on site review 44: play

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This issue of On Site review was put together in Calgary on the Treaty 7 territory of the Kainai, Siksika, Piikani, Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations; a territory which covers southern Alberta: 130,000km2, roughly the size of Greece. Mistranslated and unexplained, Treaty 7 was signed in 1877, effectively seizing all land other than limited reserves. This is considered today to be contested and unceded land.

contents

Ruth Oldham and Emelie Queney

Stephanie White

Darine Choueiri

Samer Wanan

Yvonne Singer

Yiou Wang

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

Amra Alagic, Lara Kurosky and Lea Dykstra

Aurore Maren

Carol Kleinfeldt

Tim Ingleby

Harrison Lane

Metis: Adrian Hawker and Mark Dorrian

it started with a bolobat, became a building site. 1989

architecture and play

There are several ways to think about play, the most obvious one being the one which children, with great imagination and entertainment, do, learning as they go. Then there is organised play, sports and such, games involving opposing players of great prowess, skill and combativeness. And somewhere inbetween is the play that involves messing around for the sake of meaningless joy: play for the sake of play.

There is another use of the word play, which is the looseness in a system. Mechanical parts that have some play are not highly machined, or if they once were are now worn, introducing a play between parts. This is very interesting, that the word play describes this sloppiness, where exactitude is not a factor.

en jeu air mindedness play in wartime schoolscapes

child’s play in the Palestinian landscape (for)play and wordplay minotaur plays Ludius Loci play ground

nest and branch play in three acts

BMX Supercross Legacy Track game changers joy as an act of resistance front and back covers calls for arrticles

The architecture of play is linked indubitably to Aldo van Eyck’s schools and playgrounds, and from there all the theories of education, learning and play that so dominated the twentieth century. Increasingly, either through psychology, ideology or health and safety regulations, play has become channelled, scheduled – something closer to a machined part in a busy life than poking about a ditch with a stick. for hours. till dinner time.

Somewhere in all of this is the sense that joy is for children, that eventually one puts aside childish things and gets on with some other form of life, usually something more grim, less joyous. Something we see in the tragic children of war who have been forced to put aside childish things almost from birth.

In the practice of architecture do we have works conceived, designed and built with joy throughout the whole process? Where the sense of play is there from the start, an architecture of simple pleasures, of ridiculous time-wasting that is vastly pleasurable? This transcends program and looks squarely at the process of making architecture.

What is the relationship between architecture and play?

en jeu

RUTH OLDHAM and EMILIE QUENEY

We are  Emilie and Ruth. Emilie is from France but lives in the UK . Ruth is from the UK but lives in France. Language-location mirror (and we tend to speak in French and write in English) We are both qualified architects though neither of us practices, in the traditional sense, anymore. However, we do continue to work very closely around architecture, probably in search of some, or more, playfulness.

We have started a conversation in response to the call for articles for issue 44, ‘architecture and play’. Ruth told Emilie about the call, as it was so closely connected to her work. Emilie suggested they respond together. Ruth had just returned from a conference workshop about collective collaborative writing so this seemed like a fun idea.

How might the ping-pong of ideas make new thoughts emerge, enable more creativity and elasticity in the thinking, more nourishment of ideas and more discussion? I find exciting the fact of creating a situation of play in the act of writing itself, by giving that game rules, time and free thinking.

We began by asking ourselves some questions:

What do we want to say about architecture and play?

How can we think and write together?

Can we write a text as a dialogue? As a cadavre exquis?

Can I give you a word and you respond, and vice-versa?

What if we take some words from the call, and respond to them?

If the rules/limits/framework of this game are that it is a dialogue, taking place on the page, what might we manage to say?

for the sake of play

I feel we should start with this. ‘ Sake’ is such an amazing English word, so appropriate in this case, and not easy to translate into French. Looking at the etymology, I can see there is no common root, so it might just be a fantasy, but for me, it has a sense of sacredness.

Ha! This is great, I had never really thought about how hard it is to translate ‘sake’ but it is a curious word, and I kind of understand why you link it to sacredness... There is a sort of linguistic playfulness... the two words have a phonetic similarity, and a connection in terms of meaning...; for the sake of something, means that something is special, sacred, an effort must be made to preserve it.

And indeed, even if we are in a world where playfulness is everywhere, as a gamification in service of making capitalism as enjoyable as possible, we can’t reduce play to a pleasurable addition to our daily lives. Play has no use, or at least can’t be reduced to definite functions or categories such as pleasure, education, physical exploration, expending excess energy, expression of competitiveness, enacting fantasies, sport, gambling, role play, etc...

Play is linked to our human condition, beyond anything reasonable and pragmatic, it expresses our intrinsic thirsts and needs. Friedrich Schiller wrote, ‘Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays’.

This is where considering architecture regarding play touches my soul because architecture is also an expression of higher human aspirations, beyond any practicalities, something no one needs and everyone needs simultaneously. Looking at this necessity requires stepping back and taking a holistic view.

Thinking about the meaning of ‘sake’ led me to the word ‘stake’. Perhaps simply because it rhymes. What is at stake if we do not play? Our humanity!

For the sake of meaningless joy, we must play! For the sake of humanity, we must play!

And then the realisation that ‘at stake’ translates into ‘en jeu’ in French.

Ce qui rentre en jeu par le jeu (what is at stake through play), or even, ce que met en jeu l’absence du jeu (what is at stake when there is no play).

In Homo Ludens, Johann Huizinga studied play and place in this holistic, sacred and humanist context: free (in all senses), having its own place, rules, order and time. Through play, one spontaneously experiments and lives something not yet known and therefore grows from that experience.

sloppiness

This process starts out feeling rather sloppy. While I am enjoying these pages of thoughts, notes, references, connections, and the sort of curious complicity in knowing that you have this document open on your computer as I write, even though I can’t quite be sure if you are reading the same part as me, I keep getting quick anxious thoughts about how difficult it is to make sense of the different ideas. How to write together, how to write when you don’t really know where it might go? Maybe this is: messing around for the sake of meaningless joy – turn off the anxious voice that requires a ‘plan’ and see where things go… part of me wants to start a new document, to follow the rules of a cadavre exquis, to take it in turns, to progress in a linear manner… then this other voice is saying no, just stick with this… but how can this become publishable article?

