Fun Palace is Cedric Price’s most celebrated work. Whether characterised as a giant toy or as a building-sized transformable machine, the project’s interest resides in its radical reliance on structure and technology, its exemplification of notions of time-based and anticipatory architecture. With Fun Palace, Price addressed social and political issues that go far beyond the typical bounds of architecture. The famous lecture “Technology is the answer, but what was the question?” is being reproduced publicly here for the first time ever. Following Price, we suggest you to explore this place as an instrument of pleasure and enjoyment.

author

Hans Ulrich Obrist, born 1968 in Zurich, Switzerland, is Co-director of the Serpentine Galleries, London. Prior to this, he was the Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, Paris. Since his first exhibition World Soup (The Kitchen Show) in 1991, he has curated more than 250 shows.

In 2009 Obrist was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and in 2011 received the CCS Bard Award for Curatorial Excellence. Obrist lectures internationally at academic and art institutions, and is contributing editor to several magazines and journals. Obrist’s recent publications include A Brief History of Curating; Project Japan: Metabolism Talks with Rem Koolhaas; Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Curating But Were Afraid to Ask; Do It: The Compendium; Think Like Clouds; Ai Weiwei Speaks; and Sharp Tongues –Loose Lips –Open Eyes –Ears to the Ground, along with new volumes of his Conversation Series.

Lorenza Baroncelli is an architect researcher and curator. In January 2015 she founded, together with Joseph Grima, Antonio Ottomanelli, Marco Ferrari and Elisa Pasqual, White Hole Gallery, a remotely-controlled micro-gallery in Genoa (Italy), combining strategies of artistic practice and journalism to investigate, document and debate the forces —visible and invisible —that shape society and the landscape.

In 2014 she has been scientific director of the Swiss pavilion curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014. Since September 2013 she has been the course leader of the Masters in Urban Vision and Architectural Design programme at Domus Academy, Milan. In 2011 she was general coordinator for Festarch (Perugia, Italy) the first international festival of architecture curated by Stefano Boeri.

She studied Architecture at the Third University of Rome where she graduated cum laude with a thesis on the growth and development of Bogotà in relation to its armed conflicts. She has been published in national and international architecture magazines such as Abitare, Domus and Urbanistica.

website

funpalace.ch

country

Italy

year

2014