Authorship and the archive: The reception of the fun palace project

Abstract

The Fun Palace, a landmark cultural complex that was initiated in London in 1961 by Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price and followed an increasingly mobile agenda until 1975, circulates relentlessly in architectural scholarship today. Yet the cultural agenda of the project that emanates from the archive and Littlewood's role in it seems to have been neutralized. This article reconstructs the almost sixty-year history of the reception of the Fun Palace so as to critically investigate the conditions that informed the distinctive afterimages of the project. The complex topology of the Fun Palace archive is regarded as a main agency that is constitutive of the project's modes of reception today: scholarship and activism.