Yes, I agree: spending time to think with you about how play is or can be part of architecture is definitively bringing meaningless joy. It will not add anything to the world but this present shared bubble of thinking, discussing, imagining, letting our minds wander, and reflecting, which is pure play. I love as well how we can build this text from different places, and simultaneously, embrace this way of co-constructing thoughts, as opposed to pretending to start with the beginning and finish with the end.

Related to architecture, this makes me think of architects whose creative process generously makes room for moments of collective sharing and provides a space of ‘ridiculous timewasting that is vastly pleasurable’.

This section begins with the word ‘sloppiness’, which almost feels like a rude word, a bit shocking. But it is a starting point, a way into a thinking space, a space in which to explore the relationship between that which might appear superfluous, minor, irrelevant, frivolous, pointless (messing around, time wasting) and the realm of the serious, important, worthwhile, necessary (making real and useful buildings?). I am thinking about drawing. Architects make drawings in order to ultimately make buildings. They make many more drawings than they make buildings. In the wake of each completed building will be innumerable drawings, from early sketches, to process sketches, plans, sections, façades, axonometrics, perspectives. Exploratory versions and finished versions. Then details, construction drawings. Not to mention diagrams, schemas… Even unbuilt projects generate dozens, often hundreds of drawings. But before drawings that are related to specific projects, built or unbuilt, come a multitude of other drawings. Doodles, sketches, patterns, portraits, still lifes, landscapes, cityscapes, survey drawings. Made with pencils, crayons, pens, biros, watercolours, charcoal… on ipads, on paper, in notebooks, on tablecloths... Architects’ language is drawing.  The other day I leafed through a beautiful book of 700 of Peter Markli’s drawings. Consisting generally of just a

few lines and /or blocks of colour, they might appear closer to the realm of doodles or jottings, barely even sketches let alone technical drawing, yet they express hundreds of spatial and architectural ideas, suggesting plans, façades, spaces, rooms, buildings, houses, landscapes, places, structures, systems, atmospheres. Here is Markli talking about these drawings: ‘There was no client, no direct commission, for any of these drawings. Instead, they were ways of exploring the form and the expression of a house – things I was still looking for in the 1970s, and these drawings helped me find them. When I had the good luck to get a commission I was able to refer back to some of these things. Without this work, I would not have been able to build – to realise –the buildings.’ 1

And,

‘These are hardly what I’d call virtuoso drawings. They’re drawings that I’ve had to work at, correct. That is why there are so many of them. The work is not a virtuoso exercise. It’s about thinking things through, looking for something that doesn’t yet exist in this form.”

This makes me think of the use of hands in the process of drawing, and the sloppiness of first drawings and sketches. The hands, using drawings or models search, explore, reveal and find, independently of the head. For this to happen, sloppiness must be allowed. The hand does not necessarily depend on the head and vice versa. The exploration, reflection and testing process of architectural ideas goes through the hand and the drawings, pictures or models. There is some playing space between head and hands. Ideas and concepts emerge in the space created between both. All that is left from that play margin is the physical mass of graphic documentation.

Going back to the creative processes thread, I am thinking of participative projects, where time is made for ideas and feelings to flourish, be expressed and react to each other. The German practice Raumlabor and the Rome-based Stalker incorporate times of exchange, conviviality, and collective exploration in their projects. Spaces are established during those processes. But these spaces are not created via a regular design process (brief - conception - construction), they arise from this floppiness: times of conviviality, exchange, imagination or even protest. The way these spaces take form confers upon them more than just a spatial quality: but also an emotional, social and political dimension. This involves losing the aim of conceiving a finished space in aid of moments, periods of time, situations (as the Situationists intended), and exchanges.

1 https://drawingmatter.org/peter-markli-my-facadematerial/ accessed 12.01.2024

imagination

Architecture can sometimes support the imagination, through materials or shapes inviting dreams to be more real and giving physicality to poetry. It plays with our senses, and our ideas about what buildings should be.

I think that the idea of ‘materials and shapes inviting dreams to be more real’ is wonderful. It makes me think of a collage by Jacques Simon (French landscape architect) showing a photo of a kid balancing on some bollards with a thought bubble of mountain peaks sketched and pasted onto it.

Yes! Materials and shapes can summon sensations or memories. In opening this door, they enable architecture to be experienced in ways unique for each person, who will create their own creative and sensory links. Thinking of my own experiences, I can consciously see that I love the Barbican interior spaces and Zumthor’s thermal baths for their womb/ grotto-like character. Or that wooden buildings make me go back inside my grandfather’s carpentry workshop. Or that sitting in a high-up window is like disappearing in a den.

A window seat with a view is one of my favourite types of places and I spent a lot of my childhood sitting on my bedroom windowsill watching the world (mostly birds and the odd car) go by.

combativeness

Nowadays, architectural practice is sometimes reduced to the point of absurdity, to the management of a juxtaposition of different areas of expertise framed by technical and legislative issues. On the fringes of the conventional mode of exercise, however, emerges a multitude of relentlessly creative, inventive, and original practices, as if the force of human invention, so constrained on one side, inevitably resurges on the other. A powerful illustration of this position can be seen in architectural activism which defies authority by diverting or hijacking official rules.

Combativeness also refers to the idea of sparring, of exchanging, of having good-natured arguments. While I’m not sure we will start arguing in these pages, I like the idea of bouncing off one another. And is this not at the heart of many people’s creative processes? So many architectural practices are led by a pair. Often with quite different identities and approaches.

Coming up with ideas, developing them, communicating them… these processes can operate via visual media - drawing, image making, model making… but also via language, spoken or written. Different individuals have different aptitudes and inclinations. Is establishing some kind of method the first creative act?  Imagining the rules and boundaries of a game that allows for creativity and invention? One of my old tutors in architecture school, who ran a practice with his wife, said that they would make a series of quick models and drawings independently of each other, to a given deadline, before

showing each other their ideas and attempting to combine them or choose between them. They would then repeat this process several times as the project developed: makingtalking - making - talking. In an interview, 2 Sarah Wigglesworth described how she and Jeremy Till worked on the early stages of designing Stock Orchard Street (their home and workspace, completed in 2001)

‘... we’re two architects… and as you know, there’s kind of, a bit of competition between architects about how you work together (...) who puts marks on the page and stuff like that, so we made a rule that we would only talk about it, we wouldn’t draw anything at all...”

