract line drawings and perspective views of Potteries
Thinkbelt that juxtaposed an abstract and blank architecture with the desolation of the
regions post-industrial landscape.
In a certain way, the industrial-bucolic image of Potteries Thinkbelt can be
compared to Claude-Nicolas Ledouxs agronomic architecture, designed for the
landscape surrounding the Saltworks of Chaux and linked to the theme of labor and
production. Responding to Physiocratic theories of economics, Ledoux designed a series
of architectural artifacts immersed in the landscape.19 Ledoux intended the freestanding
pavilions to reinforce the central domination of the saltworks by reforming the living and
social habits of the regions inhabitants. This reform was advanced by means of specific
moral and social institutions, such as housing and monuments, and by a specific symbolic
architectural language, or architecture parlante, made of forms that would speak to the
people through caricatures of their programmatic content a house for river surveyors
designed in the form of a pipe, or a house for coopers designed in the form of intersecting
cylinders assembled to resemble barrels. For Ledoux, the reformist ethos of architecture

Aureli

08/10/2011

17

was expressed through a strong relationship between architecture and the productive
landscape, and through a clearly recognizable symbolic architectural language.
In Potteries Thinkbelt, Prices idea of a productive landscape is in terms of the
production of services and knowledge rather than goods, and his forms refuse any
symbolism or figuration. Not even the issue of technology, which is important, is
represented. Rather, it is simply contained within the abstract forms of the Thinkbelts
urban components. In this sense it is possible to see the enormous gap between Prices
work and that of other avant-garde groups, such as Archigram, that shared his sensibility.
While Archigram was interested in the representation of technology through a clearly
recognizable visual language of rounded forms, plug-in elements, and other items that
refer to technological imagery, Price used the most anonymous and neutral architectural
elements in his project most of them ready-made industrial products devoid of any
figurative reference. For Price, architecture is what it does, just as the Italian group
Archizoom would propose a few years later with No-stop City (19681971), in which the
entire urban condition is made of nonarchitectural equipment such as air conditioning,
artificial lighting, elevators, bathrooms, etc. Yet the calculated uncertainty of the
Thinkbelt was not open-ended. It was designed to contain, manage, and determine the
labor subjectivity of its inhabitants students and faculty whose creativity and social
interaction Price interpreted as a key factor in the learning process. The architectural
blankness of the Thinkbelt was intended to provide a controlled free space for its
subjects, one in which advanced communications systems would replace the authority
imposed by buildings.

Aureli

08/10/2011

18

As Price himself recalled, the Potteries Thinkbelt began after a discussion with
Lord Kenneth, parliamentary secretary of the Ministry of Housing and Local
Government.20 If the idea for the Fun Palace came from a radical leftist cultural producer,
the Potteries Thinkbelt represented the application of the Fun Palace principles in a social
democratic, Welfare State political project. It is impossible to detach Prices project from
his political motivation as an active member of Britains Labour Party. Though Price
never held an official position in the party, his design philosophy has to be seen as a
political project perfectly congruent with the goal of the Welfare State to emancipate
education from its elitist tradition of higher education in favor of a more democratic
educational system open to all classes. In addition to recovering the disastrous state of
North Staffordshire and transforming the area from an industrial site to an educational
network, with Potteries Thinkbelt Price attempted to address a more fundamental
problem for Great Britain in the 1960s: the exodus of highly skilled workers for
Continental Europe and the United States, a phenomenon known in England as BrainDrain.21
In the history of capitalism, the movements of workers from one country to
another are recurring phenomena and one of the most common forms of class struggle.
When working conditions do not match the expectations of workers, they can only
challenge the market wage by escaping it. Brain-Drain was caused mainly by the lack of
industrial renewal in postwar Britain. Still rooted in the hegemony of the manufacturing
industry, Great Britain lacked opportunities for highly skilled workers. For many
members of the Labour Party, including Price, Brain-Drain was above all a crisis of the
education system, and more precisely of the university, which they believed was still

