Customer Reviews

From Agit Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price

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Writing a review for this book is difficult. There are very few truly good books on Cedric Price, whose novel ideas and designs should be a must for today's architectural students, if not people generally interested in revolutionary design, and/or the British cultural scene of the 1960s. Thus, the existence of this book is incredibly welcome, and the content, including rich descriptions of the projects and the culture in which they emerged, is excellent. So, on the one hand, this book is highly recommended.

On the other hand, the publisher used heavy-weight glossy stock for the pages, which makes it difficult to write notes in the substantial margins that they provide, or to mark pages - something that is inevitable if you are using this book for research, rather than pleasure. Furthermore, if you delight in wonderful books (as I do), then it is depressing to find that the combination of heavy-weight paper with poor binding means that by page 30, the book is already falling apart. By the end, it is in a shambles. While this might be an interesting comment on Price's predilection for impermanent structures, as a book lover and a researcher, it is highly problematic. I struggled keeping this book together while reading it.

Advice to the publishers - use thinner, non-glossy stock, well-bound. By amending the pages, in particular, the binding problem will probably be largely fixed, and will provide the reader a better experience. It will also reduce the cost of the book - and since the largest audience for this book might currently be students and researchers, the lowered cost might result in higher yields, via a larger audience.

As it stands, I would recommend the book for its content (which is, in truth, the most important aspect of any book), but I would not recommend the book based on its design, which is poorly realized - something a publisher of books on architecture and design should be radically aware of anyway.

The book seems to be very biographical instead of being based on essential keywords. Nevertheless it is valuable and rare material on one of most interesting architectural/social projects of our time.

But the binding is terrificly bad: I haven't finished my reading yet, but the cover is completely teared loose, and the book itself is breaking into quires. Black Dog should have invested more in proper binding rather than choosing that posh paper.