In another interview, 3 she explains the process further.

“I think one of the things we were trying to explore there was the idea of authorship, and we wanted to both claim authorship… and the problem is, when one of puts something down on paper, they tend to start claiming it, and if we were going to have a kind of equal relationship in what we did there, then that’s a bad idea, so we’re just going to fantasise about it. So we actually spent about four years just talking about it! And dreaming about what it could be like… you know, silly ideas like ‘oh it’s going to be up on stilts, or oh I really like this building by x or y, or, I want a tower because I want a place of dreams… (...) and eventually, I think the agenda about living and working, about these two separate buildings which were joined but separate… it all just began to fall into place… (...) I think it was very fully formed as a set of ideas before it got put on paper, and I think that’s very important if you want to both have a say in it.’

This idea of dialogue and combativeness makes me think of the Antepavillion project conducted in London-Hackney, which aims to fight gentrification in favour of affordable artists and community spaces.4 Since 2017, through yearly architecture projects, the traditional way of producing architecture has been challenged, in terms of functions, shapes, material sourcing and building standards. There is a dimension of fun, creativity and playfulness in each single pavilion. As it happened, the borough authority itself felt challenged, and each pavilion is now the very tool of a creative and inventive fight between the rigidity of this institution and what a playful architecture practice could be.

Play can be seen as an inherent act of rebellion. When the freedom conveyed by play is so close to anarchism, combativeness puts into question the position of architecture in relation to authority and institutions. I believe it is there, in that very context, that architecture can be questioned and reinvented in a meaningful way.

2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-3Vx9KrfTQ accessed 12.01.2024

3 https://materialmatters.design/Sarah-Wigglesworth accessed 12.01.2024

4 https://www.antepavilion.org/ accessed 12.01.2024

looseness

There are architects who find a way to respond to the multiple regulatory constraints that nearly every contemporary project is subjected to, in a playful way.

Found in mechanics or joinery, play is the essential room for tight parts to work together just right. In the call for submissions, it is suggested that this looseness means that ‘exactitude is not a factor’. But, if we look closely, the space for this lack of exactitude is very precisely established - not too tight, and not too loose. In French, this room has the same name as play itself: jeu

In architecture projects, this looseness exists between the rules (standards, norms, finances, politics): this is where creativity and invention can take place, where the project can be more than a logical and exact answer to a series of constraints, or when art adds to technique.

Thinking about this idea made me think of Koolhaas. I have lodged in my mind this idea that his approach is to almost relish, devour even, the multitude of crisscrossing, complex, often contradictory webs of legal, programmatic, financial, and other constraints that condition every contemporary project. Along with glass and corrugated plastic and plywood and concrete and perforated metal and extruded aluminium and gold paint, these rules and norms and standards and constraints are part of OMA’s material palette/resource box/tool kit. As if they are understood as physical tangible ‘stuff’ that shapes and forms space and atmosphere. Making architecture an elusive art of applying the rules but not letting them rule.

Children would be the best teachers about this: whatever rules and planned uses are made, the only certainty is their ability to find the tiniest possibility of creating something which has not been thought of. This is the spirit which is cultivated here: how to agree and comply, and at the same time find the little interval allowing for creativity and invention. What a great source of joy this can provide!

And as well as rules, regulations, norms, standards, and budget restrictions there are other less precise constraints that can exert a subtle pressure on the design process. To do with the current accepted paradigm, what is considered ‘good’ or ‘bad’ practice, how to position oneself in relation to fashions, to the zeitgeist...how to navigate between finding one’s own voice and being influenced by others, being original but not necessarily being original for the sake of being original. I will return to Sarah Wigglesworth: Stock Orchard Street was criticised by some for containing too many ideas, and she has noted that at the time (late 90s and early 2000s) minimalism was the dominant aesthetic. She was using words like hairy, messy, baggy, rough, to talk about the building and its materiality.

‘It’s not about minimising it to a kind of core… to me it’s more about a kind of layering, or a sort of palimpsest of a

5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-3Vx9KrfTQ accessed 12.01.2024

series of ideas… which you know, to a lot of people might be a very baggy, and quite incoherent and the rest of it, but actually, the flipside of the coin is, it could be regarded as richness, or embracing a range of different things simultaneously… and I think I’m much more interested in that, I mean, I don’t really care if it’s incoherent! What does it mean to be incoherent? Whose incoherence is it?’ 5

This makes me think of New Babylon, a Situationist urban and architectural project, a revolutionary and subversive way of conceiving life. This nomadic city was designed for constant play. Its design would allow everyone to drift, and live indefinitely and spontaneously create new situations and new experiences. This was a rethinking of society itself as well as its urban form, where values such as ‘coherence’ don’t mean much in comparison to permanent freedom of experimentation.

Arriving at the end of this writing experiment, I can see that not only have we touched upon all my thoughts about the initial theme, but that the dialogue form has enabled the pulling together of new threads, in the space between our two heads, touching a range of new ideas, making new connections, experiencing something light and new and embracing the unknown, which is exactly the aim of play. The result has no structure, as the raw start of something more ordered. Hopefully, it can allow readers’ thoughts to emerge and wander.

When we set out, we wondered if the process of writing and thinking together, sitting somewhere between ‘organised play’ and ‘messing around’, could be a way of playing together and creating together. It has certainly been a way of playing together. Writing is usually quite a solitary affair, but developing this text together, in equal parts, brought about a feeling of complicity. Adding some text and wondering how the other would react, sometimes working on the document simultaneously but on different parts. Sometimes talking on the phone (in French) as we edited parts together, sentences contracting and expanding in surprising ways as we both cut and added parts. The resulting text wanders and meanders, sometimes stops and starts, but it has definitely also been a way of creating together. It feels like a beginning.

It ’s a bit messy but that’s ok.  £

RUTH OLDHAM teaches, writes, designs and translates, within and around the field of architecture. Originally from Kent in the UK, she now lives in Montreuil in the eastern suburbs of Paris. @_rutholdham_

EMILIE QUENEY is passionate about creating installations, workshops, objects and videos around the subjects of play, craft and architecture. Born in France, she has been based in London since 2014. www.emiliequeney.com

air mindedness

drawings of a very young architect

STEPHANIE WHITE; proposed by David Murray, and help from a host of Hemingways: Mistaya Hemingway, Enid Palmer and Guy Palmer

Peter Hemingway was an architect in Edmonton, Alberta, well-known, well-awarded, a personality about town, political, outspoken, a fine architect.

