Inter-Action Centre

The Inter-Action Centre was one of architect Cedric Price's few realized projects.^[1][2] The community centre, sited at Talacre Public Open Space in Kentish Town, in the London Borough of Camden, was commissioned in 1964 by Ed Berman and the Inter-Action Trust^[3] and built in 1971.^[4]

The Inter-Action Centre is particularly notable for having been one of the first buildings to make concrete the ideas of flexible architecture^[5] and impermanence.^[6] Price's body of work as a whole had a tremendous influence on the architecture profession,^[7][8][9] and the Inter-Action Centre helped realize the ambitions of his earlier, unbuilt Fun Palace^[4][2] (which had proposed the fusion of architecture and information technology, entertainment and educational activities^[10]) and Potteries Thinkbelt.^[11] It was constructed around an open framework into which modular, pre-fabricated elements could be inserted and removed according to need.^[12] It was essentially a building that could be reconfigured over time as its occupants' requirements evolved.

Often compared to Centre Pompidou and other high-tech buildings of the time, the Inter-Action Centre differed in being explicitly designed around a democratic approach to architecture.^[13]

Price had been working with, and was influenced by, cybernetician Gordon Pask and used the Inter-Action Centre as a way to present an architectural approach to second-order cybernetics.^[14] The Inter-Action Centre was architectural evidence that Price's radical and utopian agenda could be materialized in a built form with a clear social agenda,^[15] though there is also a view that the building showed that his goals were not quite realizable in the real world.^[16][17]

Price himself persuaded English Heritage not to list the building, and supported its demolition in 2003^[18] because he believed it had fulfilled its purpose as a temporary commodity with a short lifespan.^[15]