Aureli

08/10/2011

19

anchored to an idea of education completely detached from its economic usefulness. In

the tradition of the European nation-state, public-sponsored education was charged with
the paternalistic role of constructing the good citizen that is, the good soldier and
good head of the family. Higher education furthered these values toward the creation of
an effective ruling class. The humanities, specifically disciplines such as literature,
history, and philosophy (all taught as nation-based traditions), were privileged over the
sciences because they represented the reassuring values of the national culture. Moreover,
the university campus, a unique compound often detached from the city, reinforced a
communitarian ethos that merged contemplation and camaraderie. This was meant to
reinforce the class-consciousness of the privileged regarding their role and responsibility
in society. The growing prosperity of the lower-middle class, which rose under the
Welfare State, and the consequent phenomenon of mass-education, however, brought this
educational model to crisis.
Arguably, the 1968 student protests originated in students increasing
dissatisfaction with the old, elitist attitudes of the traditional university. Prices Potteries
Thinkbelt seems to merge uniquely the anti-authoritarian spirit and self-determination of
the early student protests with the economic imperative to involve education in the
renewal of the labor market. To solve the crisis of higher education the British Labour
Party (and Price) sought to propose a more flexible and accessible system, one oriented
toward broader applicability of knowledge as an effective economic factor. Echoing the
ongoing debates in the Labour Party, Price declared that in order to solve the industrial
decline of England, a much greater emphasis needed to be given to scientific and

Aureli

08/10/2011

20

technological knowledge.22 Rather than the hegemony of the humanities, Price proposed
a university focused on knowledge that would be immediately useful in the labor market.

From Free Space to Precarious Space

The relevance of the Thinkbelt proposal today is Prices unwitting anticipation of the
most perverse neoliberal tendencies to exploit labor power. For example, a dystopian heir
of Prices reformist vision is the ongoing Bologna Process, the broadest restructuring of
higher education undertaken in Europe since 1968.23 During the 1990s it became clear
that education is a fundamental economic factor in advanced capitalism. As such it could
no longer be sustained as a publicly funded system, but was susceptible to being traded as
a commodity. In Europe, where, until the 1980s, the policies inspired by the Welfare
State agenda had been highly influential, the increasing privatization and
commodification of education introduced a number of conflicts with, and resistance from,
students.24 In order to ease the conflicts and find a more politically and economically
legitimate reason for these market-oriented changes, at the end of the 90s the European
Union adopted the Bologna Declaration.25 The official aim of the declaration is to
standardize higher education curricula in the member countries of the EU. Yet, by doing
so the Bologna Process has drastically reformed the very objective of higher education. If
in the 1960s education was linked to the economy within the framework of the Welfare
State, the Bologna Process is now reforming the university according to the parameters of
a neoliberal economy in which flexibility plays a fundamental role as a managerial
paradigm.

Aureli

08/10/2011

21

No longer dedicated to developing the good citizen, the Bologna Process seeks
to define the student as an entrepeneur whose educational curricula is immediately finetuned to market demands. Universities are thus encouraged to offer much more flexible
curricula, which students can easily adapt according to the best opportunities available in
the market. Given the progressive withdrawal of the state from supporting higher
education, the Bologna Process encourages universities to collaborate more with the
private sector and to rely on private funding. While departments and universities of
applied research, especially in the fields of engineering and science, are well-funded
because of their immediate usefulness in the market, the humanities suffer from lack of
investment, and thus are seen as increasingly irrelevant in the face of market pressures.
It is an oversimplification, but one can say that the university prefigured by the
Bologna Process is a factory that produces immaterial commodities in the form of
knowledge, and that this production cannot be separated from its producers. When what
is bought and sold is inseparable from its producers in this case, students, teachers, and
researchers the object of production becomes not just the commodity itself, but the very
subjectivity of the producers. In short, universities are now factories that produce
subjectivity, which is addressed to the precarious student-workers: socially mobile, able
to cope with all sorts of unstable conditions, and ready to jump from one knowledge
domain to the other according to opportunities. In constantly self-customizing their
course of study, students are encouraged to exploit their personal skills rather than what
they might learn in a class. The Bologna Process acknowledges that the interactive
experience of students how they live, how they cope with any given situation, how they
socialize is a great source for their formation, and thus promotes mobility as a