Born in 1929, he grew up in Minster-on-Sea on the Isle of Sheppey where the Thames meets the English Channel: for centuries the front line against invasion. The Second World War was no exception, Sheppey’s north and east coastline bristled with fortified beaches and anti-aircraft installations, with a second line set back from the coast. As it flanked the route for aircraft flying up the Thames to bomb London, it was so strategically important that the island’s children were evacuated in 1940. Peter and his sister Enid were sent to Yorkshire, where he was so unhappy that he was sent back to Minster.

Was he homesick? Something tells me no. Missing the war, the excitement, the urgency of being part of something so huge – it must have rankled.

This file of drawings done by Peter Hemingway when he was 11 or 12 is from Hemingway’s archives, held by his daughter Mistaya. Are drawings play? They are undoubtedly something children do from a very early age. Is drawing different from playing with toys? Hand to eye coordination is being learned, refined, imagined. But that is neither interesting nor informative for this little book of drawings of WWII aircraft, carefully drafted, coloured and labelled in irreverent verse.

History is written magisterially, in text, by historians who paint enormous histories that document events, dates, places, protagonists, victims, economies and aftermaths. The study of material culture finds smaller stories in smaller objects; it fills in the human daily lived life on the ground which often goes unnoticed by events, politics and ideology, yet contributes to them. As On Site review is interested in architecture as material culture, it is a simple thing for research purposes to flip this to material culture as architecture, and then one must ask, what kind of architecture are we looking at?

all images courtesy of Mistaya Hemingway

Mistaya Hemingway

For these drawings it is the architecture of childhood during war, specifically how a boy might fill a notebook with the fierce components of an air war.

Gabriel Moshenska writes in Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain about the ways that children directly engaged in wartime activities, from collecting and trading shrapnel, playing in bomb sites, using their cardboard gas mask cases as satchels for findings, to aircraft spotting.1 Specifically there was an air-mindedness in Britain promoted in the press, in aviation magazines, children’s books and air pageants: waves of bomber aircraft were necessary components of modern warfare. 2 The avant garde nature of such warfare was kept at the forefront of the public mind as battles were fought noisily and visibly in immediate British airspace, not somewhere else as on the high seas with the Navy, or in Europe, Africa or the Far East with the Army. Plane spotting for children was competitive and obsessive.

Identifying aircraft by the particular sound of their engines or their silhouettes in the night sky, writing down registration numbers, all was useful war effort – either information to be telegraphed to RAF bases or ARP wardens, or simply just to know. There were clubs, there were magazines, there were the Biggles stories, RAF men were heroes; Peter’s older brother was in the RAF. Children, Moshenska writes, saw themselves as active participants in wartime society:

“If we want to understand childhood and its material worlds in Second World War Britain, or indeed anywhere, we need to start from this understanding of children as people, keenly observant and aware of their environments even as they are shaped by them, and reshape them for their own purposes.”

1 Moshenska, Gabriel, Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain. London: Routledge, 2019

2 B uitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words. British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987

An anti-aircraft gun on the Isle of Sheppey, probably seen on the walk home from school.

all images courtesy of Mistaya Hemingway

One aspect of play is the miniaturisation of the world: everything becomes small: the ditch is a river, lead soldiers are an army, the rock in the woods is a mountain. Bits of shrapnel (a bomb), medals and buttons (a soldier), model aircraft (planes exploding overhead and destroying your house) become synecdoches of the disturbance of war at the scale of a child’s hand — controllable, collectible, evidence that one is alive. So too the drawings here, amplified or diminished by the verses and commentary. That which is traumatic is neutralised by being made small while at the same time being part of something as enormous as a war. The Right to Play movement which is about child labour, might in what appears so far to be a war-torn twenty-first century, go hand in hand with being allowed to play, allowed to process what is happening by translating it into artefacts, collections, games with arcane rules, drawings and stories: a kind of material resistance. A survivalist response. £

all images courtesy of Mistaya Hemingway

Mistaya Hemingway

Enid writes to Mistaya:

‘It was a popular thing in teenage years to collect autographs of family and friends but Peter preferred to use the blank pages to draw aeroplanes and my father added the words to the drawings. These are pretty exact drawing of each plane as it was necessary to recognise English planes or German ones. On one occasion your Dad and Ralph cycling home across a grass track on the marsh were machine gunned by a German plane and Ralph threw them both in a ditch as the bullets hit the path. pps. Your Dad would have been almost 10 when the war started and possibly 12 or 13 when he did these drawings.’

and a later note:

‘We went by train to school each day and slept in our own beds unless there was an air raid siren. The raids generally stopped in mid ’41-ish and only really started again in ’44 with the V1s. Dad was out all the time in the evenings.  Peter could have been drawing any time as the book was small and portable.’

MISTAYA HEMINGWAY is a freelance dancer, choreographer, filmmaker and urban thinker living in Montreal. A soloist for nine years with La La Human Steps, she holds a degree in urban planning: these are blended to focus on artistic projects that unite movement, music, film and the city. She is currently working on an immersive installation that explores the architecture of Peter Hemingway through dance, scenography and XR technologies, accompanied by original composition by Sarah Pagé. www.mistayahemingway.com

all images courtesy of Mistaya Hemingway

play in wartime schoolscapes

DARINE CHOUEIRI

courtesy

of Čedo Pavlović

In this photo taken around 1993 in the Hrasno neighbourhood, the boy with the blue tank shirt is holding the carcass of a mortar. He is carefree, posing in the midst of two other friends sitting next to him, each of whom have also one of their hands reaching to touch the loot of the day. The photographer must have said something funny because the boy in yellow sitting on the ground, sealing the composition of this happy group, burst into a genuine laugh while the others, blinded by direct sunlight are smiling while wrinkling their eyes. A bike wheel sticks out from the left side of the photo, probably belonging to one of the boys and taken out on this sunny day for a trip in the neighbourhood.

