One of the most conscious attempts to reorient the mainstream was the ground-breaking exhibition Place, at the ICA in September 1959. It was the first important manifestation of the younger generation, and it was under the direction of Alloway. But in this case Alloway was not just organizing an exhibition—he was attempting to shape the direction of avant-garde art. Opened by his friend Stefan Munsing of USIS, the exhibition featured the work of Robyn Denny, Richard Smith, and Ralph Rumney, with the catalogue text supplied by Roger Coleman. Like a game—and influenced by Game Theory—the scope of the exhibition was determined by agreed rules, decided upon by the painters before they produced their work. Paintings would be a standard size of 7 feet 6 inches, with a variant of 7 feet 4 inches permitted; colour would be restricted to red, green, black, and white, used singly or in any permutation; and the free-standing paintings on panels were given a careful lay-out to give four main vistas, including one for each painter. The purpose of having rules was, according to Coleman, “for the sake of unity, as cues for the spectator or participant, and for organizational simplicity.” Within the common approach, the painters “agreed to paint as near to their normal work as possible and to make no radical departures from their usual procedure…” The style was proto-Hard Edge, as if painterly works were transmogrifying into cooler, more minimal, harder ones. More important than any one painting was the exhibition as a whole because it functioned as an environment or event.

Coleman, a friend of Denny and Smith at the RCA, had been recruited by Alloway to serve on the Exhibitions Sub-Committee of the ICA in February 1957, while he was still a student. His editorship for the RCA's Ark showed him to be staunchly IG-influenced, with half-adozen articles by IG members appearing in 1956 and 1957. His text for Place describes the concept in terms of three “backgrounds,” two of which had become well-established in younger generation circles in the later 1950s. The first, “The Mass Media,” outlined how the mass media were a “legitimate body of reference” for younger artists, even when the references were not literal or recognisable.