Aureli

08/10/2011

22

fundamental factor for learning. This seems to confirm the subjectivity that Price
envisioned with the Thinkbelt project. Yet, in his social-democratic reformist approach,
Price did not understand the role of education and the production of knowledge in terms
of political economy. In other words, he did not understand that the design philosophy
behind his idea of education and, more generally, of the merging of work with activities
such as learning and leisure, was instrumental to an economy that at that time was
already moving from material to immaterial production.
Indeed, one can say that Prices project is today fully realized by the neoliberal
policies of the EU, except for one fundamental issue. Price imagined that in a society
where education directly serves the needs and demands of the labor market, students
should be hired as workers and not simply be supported by grants. But the reality
highlighted by the Bologna Process is quite the opposite. Since knowledge is now a
marketable commodity, students have to pay to access it, and because the rise in tuition
accentuates an entrepreneurial approach to education, students must be all the more
farsighted, since their investment is significant.
As in Prices Thinkbelt scenario, under the Bologna Process students are
encouraged to enter society from the beginning of their studies; if before they were
isolated from its expectations and rules during their education, they now must learn to
live within them. The gap between the university and the city that allowed students to
embody social rebellion no longer exists. Students are less focused on the critical
assessment of ongoing economic, political, and industrial developments and more
interested in learning how to deal with these conditions in the most effective way. It is
precisely this precarious environment in which students are forced to evolve, developing

Aureli

08/10/2011

23

their entrepreneurial abilities and learning how to produce in an unstable environment in

which freedom of choice is constantly conditioned by an increasingly precarious life.
In light of this situation today it seems outrageously nave to continue to live in
the dream bubble of the progressive 1960s, when the idylls of flexibility and creativity
seemed to be amplified by the application of networks and technology. Cedric Prices
belief in an architecture of free space and of life conditioning seems completely outdated
in an age that has seen the complete exploitation of these two concepts. And yet, I would
argue that as a project Potteries Thinkbelt is more contemporary and relevant today than
when it was developed. It is urgently contemporary because the economic and political
conditions that would support the need for Potteries Thinkbelt are fully realized today.
Only now have labor, creativity, and education merged and become the very core of the
21st-century working classs labor power. The embodiment of this form of labor power is
no longer the proletariat but the precariat: the producers of immaterial goods such as
knowledge, creativity, and information. A project like Potteries Thinkbelt, with its crude
and honest form and radical abstraction, would at least make explicit how higher
education is the new 21st-century factory, and students, teachers, and researchers are the
new cognitive workers.
Every architectural and urban project always contains the capacity to be
developed further, contains something that remains unsaid and demands to be
acknowledged and re-engaged. The potential of Potteries Thinkbelt is precisely its
fundamental political value, its ability to make visible the conditions of labor in the 21stcentury edufactory. Instead of continuing to believe in the idea of flexibility and
indeterminacy as progressive and liberating attributes, we might reverse our thinking and