The boy in the middle is Čedo Pavlović, from the neighbourhood of Hrasno; writtten in half-erased white letters on the black billboard crowning the four boys’ heads. Čedo sent me this photo in April 2022, exactly 30 years after the beginning of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992. This photo could have been a trivial one, like many others taken to keep a memory of the giddy years of childhood. But the defused mortar, the blown up store front and the car riddled with bullets give this photo a sense of the uncanny.

A mortar becomes a toy and destruction echoes a laugh.

the new structure of school: play by default

April 1992 the city of Sarajevo is under siege and the schools are closed. For children, war is perceived as a restriction of their freedom, a halt in their physical activities. Adults, aware of the pressure war exercises on children, start scattered initiatives to give children a sense of normality and a basic need: schooling. A person, often a professor, gathers children hiding in the basement of a building and organises a class.

These initiatives first appeared in the neighbourhood of Dobrinja and were referred to as Haustorska škola (stairway schools) because they occured in the lower parts of staircases, considered the safest in the apartment blocks. This practice soonl quickly built up into a local school system in Sarajevo, put in place by the Pedagogical Institute of the city. Schooling continued during the war and siege that Sarajevo painfully underwent for four years.

Darine Choueiri

Schooling adapted to the compelling situation of war and siege. In this altered pattern, space and schooling are linked beyond, and often without, the architecture of a specific school building.

The war school is a temporary suspension of the rules and hierarchies of regular schooling. A rhizomatic system is implemented, where schooling activity occurs in makeshift classrooms located in rooms considered safe, called punkts This network spread through the city, clinging to a spatial logic – the urban divisions inherited from the Yugoslav period named Mjesna Zajednice (MZ), or local communities. The MZ is the smallest urban unit to constitute a neighbourhood, or a fragment of a neighbourhood, its perimeter delimitated by streets or natural elements.

Each of the four municipalities of Sarajevo are composed of a number of Mjesna Zajednice, an urban structure that was also social; during the Yugoslav period these MZ were self-managed entities where residents autonomously made decisions on local issues. This existing structure actually facilitated the development of a rhizomatic school structure: all the children living in a particular MZ attended the same punkt located in it, no matter which primary or secondary school they had attended before the siege. Before, primary schools, gymnasiums and vocational schools might have a number of MZ under their responsibility, which meant finding

Map showing the contour of the Mjesna Zajedniča in black, and the schools in Sarajevo in red( outline: non-operative, solid red: operative)

Map of the itinerary of teachers from the high school Treća Gimnazija. In red, the school, its two relocations, the houses of the professors and the punkts. In black, residential settlements from the Yugoslav Socialist period.

and organising teachers and professors to give classes, keep records and organise exams in each one. If these Matična škola (mother schools) were destroyed, professors relocated to schools that were still operative or in other kinds of spaces. Thus school came to the children; it was always in their close vicinity, within walking distance from their homes which avoided displacement and limited danger in getting to and from school. Instead it was the teachers who had to walk often long distances from their houses to the punkts, when it was not too dangerous, to meet their students.

Darine Choueiri

This reversal of the trip to school is a first détournement of the schooling structure. As well, spatial and curricular organisations were de-hierarchised: the central school building no longer existed, instead it dispersed to different punkts; class levels were blurred with students of different ages cramped in often small rooms.

Urban elements on the way to school also experienced a détournement. Some buildings were considered as shields because of their length and height and were nicknamed Pancirka (bulletproof jackets). Garbage bins became hideouts if sniper bullets were heard; damaged cars were filled with rubble and turned on their side making a buffer; in some neighbourhoods a trench was dug to ensure a safe route for children at some critical crossing point.

Darine Choueiri

from top: Students carrying a desk and running protected by the trashbins disposed along the way, students running to reach the punkt, Little light, big smile.

Students in a basement room, students crouching in a trench, students gathering under the porch in Emile Zola street.

Screenshots from You Tube movies by Smajo Kapetanović in the neighborhood of Dobrinja.

In some of the videos shot during the war, kids on their way to class, with their backpacks on their bent backs, are hurtling through a devastated street. With the sound of sniper bullets in the background, children gather under an entrance porch in Emile Zola Street in Dobrinja, chatting while waiting to the enter the small basement room where school will take place. In single file, children hurry up the trench with big defiant smiles. The primary school of Hrasno, a neighbourhood on the direct line of siege, was protected by the UNPROFOR (United Nations Protection Forces) with concrete panels wrapped around the perimeter of the building. It was cold and dark in the classrooms on the first floor but children could study, and came to do it. In the makeshift classrooms, school desks are generally missing, sometimes a table is turned up to become a board, and often children have oil lamps for light.

The teacher’s route: a drawing by Amina Avdagi ć, the director of the Treca Gymnazija during the siege. It shows a zone in a quarter of Hrasno to which the Treca Gymnazija was relocated in July 1994. Loris is a shield building, very long (relatively high) on the frontline, the border with the belligerent army on the other side. People ‘integrated’ it spatially to their itineraries because it was good protection from snipers In their war jargon, it is a Pan č irka, a bulletproof jacket.

A fuller discussion of this specific school is found in Darine Chouieri, ‘Sarajevo Schooling Under Siege’, Mémoires en Jeu/ Memories at Stake, numèro 18, Printemps 2023. https://atablewithaview.com/mapping-schooling-undersiege-an-interview/

war, play and the architectural agenda

In besieged Sarajevo, schooling gave way to what I call play by default: common elements of daily life were played out to become extraordinary; even the path to school was an adventurous slalom where children had to thwart the snipers.

Schooling does occur in extremely dangerous conditions, but danger is an abstraction for children and that is why they can play out school. Risk is a fundamental aspect of play according to Lady Allen of Hurtwood, the designer of adventure playgrounds in postwar Britain; in Sarajevo children assumed risk and canalised it through their schooling activity. The war lasted four years; children died because they went outside to play. But how to keep a child in the basement that long?

This also changed their involvement in the socio-public sphere. For Maria Montessori, play is a fragment of space and time situated between the individual and the world where a child builds up his own self as well as his representation of the world. This is why it is such an essential activity. Space is decisive – in the sphere of the local community, in a spatial context adapted to new ways of life, the playing out of school is a form of childhood survival.

