Tuning Up the City: Cedric Price's Detroit Think Grid

Crisis, framed through world-systems theory, can be understood as a period of opportunity to reimagine and redirect contemporary urban and institutional conditions through design. This article situates Cedric Price's Atom and Detroit Think Grid projects as generative, system-based proposals designed specifically to operate within the patterns, structures, and dynamics of the institutional and urban crises of the late 1960s. These projects were intended to strategically and with minimal physical means reorganize these systems toward more socially productive ends, mobilizing an expanded architectural repertoire to rescript the social and institutional processes through which the urban might be produced and reproduced.