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This research represents a new kind of critical investigation of the renowned Fun Palace as a complex cultural project, one that exceeds its remarkable architectural significance. The Fun Palace maps an extensive network of practices and agencies involved in the project's complex constitution and constant regeneration. Initiated in London 1961 as an interdisciplinary collaboration between radical theatre entrepreneur Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price, it engaged main personalities throughout its development up until 1975, such as cyberneticist Gordon Pask, engineer Frank Newby, journalist Tom Driberg and trustee Buckminster Fuller, amongst other. It aimed to construct situations in which self-directed, pleasure-led and open exchange could transform mass-audiences into active citizens. By 1964 the Fun Palace had gained momentum, and a giant cybernetic infrastructure featured within the Civic Trust's plans for Lea Valley. By the end of the decade, and under the leadership of Littlewood, the idea was reconstituted into local activism to engage Stratford youth amidst violent redevelopment in the area neighbouring Theatre Royal, where Littlewood's Theatre Workshop was based. Over and above, the struggle for a site in the institutional map of London prompted the realization of the Fun Palace as a media event. Broadsheets, films, journals, grids and press cuttings, all these media actively produced and disseminated the Fun Palace's distinctive cultural agenda of emancipation through pleasure in Britain in the 1960s and early 70s. Meanwhile, an excited architectural scholarship celebrated the challenge that the Fun Palace issued to the determinism of modern architecture and planning. Paying close attention to the role of Joan Littlewood in the project, this research analyses the conditions of production, circulation, storage and reception of these media as a way to unpack the complexity embedded in the Fun Palace's cultural agenda. On one hand, the radical plurality, ephemerality and dynamism of the project reflects transformations in British society from the immediate postwar period across the 1960s and 1970s and the pressures that these exerted upon interrelated areas of cultural production - architecture, theatre, education, leisure, (mass) media, and information and communication technologies. On the other hand, the analysis of the distinctive periodization and the modalities of the Fun Palace reception during its fifty-year long history and up until today, questions the agency of the uneven Fun Palace archive. Ultimately, through the interrogation of all this situated activity and agency, I argue for the central role that media plays in the constitution of the Fun Palace's complex cultural agenda.

El Fun Palace, el emblemático complejo cultural iniciado en Londres en 1961 por Joan Littlewood y Cedric Price y cuya agenda iría progresivamente ganando en contingencia e inestabilidad hasta 1975, circula sin cesar en la investigación académica de la arquitectura en la actualidad. Sin embargo, el programa cultural del proyecto que emana del archivo y el papel de Littlewood en él aparecen en cierto modo neutralizados en estos discursos. Este artículo reconstruye los casi sesenta años de historia de la recepción del Fun Palace para investigar críticamente las condiciones que influyeron en la construcción de sus distintivas imágenes. La compleja topología del archivo del Fun Palace se vislumbra como un actor principal en la constitución de los modos de recepción del proyecto en la actualidad: la investigación académica y el activismo.

This dissertation is the first systematic monograph that explores untapped potentials germinating between Spinoza's philosophy and architecture. This exploration is grounded on the premises that there is a latent architectural treatise underlying Spinoza’s philosophical oeuvre, which has the potential to engender new ways of conceiving and constructing architecture, while architecture has as much to offer for Spinoza scholarship, as Spinoza for architecture. The monograph explores these reciprocal potentials in two books. The first, “Onto-Epistemological Treatise,” deals with problems of ontology and epistemology, meditating on intricate questions of being and thinking. The second book, “Ethico-Aesthetic Treatise,” addresses elaborate problems of ethics and aesthetics, ruminating on complex processes fusing the art of life with the life of art. These two books operate through multiple research trajectories that include: [1] analyzing Spinoza’s philosophical concepts in their formal structure, [2] studying their historical evolution in comparison to rival as well as confluent modes of thinking (Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, Al-Hallaj, Ibn Arabi, Duns Scotus, Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger), [3] unearthing latent spatial traces and interweaving implicit architectural connections therein, [4] extending Spinoza’s critical analyses to expose problematic tendencies in canonical architectural discourses and practices (Vitruvius, Alberti, Filarete, Giorgio Vasari, Marc-Antoine Laugier, Étienne-Louis Boullée, Le Corbusier, the Fletchers), [5] widening Spinoza’s conceptual lens to reveal consonant approaches across diverse aesthetic fields (Piranesi, László Moholy-Nagy, Theo van Doesburg in architecture; Paul Cézanne, Paul Klee, Francis Bacon in painting; Georg Büchner, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf in literature; Pina Bausch, Joan Littlewood, Iannis Xenakis in performing arts; Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen in music), [6] and zooming in on confluent architectural scholia to uncover overlooked potentials of singular buildings like Cedric Price’s Fun Palace and urban histories such as Re_ad Ekrem Koçu’s Istanbul Ansiklopedisi [Istanbul Encyclopedia] with the help of original archival materials and previously untranslated sources. In addition to such analytical contributions, the relevance of this research finally lies in its generative undertaking, which pertains to playing latent potentials discovered at the intersection of Spinoza’s philosophy and architecture in new settings, for today and tomorrow.

Around 1970, Cedric Price and the Archigram group presented proposals for inserting inflatables, geodesic domes, robots and other prefabricated systems into the landscape. This article discusses these proposals as part of a historical trend with important cultural significance. Historians Leo Marx and Reyner Banham considered such proposals to reflect the difficult search for a middle landscape: a landscape model in which nature is balanced and stabilized by art. Since the 19th century, this search has been guided by the belief that the machine will build the garden.