The Sarajevo story shows education is turned into play. This is also a détournement in the relation between these two programmatic activities in architecture. Play had never been on the functional agenda of urban planning unless it had noble objectives – the instillation of values, otherwise it was considered a disturbing, unsocial activity whose disorders – noise and dirt, should be avoided. Playful inclinations of children had to be civilised into play that teaches respectable behaviour.

In the CIAM congresses recreation figures among the four dimensions of the functionalist city: living, working, recreation and transport. This doesn’t explicitly imply children, rather the dweller in general, with recreation as time off work. In the first congress after WWII, CIAM 6, recreation is referred to as ‘the cultivation of mind and body’; the spatial contours of leisure activity are not defined beyond the aspects of open air and green spaces. It is not until the 1951 post-war congress, CIAM 8, The Heart of the City: Towards the Humanisation of Urban Life, that activities pertaining to the public sphere are more clearly put. The new definition of the heart, the core of the city, tries to overcome the much-criticised modernist antihumanistic programmatic city to create liveable environments in neighbourhood units with social, psycho-social and spiritual functions.

Amina Avdagi ć

After WWII, reconstruction was not only concerned with the rebuilding of edifices but with the laying down of the foundations of a new society. Children led by example: bombsites scattered across Europe became their informal playgrounds with the basic elements they needed: scrap, loose topography, no grass to care about and no keepers to reprimand them, opening the way to an unprecedented venue: a space made exclusively for the purpose of play.

Emdrup, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, 1943 under Nazi occupation: parents had asked for a children’s play space in which activities would not appear suspicious to German soldiers. Dan Fink, an architect with the Emdrupvænge housing estate, commissioned a playground from the landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen in collaboration with the educator Hans Dragehjelm, the inventor of the sandbox, and the pedagogue John Bertelsen. Sørensen was inspired by the simplicity of children ‘messing around’ in bombsites with objets trouvés. He proposed a space to foster a similar action, putting at the disposal of children elements to be manipulated, touched and transformed. This was a transgression of the idea (in place from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century) that associated play with a natural and healthy environment. Sørensen designed an artificial, contaminated nature, where children like those in rural areas, have at their disposal scrap elements of play, but this time associated with urban life.

The director of the playground, John Bertelsen, called it a junk playground, inspiring the landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood in the recovery of London bombsites after the Blitz. It was an opportunity to recycle spaces left free in the re-building process, not for construction, but as free space for kids whose numbers were growing and had no place to play. Junk was not a well-received label for these places so Lady Allen of Hurtwood re-named them adventurous playgrounds. Leila Berg, in her book Look at the Children,1 gives a description of the effect these playgrounds had on adults: ‘I once passed an adventure playground where five or six boys of twelve or so were climbing some high ramshackle construction, so high that it was very visible above the fence – a mistake to be paid for, as all adventure playground workers know – when a man stopped, horrified. He could scarcely believe his eyes. A policeman on the corner was leaning on the bonnet of a car, making notes. The man walked swiftly up, ‘Officer!’ he said. ‘Look!’ The man waved his umbrella; he was incoherent ’Look!’

‘Look at what?’ said the policeman with deliberate weight.

‘Those boys! Look! They’re climbing!’

‘They’re allowed to, sir’ said the policeman. ‘It’s their playground.’

‘But…!’

‘If you don’t mind sir, I’m busy here.’

‘But – they’re climbing!’

‘I know, sir. There is nothing I can do, sir.’

‘But – they’re climbing! It’s fantastic! Disgraceful! Appalling!’

It was also on a bomb site in 1947 that Aldo Van Eyck built his first playground in Amsterdam. On Bertelmanplein he introduced a sandpit, posts of different heights pitched in the pavement and scattered in the plaza, and jumping stones that were first put in the sandpit but later disposed in the surrounding area by Van Eyck himself. The success was such that parents sent letters to the municipality asking for more of these in town. Play as a programmatic component in planning, took advantage of leftover, in-between spaces that destruction laid bare and were lying expectant.

Children’s play became present in public space; more than 700 playgrounds scattered in the city, were designed over 30 years by Aldo Van Eyck. Working in these liminal places, Van Eyck recovered the element of the street as the first public space children appropriated. The street has always been their first extramuros beyond the house, where they felt free to wander and mix with adult life. The indefinite limits of the playgrounds in between buildings and the abstract geometric forms composing the elements of play, engaged children’s imagination but also were absorbed by cityscape almost as if the playgrough was urban furniture found on the street. Once again, we are dealing with the idea of found objects along the way, scrap in the street that can be played out in multiple ways by children.

All this reappears in the importance of the street for children during the war in Sarajevo; it was their way to school, but also an adventurous itinerary. Its elements played a major role in their narratives; the shade of the towering residential building, the corner that was safe, the place that was denied by the snipers, the play against these rules. In the words of Leila Berg:

‘Our street is full of drama. We lived in it. It was our territory. Every stage of our growth was marked on it, our wonderment, our terror, our triumphs, our deprivations, our compensations, our hate and our love.’ 2

In post-war architecture of the Athens’ Charter, elements of circulation or transport, such as the street, were reinterpreted. The street was especially revisited by architects such as the Smithsons who wrote about their Golden Lane housing: ‘the street is an extension of the house; in it children learn for the first time of the world outside the family; it is a microcosmic world in which the street games change with the seasons and the hours are reflected in the cycle of street.’ 3

After WWII in Yugoslavia there was an urgent need for housing. Early large scale social housing estates constituted neighbourhoods on their own, where communal facilities

1 Berg, Leila. Look at kids. Penguin Books, 1972. p 68

2 Ibid. p 44

3 Resta, Giusepe & Dicuonzo, Fabiana. “Playgrounds as meeting places: Post-war experimentations and contemporary perspectives on the design of in-between areas in residential complexes”. Cidades, Comunidades e Territórios, no. 47, 2023. Open Edition Journals, https://journals.openedition.org/cidades/7771

were always provided, always a kindergarten and a primary school. Circulation was clearly differentiated – motorised vehicles often relegated to the periphery of the settlement while pedestrians move freely in generous common areas. Depending on the settlements’ typology, these communal spaces were often large scale green areas, or interstitial spaces between residential blocks. In their design and scale they were thought of as spaces of conviviality for an intergenerational public. Pedestrian paths, still considered an extension of school and kindergarten perimeters, are never closed. Children always have access to the extramuros zone of the school where the play area is located, even on weekends. It is probably through this sense of community, of feeling safe in the streets of the neighbourhood and knowing it well, that children eagerly found their way to the punkts, with the help of the objets trouvés on the street.

the aesthetic of play, replayed

The year of the last CIAM congress coincided with that of the Declaration of the Rights of the Children on the 20th November 1959, where play and recreation appear as a right in Principle 7:

‘The child is entitled to receive education, which shall be free and compulsory, at least in the elementary stages. He shall be given an education which will promote his general culture and enable him, on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop his abilities, his individual judgement, and his sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society.

