The Fun Palace and the Case for Flexible Venues

Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood designed a building that could become anything. Venues are finally catching up.

Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood designed a Fun Palace that could become anything, and it was never built. This essay traces its heirs, from the Pompidou to The Shed and Aviva Studios. It gives you a twelve-question audit that shows whether a venue can really change, and what every new layout must check again.

Most venues are built for one kind of event and then asked to host every other kind. In 1961 the architect Cedric Price and the theater director Joan Littlewood proposed the reverse. They called it the Fun Palace, a building with no fixed use. It was never built. Venues are now being built on its logic. The work left is to make planning as flexible as the walls.

One building, every event

The ballroom becomes a trade show on Tuesday and a gala on Thursday. The theater is cleared for a dinner. Each change is a fight with a room designed for something else. The columns are in the wrong place, power sits only at the walls, and only one door is wide enough for the set.

The Fun Palace was the boldest answer to that fight. It refused to decide what the building was for.

Littlewood, Price and the Fun Palace

Littlewood and Price began the project in 1961. The Canadian Centre for Architecture holds Price's archive. It describes the project as a socially interactive, ever-changing "laboratory of fun". The design was an open steel frame with traveling gantry cranes. The cranes would move walls, floors and whole rooms as the program changed. The cybernetician Gordon Pask joined the team to work out how the building could respond to its users.

It was meant to stand on public land for ten years and then come down without a trace. Sites from the Isle of Dogs to Camden Town and Mill Meads in the Lea Valley were considered. None was agreed.

The CCA's account points to restrictive policies and to community concerns over its "safety". Work went on in some form until 1974, and the Fun Palace was never built.

What it changed

Its descendants are easier to name than its influence is to prove.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris, by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, opened in 1977. It has open floors and its services on the outside. Critics have long read it as the Fun Palace made real. That is a critics' reading, and it should be cited as one.

The Inter-Action Centre in Kentish Town was Price's own smaller built version. It was a frame from the 1970s, designed to be added to and taken apart. It has since been demolished. Then in 2014, for Littlewood's centenary, a campaign called Fun Palaces revived the name for community events run by local people.

In the same years Archigram pushed the idea to its limit with Instant City, a city that arrives, stays a week and leaves.

Venues catching up

Two recent buildings sell flexibility as their purpose.

The Shed in New York opened in 2019, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro with Rockwell Group. Its outer shell rolls out on rails over the plaza next door. That doubles the building's footprint and forms a hall called The McCourt.

Aviva Studios in Manchester was designed by Ellen van Loon of OMA. It opened officially in October 2023. Its Warehouse is a space 21 meters high for up to 5,000 people standing. A movable, full-height acoustic wall can divide it. The Hall seats up to 1,600. The two spaces can also work together, so the stage runs deeper into the building.

Both make the Fun Palace's bet. Each is a frame for changing uses, not a container for one.

What flexibility really needs

An empty hall is not flexible. It is only empty. Flexibility is built into the structure and the services. You can audit it with twelve questions.

• 1. Area: Structure. Question: Can the floor take the heaviest load you expect anywhere, not only in marked zones?
• 2. Area: Structure. Question: Does every layout you sell work around the columns, or do some layouts only work on paper?
• 3. Area: Services. Question: Are power and data on a grid across the floor, not only at the walls?
• 4. Area: Services. Question: Is water available away from the perimeter, for catering or wet installations?
• 5. Area: Rigging. Question: Are rigging points spread across the whole ceiling, with published loads?
• 6. Area: Rigging. Question: Can one part of the space be rigged while another is in use?
• 7. Area: Access. Question: Are doors and lifts sized for the largest set or vehicle you want to host?
• 8. Area: Access. Question: Does the load-in route avoid the audience route?
• 9. Area: Acoustics. Question: Can the venue crew divide the space acoustically, and open it again, between events?
• 10. Area: Acoustics. Question: Does each divided part have its own sound and light control?
• 11. Area: Exits. Question: Does every configuration you sell keep its required exits and exit widths?
• 12. Area: Exits. Question: Is the capacity of each configuration calculated and approved, not assumed?

The last two questions never close. Every new layout reopens the safety and capacity questions. A wall that moves in an afternoon can block an exit in an afternoon.

Plans that move with the walls

A building that changes in a day needs plans that change as fast. The plan in a venue's sales pack shows one configuration. The event in the room is often another. The easy fallback is a zombie layout copied from the last event. The fix is a plan drawn fresh for each configuration, with its exits checked again every time.

The measured room matters as much as the drawing. A venue digital twin lets a layout tested in the model work in the real space. A single source of truth turns last-minute changes into routine, not crisis.

Enable, don't dictate

Price's point was that a building should enable its users, not dictate to them. A venue can become anything only when its plans can change as fast as its walls.

A venue that changes in an afternoon needs plans that keep up. With Monet, one change regenerates the floor plan, renders and drawings, and the exit clearance check re-runs on its own. Its venue digital twins then show each new layout in the real room.