Potteries Thinkbelt: an architecture of calculated uncertainty.

Stanley Mathews

Assistant professor of art history, Hobart & William Smith Colleges.

September, 2000

Cedric Price’s North Staffordshire “Potteries Thinkbelt” marks a shift from a determined and mechanical architectural paradigm to the fluid and indeterminate model of the information age.  The history of the Potteries traces the historical trajectory from industrial production to postindustrial society.  For more than 250 years, the North Staffordshire Potteries was the center of the English ceramics industry.  It was here that Josiah Wedgwood and Enoch Wood (Cedric Price's great, great grandfather) opened their porcelain "Manufactories" in the early 18th century.[1] By the middle of the 19th century, the "Potteries" had grown from a few small family operations into large corporations.  The Potteries also became a center for cutting-edge science and technology.  Joseph Priestly conducted his first thermodynamics experiments in the Potteries, and one of James Watt's first steam engines was used to crush flint, mix clay, and turn potter's wheels in the Potteries.  The first steam engine in Britain, George Stephenson's "Rocket,” moved materials to and from the Potteries. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Potteries was a thriving web railways, snaking across the landscape to connect towns and factories.[2] But, like much of British industry, it all changed after the war.

After the Second World War, Britain was no longer the major industrial power it had once been.  Britain's industrial infrastructure became increasingly obsolete and could no longer compete with the emerging industrial superpowers of the United States, Germany and Japan.  Today we may perceive that industrial production was giving way to newer technologies.  But at the time, successive British governments failed to appreciate the significance of this trend towards post-industrialization, and continued to shore up the old "smokestack" industries as best they could, not realizing that Britain's role in the history of industry and technology had changed forever.  For their part, English universities impeded the development of new technologies by privileging higher education as the exclusive preserve of gentlemanly learning while ignoring technology and "applied science."  These conditions led to the disastrous "brain drain" of the 1950's and 60's, when the best and brightest British scientists and engineers flocked to American universities and companies.  Meanwhile, industrial areas such as the North Staffordshire Potteries languished, while factories closed and workers were laid off.  The North Staffordshire "Potteries" is today the ravaged battlefield where the Industrial Revolution was won and lost - an industrial wasteland of ruined factories and rusting machinery.   Only the network of rail lines remained intact.

Cedric Price grew up in the Potteries, and his mother was a direct descendant of Enoch Wood, who, as we’ve seen, was one of the founders of the Potteries. In 1964, Price began work on a revitalization plan for the North Staffordshire Potteries, which he called the "Potteries Thinkbelt."   The Thinkbelt was to be a "higher education facility" devoted to science and technology.  Price disliked the upper-class connotations of the word "university," complaining that these were little more than "medieval castles with power points, located in gentlemanly seclusion", which taught nothing in the way of applied science and technology.[3]  Covering a 108 square mile "campus," Price's Thinkbelt would provide scientific education for 22,000 students and reestablish the North Staffordshire Potteries as a center of science and technology in the English Midlands.

There was no client for the Potteries Thinkbelt - it was a labor of love, the result of a challenge.  Price had criticized the state of British universities to the Junior Minister of housing and local government, who in turn challenged him to come up with his own idea for a university.   Price explained,

"...the challenge from the Junior Government Minister, Lord Kennet, to explain an alternative to the then popular 'new' universities (early sixties) produced the Potteries Thinkbelt to take advantage of local unemployment, a stagnant local housing programme, a redundant rail network, vast areas of unused, unstable land, consisting mainly of old coal-working and clay pits, and a national need for scientists and engineers."[4]

The "PtB," as it became known, was not a "building" and perhaps not even "architecture" as it was understood at the time.  Price proposed utilizing the derelict railway network of the vast Potteries district as the basic infrastructure for a new technical "school."  Mobile classroom, laboratory and residential modules would be placed on the disused railway lines and shunted around the region, to be grouped and assembled as required by current needs, and then moved and regrouped as those needs changed.  Modular housing and administrative units would be assembled at various fixed points along the rail lines.

There were to be three major "transfer points," where various types of mobile, prefabricated housing and classroom units could be transferred to and from the rail lines as needed.  Some of these units included self-propelled seminar coaches, with scheduled service of class length between stops so that students could literally learn "on the move."  Classroom and laboratory trains could be linked to form larger units.  The largest lecture-demonstration units spanned three parallel rail lines and came equipped with foldout decking and inflatable walls. 

The housing units were equally inventive.  Various types of prefabricated housing modules could be combined in different configurations, densities and terrains, depending on changing needs and conditions.  "Capsule" housing was made up of small units arranged in linear layouts on steeply sloping sites with good views.  "Sprawl" units had adjustable legs for uneven ground, while "crate" housing units could be plugged into a high rise framework.  Like all elements in the Thinkbelt, housing units could be moved around and rearranged as the program changed over time.

