Interview with Will Alsop

By Alessandra Orlandoni - 11 January 2010

Alessandra Orlandoni - You studied at the Architectural Association and then worked for Cedric Price, who died in 2003, a man renowned for his theoretical projects and the influence he had on Richard Rogers and Norman Foster. You started your career in the post-swinging London of the seventies. What do you remember of that period?
William Alsop - Well I remember a lot. I started at the A.A. in 1968. I didn’t apply to any other school of architecture since Peter Cook and Archigram were teaching there, so that was the place to go. Cedric’s studio was just round the corner and he was often around. The A.A. was a vital place with a very open agenda on what architecture was, much more than any other school in England and maybe in the world. I was there for 3 years before I ever even thought about designing a building. We didn’t know what to do with architecture: somehow it became boring because it couldn’t achieve our dreams of changing society. We were just interested in society, the arts and only their reflections in buildings. Cedric Price, for whom I later worked, was a very important man. He was like a conscience reminding architects they were simply decorators or designers rather than getting to the heart of what the question might be. London in the beginning of the seventies still had some of the swinging sixties; it was an exciting place to be. But in 1975, the economy started to fail, people started to get more boring and that was the beginning of personal visions in architecture. In 1984 Prince Charles made his famous speech at the 150th Anniversary of the Royal Institute of British Architects and suddenly the world of architecture and some other worlds took a step backwards, in my view, although, on reflection, it raised the profile of architecture itself. It was because of Prince Charles’ speech that quality newspapers started covering architecture and urbanism arousing general public interest. But that has taken 20...