News from the British Sixties: Fun Palace's Press Cuttings

Description

The paper examines the collection of press cuttings from the 1960s related to the Fun Palace that is held in Cedric Price fonds at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in order to trace the reception of the project by a wider public and to interrogate the systematic use of newsprint to convey it to a mass audience. A carefully scripted publicity strategy by the Fun Palace promoters converts the project quickly into ‘news’, which is then carried by a press system whose hegemony the project was in many ways concerned to oppose. Thus, each news page becomes both a field of the active contestation that the project pursues with the British press – and the control it exercises upon society at the time – and its record. The collection of press cuttings therefore constitutes not only a reservoir of publicly retrievable anecdotes and quotations – it is also importantly a media archive which reflects social struggles around mass communication and press power in the British 1960s.

Period	11 Sept 2021
Event title	European Research in Architecture and Urbanism 2020: Multiple Identities. Reflections on the European City
Event type	Conference
Location	Stoke-on-Trent, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International