Hobart and William Smith Colleges

31 May 2006 Mathews finishes articles on Price

Stanley Mathews, HWS associate professor of art history, recently completed two articles on British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003).

Man Made Modular Megastructures, published in the April 2006 edition of AD-Architectural Design, was an investigation of Prices 1964 Fun Palace and 1965 Potteries Thinkbelt projects, addressing the changing economic and social character of post-war Britain.

The other article, The death of the auteur: Cedric Price as anti-architect, discussing Prices redefinition of authorship and the architect, will be included in a forthcoming anthology, Architecture and Authorship.

Mathews is also publishing an on-line article on Prices innovative Potteries Thinkbelt project through the Schrumpfende Stdte/Shrinking Cities project on architecture and urbanism, co-sponsored by the Federal Cultural Foundation of Germany, the Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the German architecture magazine ArchPlus.

Mathews book, From Agit-Prop to Open Space: the Architecture of Cedric Price, is in production with the London-based art and architecture press Black Dog Publishing, and is expected to be released in early 2007.

A member of the HWS faculty since 2000, Mathews was recently granted tenure. He co-directs the Colleges architecture program, and teaches art history and architectural history and design. He has served on the City of Geneva Planning Board and on the Overlay Planning Committee, appointed by the mayor to write ordinances and guidelines for the design and preservation of the traditional urban character of downtown Geneva.

He is an internationally known expert on Prices innovative architectural projects in the 1960s and '70s, which popularized the ideas of Buckminster Fuller and helped to create a new interactive and indeterminate paradigm for architecture.

For many years, Price taught at Londons prestigious Architectural Association School, where his students included renowned architects Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi, whose work bears the imprint of Prices work and theories. Through Mathews lectures and publications, Price has come to be acknowledged as one of the most influential architects and theorists of the late twentieth century.