The best interests of the child shall be the guiding principle of those responsible for his education and guidance; that responsibility lies in the first place with his parents.

These operate at both the

4 Unesco Digital Library. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000064848

5 Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Free Press of Glencoe, 1961, pp 9-10

The child shall have full opportunity for play and recreation, which should be directed to the same purposes as education; society and the public authorities, shall endeavour to promote the enjoyment of this right.’4

Even if play is still an annex to education, it is nevertheless considered as an autonomous activity, freed of behavioural codes. It shares the same purposes as education: ‘to enable him, on a basis of equal opportunity, to develop his abilities, his individual judgement, and his sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society’.

In junk playgrounds this childhood emancipation was achieved precisely because of its anti-authoritarian aspect. It is relevant to note that Johan Bertelsen, apart from being the pedagogue and playleader in the playground, was an active member of the Danish Resistance against the Nazi occupation. His views of a non-authoritarian, non-fascist form of life, must have imbued the atmosphere of play in the playground. Schooling under siege was a playing out of this anti-authoritarian response to the belligerents waging war against Sarajevo. The dangerous trip to school implicated children, in that they became equal actors along with teachers in the task of schooling. A whole playful set up was put in place as an act of resistance: the school radio, mathematical competitions, school magazines were launched, even a prom party.

The act of still going to school, possibly superfluous in the context of war, was defiant and echoes one of the components of play according to Caillois, the make-believe. ‘Make-believe: accompanied by a special awareness of a second reality or of a unreality.’ 5 Within the limits of the Sarajevo siege, a geography of movement, a dance of freedom, was created by kids and teachers going to school.

Drawing of the blue routes that constituted breaches during the siege that allowed entry and exit from the city.

scale of the city and the scale of the neighbourhood punkt

Thirty years later, I decided to walk this invisible geometry, or more precisely, fragments of it that weren’t forgotten. Almost 300 unrecorded punkts existed in besieged Sarajevo. I ended up with a map retracing the itinerary of three teachers to the punkts. It was impossible to map the trips of children, there were so many of them; they still escape any authority, even the one of representation.

Along the teacher’s itinerary, I was walking through unimportant, trivial parts of town, between blocks in the large housing settlements, sometimes on the backside of the city. Given the overwhelming importance of Ottoman and AustroHungarian architectural heritage to the detriment of that of the Yugoslav socialist period, these are considered the nonaesthetic parts of the city. My own walk, in that sense, was a kind of resistance to dominant aesthetics in the city of Sarajevo, where the architecture of everday life in the housing settlements is invisible and merged with the urban context almost to the point of disappearance.

This resounds with Aldo Van Eyck’s playgrounds melting into the city – an invisible architecture that is, and was during the seige, the scenery of play. The playing out of school used its own aesthetics, or rather anti-aesthetics, of detoured objects and architectures.

Caillois describes play as unproductive, ‘creating neither goods, nor wealth, nor new elements of any kind; and except for the exchange of property among players, ending in a situation identical to that prevailing at the beginning of the game.’6

There is no sign of it taking place, apart from the collective memory of this generation, kept in old school books and washed out photos. Play is unproductive and gathers unproductive objects found in these war playgrounds, such as defused mortars.

When Robert Rauschenberg went to study art at Black Mountain College after WWII, Merce Cunningham said, ‘He made this object out of sticks of wood he found in the street, pieces of newspaper, some plastic. There were some comic strips on it. There were ribbons hanging, and you could go through it or around it or even underneath it. I thought it was beautiful. The colour was so extravagant with all of these materials he’d found in the street.

Rauschenberg began creating works out of found objects when, like other artists of his generation, he was looking for a way to move beyond abstract expressionism […]. These objects created of found fragments, inaugurated the ready-made in art as a critical attitude towards the prevailing aesthetics of arts. By repositioning them they are stripped of their original significance and given a new one. 7

Berg, Leila. Look at kids. Penguin Books, 1972, p. 120. ‘Fantasy is an exploration of living reality, and play a rehearsal of living reality, and we use them both as tools of growth that will help us first understand our reality, and then help us shape it with awareness and competence.’

Rauschenberg would have been fond of Čedo’s photo. In it, the order of representation is completely inverted: the bomb is totally defused, its meaning to be re-invented. This is the rewriting of war by the children, the winning of the battle: they fought it, through play, by the make-believe of living, by detouring its spatial field and objects, like this mortar in arms on a sunny day. They played it out in their own junk playground. And what is play but a ‘rehearsal of living reality’?8 £

6 Ibid.

7 ‘Rauschenberg Shifted Path of American Art’. All things Considered, NPR News: https://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=90411572

8

above, playground along Marka Marulića Street.

left, the playground area in today’s Alipašino Polje settlement

below, open playground in an interstitial area in Čengić Vila housing settlement.

Darine Choueiri

Darine Choueiri

In the MAXXI of Rome, there was a recent exhibition of Ricardo Dalisi’s work. Especially striking are the workshops Dalisi and his students of Napoli’s Faculty of Architecture Federico II did with the children in Naples, in the area of Rione Traino (1971-74), a district that arose during the post-war reconstruction of social housing in Italy and was suffering from lack of amenities and criminality. The photos in black and white taken by Mimmo Jodice of the children and the structures they were building up, playing with or climbing on, first came to my mind when looking at the children of Gaza, today, hanging and swaying on electrical cables that lie useless after the besieged city is plunged in blackout.

It seems that play, historically, is most creative in an extreme situation, a context in which scarcity fuels creativity in a deliberate intent to play out the materials at hand. This is what Dalisi, a member of the experimental educational program Global Tools (1973-75) was doing: the making of objects through participation and self-engagement: tecnologia povera, ordinary materials offered as tools for children to shape their environment.