Aureli

08/10/2011

24

see this idea as a basic form of exploitation. This does not mean that we have to dismiss
the project. On the contrary, to take Potteries Thinkbelt seriously means to see in its
abstraction, explicitness, and directness the potential for appropriation in an alternative
direction, toward the possibility of seeing the university, and the city in general, not just
as the realm of play, but as the site for political struggle. Just as in the past, the factory
was both the place of exploitation of labor power and where labor power came into being
as a visible political force. Above all, Potteries Thinkbelt may help us not to idealize the
public sphere without taking into consideration that public space today is one of the most
valuable commodities because economic value flourishes where there is social
interaction. For this reason, Potteries Thinkbelt, with its emphasis on the ways social
interaction and education are inevitably linked to the economy and production, could
question the productivist logic of capitalism that has now insinuated itself into
civilization. At the moment when capitalism seems unable to sustain not only its labor
force but even itself, a radical revision of this productivist logic is necessary. In this
respect, as Gorazd Kovacic has written, Arendts critique of labor (and of Marx) can
provide a clue for a counter-proposal that would, for instance, reduce labor, production
and consumption together for the sake of a better (and not just sustainable) development
and liberation of human life. Potteries Thinkbelt could be reinterpreted as a political
cartography wherein the most essential faculties of the human subject are made explicit,
and can thus be reclaimed as qualities exceeding their economic function.
To grasp this potential we need to reconsider Potteries Thinkbelt so that we might
understand it better than Price could in his own time.

Aureli

08/10/2011

25

See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

1958).
2

Ibid., 85.

See Kenneth Frampton, The Status of Man and the Status of His Object: A Reading of

The Human Condition, in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K Michael Hays
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 36277.
4

Ibid., 370.

Ibid.

Ibid., 364.

Ibid., 371.

As Arendt summarized Marxs undertstanding of Labor, see: The Human Condition, 88.

Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes and

David Fernbach (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 270.

10

Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 81.

11

Ibid., 8384.

12

Francesco Marullo, Generic and Typical Plan, The City as a Project, The Berlage

Institute, http://thecityasaproject.org/2011/04/generic/.
13

See Cedric Price, Potteries Thinkbelt: A Plan for the Establishment of a Major

Advanced Educational Industry in Staffordshire, Architectural Design 36 (October

1966): 49497. See also Cedric Price, Potteries Thinkbelt, New Society 7, no. 192 (June
1966): 1417.
14

The term post-Fordism emerged in Italy in the 1980s within the tradition of post-

operaism in order to describe the new forms of labor after the decline of material

Aureli

08/10/2011

26

production as the leading form of production in advanced economies. One of the first
analytical study of post-fordism was put forward by Christian Marazzi, in Il posto dei
Calzini. La svolta linguistica delleconomia e i suoi effetti politici (Bellinzona: Edizioni
Casagrande, 1994) trans. Capital and Affects: The Politics of the Language Economy
(Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2011). A comprehensive critical definition of post-Fordism is
advanced in Adelino Zanini, Ubaldo Fadini, eds., Lessico Postfordista: dizionario di idee
della mutazione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001). See also Gal Kirn, ed., Post-Fordism and its
Discontents (Mastricht: privately printed, 2010).
15

For an accurate history of the Fun Palace, see Stanley Mathews, From Agit-Prop to

Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007),
66191. Unlike many readings of this project, Mathews rightly situates the project within
a much broader history of ideas and the economic and political realities of postwar
Britain.
16

Arendt, The Human Condition, 22.

17

As quoted in Mathews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space, 70.

18

Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, 83.

19

See Anthony Vidler, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux: Architecture and Social Reform at the

End of Ancien Rgime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

20

See Mathews, From AgitProp to Free Space, 200.

21

See Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of Industrial Spirit, 18501980

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

22

Cedric Price, National School Plan, The Architects Journal 143 (May 1966): 1282

284.

Aureli

23

08/10/2011

27

For a general overview of the so-called Bologna Process, see Alberto Amaral, Guy

Neave, Chrstine Musselin, Peter Maaseen, eds., European Integration and the
Governance of Higher Education and Research (London: Springer, 2009). For a critical
analysis, see The Edufactory Collective, Towards a Global Autonomous University (New
York: Autonomedia, 2009).
24

The protest against the privatization of the university that took place in Italy in 1990

with the so-called Movimento della Pantera was the first resurgence of mass-political
struggle after the political apathy of the 1980s.