Price's plans not only responded to the growing need for technical education, but also addressed the problem of local unemployment by creating a new service industry to operate the vast new technical school. Price was able to obtain some of the first computer generated data from the Ministry of Labor on population and unemployment for North Staffordshire.  But as precise and detailed as the plans were, the Thinkbelt was still "uncharted territory", filled with unknowns and uncertainties, which Price welcomed.

Price was arguably the first architect to develop an architecture expressly for such programmatic variability, and in this sense, the Potteries Thinkbelt anticipates the characteristics of the virtual machine and the computer.  But Price's cybernetic  paradigm  is very different from the mechanical model envisioned by Le Corbusier or the architects of the Neue Sachlichkeit.  Price's use of technological gadgetry is expedient, aimed at directly improving the lot of “downsized” workers, rather than symbolic or aesthetic.  Social advancement and individual freedom are the core values which motivate Cedric Price and inform his use of technology.  Price makes this attitude clear when he writes, “no one should be interested in the design of bridges – they should be concerned with how to get to the other side.” [5]  Although information technology was still in its infancy at the time, the paradigm for the Potteries Thinkbelt is the electronic computer circuit of the third machine age, capable of temporal transformation, of being reprogrammed and becoming an entirely different instrument at different times and situations.

Price strongly believes in the element of "calculated uncertainty," because, as he explains, "it is not the architect's role to crystal gaze." [6]  Not being clairvoyant, he does not and cannot know what will be needed in the future, and therefore has no "overwhelming desire to 'get it right the first time’."[7] The temporary and the temporal are major themes in Price's philosophy of architecture.  When Cedric Price writes that the "...time factor is a major element in producing valid designs,"[8] he is referring to time on at least two levels.  On the "micro" level, Price argues that the architect cannot accurately predict how initial needs and uses may change over time (a view supported by Karl Popper as well as 'chaos' theory).  The architect must therefore acknowledge the impossibility of totalized planning, and build in a degree of indeterminacy to allow for uncertainties in program, obsolescence and complete changes of use throughout the life of the building. But Cedric Price also values “enabling” and “agency” above all else, and trusts the working classes to decide their own future.  He relinquishes the traditional role of the architect as omniscient form-giver and generously allows people the freedom to control and shape their environment and choose the ways and means to do so.  For Price, the best of all possible designs is that which people can in the future manipulate and use as they see fit.  More than any physical characteristic or style, it is this generous and calculated uncertainty which characterizes Price's work. 

On a larger scale, the "life" of the building defines time on the "macro" plane.  Any building will in time outlive its usefulness, regardless of how well it has accommodated micro-temporal uncertainties, at which point, it should be torn down.  This last point is not mere rhetoric, since Cedric Price is the only chartered architect in Britain who is also a fully qualified member of the National Institute of Demolition Contractors.

It is this capacity for change and transformation that closely relates Price’s work to the Archigram group (who may have got the idea from Price).   But the interchangeability and indeterminacy of Archigram's "Plug-in" projects were driven by interests in an aestheticized technological romanticism and consumer fashion.  The "plug-in" features of the Potteries Thinkbelt are motivated by Price's profound understanding of the impossibility of determined programming within unstable socio-economic conditions, and of the potential of calculated uncertainty in post-industrial society.

The most remarkable thing about Price's Thinkbelt is his recycling and redeployment of the obsolete industrial detritus of a bygone epoch, as the basic infrastructure for new "industries" of education, science and technology.  In the Potteries Thinkbelt, Price demonstrates a sensitivity and awareness to a fundamental shift in the normative center of all aspects of postwar British culture.  But Price's contemporaries failed to appreciate the significance of these cultural transformations.  At the time, the British government showed little interest in Price's proposal.  Price notes also that, "it is ironic that the response of other architects at the time, 1963, was totally hostile while now twenty years later - the period proposed for its socio-economic life - architects find it 'interesting' and 'important.'"[9]

The indeterminacy and capacity of the Potteries Thinkbelt to change over time is particularly significant given the instability of British culture at the time.   As social instrument, Price's architecture is informed by his ethical and polemical perceptions of the fluidity of contemporary social, political and economic contexts.  A truly "monumental" architecture can exist only in an equally "monumental" culture of social and political consensus and uniformity of purpose, conditions that did not describe postwar Britain. The Potteries Thinkbelt is an "anti-monument" for a fragmented and chaotic Britain, far ahead of its time.  Rather than lamenting lost "order" and consensus or engaging in futuristic technological romance, Cedric Price perceived a coherency within the cultural "chaos" of postwar Britain.  Price’s radical iconoclasm and his “calculated uncertainty” at the expense of traditional architectural conventions significantly limited his ability to build.  Yet it is precisely his independence form convention that permits the Potteries Thinkbelt to negotiate the highly volatile and uncertain conditions which characterized postwar Britain.

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