The selection of projects has been made on the basis of their specific relevance to current spatial, economic and social issues of the Meuse-Rhine Euregion, a cross-border region that currently faces a number of challenges that are typical for post-industrial areas, such as a declining economy and the shrinking and aging of its population. Local initiatives, such as IBA Parkstad, aim to ‘update’ the region and to help it to regain confidence, - a key ingredient for economic and social redevelopment. It is this aspiration to reinvent a region that provides the impetus to show the work of CP.
The material on show is sourced from the Cedric Price Fonds at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and the private collections of the Cedric Price Estate and Lord McAlpine. It will be accompanied by contemporary work, reflecting both the critical attributes of Price’s practice and the concept of the exhibition itself.
CP broke the conventional boundaries of architectural practice by continuously employing a broad pallet of potential design variables – engaging formal, infrastructural, organizational, operational and ethical factors into all of his design propositions. It is this level of complexity that both sets Price apart as an architect and obscures the great potential of his profound design ideas.
Including this latest presentation at Bureau Europa in Maastricht, the exhibition will have appeared in three locations in four years (previously Venice and London). The itinerant nature of the exhibition has created the opportunity to re-position it in relation to new locations; thus CEDRIC PRICE: The Dynamics of Time offers not only a new title, but new content, to reflect research that has ben undertaken during the intervening years.
The newly commissioned project Memory Bank (www.cedricprice.com) traces and registers sections the person and the world of CP through his network. It aims to address the gap in the available history and to understand more of the conditions in which the ideas where shaped.
The exhibition is curated, at the invitation of Bureau Europa, by Jan Nauta and Samantha Hardingham ad is made possible with the support of the municipality of Maastricht, the province of Limburg and the Creative Industries Fund NL.
1/Jos van den Camp, IBA Parkstad met Jo Coenen, 6 February 2014
2/The geneology of the exhibition starts with VENIC VENIC, an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Samantha Hardingham and first shown at the Venice Biennale in 2010. Featuring additional material and under the new title of Wish We Were Here it was remounted in 2011 at the Architectural Association in London by Jan Nauta and the Public Occasion Agency.
