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A. Rumpfhuber:
"Leisure as the Extended Field of Labour An Incubator for Spare Time & the Invention of Live-long Learning";
Talk: Architecture for Leisure in Post War Europe, Leuven, Belgium (invited); 2012-02-17 - 2012-02-18; in: "Architecture for leisure in post-war Europe (1945-1989)", H. Heynen, J. Gosseye (ed.); Architecture for Leisure in Post-War Europe (2013), 6.

My presentation focuses on the Fun Palace project. Fun Palace is a piece of cybernetic workers architecture for a leisure society, designed and conceived by the agit-pop theatre maker Joan Littlewood, the architect Cedric Price, and the cybernetician Gordon Pask between 1962 and 1966, but never got built.

I will discuss Fun Palace from the angle of a labour-discourse, arguing that Fun Palace forms a reactive manifestation of an architecture of immaterial labour. It mirrors the mechanisms of a cybernetic hypothesis and produces spaces for work as leisure. Its supporting structure is the cybernetics´ systems boundary. Within its borders, countless machines - based on feedback loops - organize the building, producing a situation known today as life long learning. Fun Palace is a cybernetic machine for leisure time, a revolutionary apparatus that produces spare-time as learning, an architecture that prepares people temporarily for a new life: that of the factory of society in which people will always and only work.