Even in a disruptive situation that endangers their childhood, children seek to play, and to study.

Conjuntos divertidos para distfrutarios eye.on.palestine, instagram:

Near the Egyptian border, displaced children use electrical wires to play with, amid the complete blackout in the Gaza Strip since the beginning of the Israeli aggression.

Photos Belal Khaled / @anadoluajansi

This makeshift classroom in Gaza, says it all. Even the children who cannot sit are lining up against the wall, a wall that seems infinite, going beyond the picture frame to reach the thousands of displaced children. The room is insignificant, the architecture is a collective decision to transform it into a classroom, into a living experience. It is a reversal of school scenery, an escape moment, where children are happy to be together, happy to be in this in-between space: the space of play. A glimpse of the Ratna Škola.

Instagram: DarineChoueiri

eye.on.palestine The Palestinian youth Tarek Enabbi teaches children at one of the displaced civilian shelters in Rafah. Via @rabie_noqaira 19 décembre 2023

https://www.instagram.com/p/C1DCTc jgXGf/?igsh=M3p2ajdzc312a21x

DARINE CHOUEIRI is an architect-urbanist interested in stories that are embedded spatially. She explores the relation between walking, mapping and the production of narratives, and the power of the built environment in shaping structures of everyday life. atablewithaview.com

Photographs by Mimmo Jodice, captured from the MAXXI exhibition of Ricardo Dalisi’s work in Naples, 1971-74.

Jean-Franois Pirson at the Venice Biennale, 2018.

child’s play within the Palestinian landscape

SAMER WANAN

A child finds five boxes lying on the ground. Sitting on the floor, small hands randomly pick and choose from the toys placed there: boxes all the same size and yet each feels different as if emotions are imprinted in their materials.

The first box, heavy and dusty, has pieces rattling in it. Opened, the child’s hand runs over the rough surfaces inside, discovering small gaps among its pieces, like dry cracked mud. When the box is tipped all the stone-like parts scatter on the ground, like characters brought to life.

‘Which one is next?’

One is made of old wood, with plants and trees engraved on it. Warm to the touch, this box is hard to open. When it does, the flowers engraved on the outside take on colour and vitality on the inside. Yellow toys inside feel like jellies. All together they are players in a theatre, or in a court.

Another wood box; this one is lighter. Inside, thin clear sheets hang vertically. Black marks on them appear to be a flying bird, maybe a running person, the sheets aligned like a flip-book. Turn the box upside down, they reassemble into a different pile, the birds have a different life as the sheets slide smoothly, shuffled by little hands.

The golden box is next. Cold, dense; metal. Carefully opened, a grainy sticky sand clings to fingers. Digging deeper, tiny buried objects surface and are discovered.

The last toy, a black box, is hiding in the shadows. Laying a hesitant finger on it, the mysterious box opens slowly. ‘But there is nothing in it!’ It is nudged, lights flicker inside. Trying to capture the light, a sharp pain is caught instead, a sting from something very pointed. Unpacked, a fuzzy stuffed object like a stitched glove lies on the floor. The little hand rubs it. It feels magical.

Roland Barthes, in one of his essays in Mythologies, comments on the relationship between children and adults through toys.1 An adult man sees a child as another self, demonstrated in the way that common toys – speaking about French toys at the time of his writing – are ‘a microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects’. He differentiates between two kinds of toys: invented forms constituted by a set of blocks inviting an open play, and others that are manufactured in a socialised way with a literal meaning, providing no room for the child but to accept the adult world as it is, turning the child into a user rather than a creator. This questions how toys mediate the relationship between generations, or convey generational dynamics. I approach this relationship within the Palestinian context while exploring the role of play and tactility. To do so, a collection of designed artefacts are used as mediators, taking the form of toy boxes and short stories, based in research-by-design methodologies.

The child, in the Palestinian context, is the figure onto whom ancestral generations project their own hopes for liberation and return to homeland. The child, therefore, represents

a future that necessarily includes the liberation of the Palestinian people from suffering. How adults introduce historical events, cultural heritage and identity to children who embody such hopes is a particular case. With a child living in such a violent and oppressive environment, how does it affect their playing patterns and sites of play?

While the formation of a child’s subjectivity depends on the environmental experiences they are living under, there is the possibility of introducing new perceptions of the situation with each generation. Perceptual experiences and hidden narratives within a particular spatial condition and time can be traced by close attention to children’s spatial playing patterns, and material traces they leave behind. A sort of chronicle emerges out of each generation’s forms of play and their toys, carrying the particular tensions that define their environment. Reading it outward will reveal a larger system of forces at play which, in turn, shapes the Palestinian children’s playscape and its material footprints. In an attempt to adapt and appropriate, or even protest against, their imposed environment, the Palestinian child occupies the available small spaces that engulf their own bodies through play

1 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies. Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1957, pp 52-54

Samer Wanan

Studying child’s play counters any idea that play is something minor, of no value, dismissable. This design research project looks at children’s play in violent contexts with a new lens, drawing attention to its material, temporal and architectural dimensions, in search of alternative modes of reading and engagement with a child’s built environment. What can we learn or gain from narrating Palestine through a child’s point of view by bringing attention to their games and playing territories?

In her 2002 novella, Masās (Touch), Adania Shibli portrays a child, overlooked by her elder family members, mirroring the intergenerational social tensions and the internal dynamics of family relations in times of crisis. 2 The interplay between individual subject and collective memory, children’s world with that of the adults, shows the Palestinian situation through the eyes of a child. In a series of fragmentary scenes of the child’s daily encounters, she listens to adults, or witnesses some traumatic event unfolding in front of her eyes while not fully understanding their meaning. Touching on the absurdities of social and political rules, the child finds herself in humorous, sometimes painful, situations when she encounters these rules – living her own intimate world despite feeling the agony in the background. Shibli shows children negotiating the adult world and an imposed environment through play, combining the

factual and fictional, tragedy and irony. She narrates a series of experiential situations through a child’s pre-meditated view – a not-fully-cultured look, revealing a lot about the charged environment and its complex realities. This way, Shibli goes beyond the interiority of everyday life to reach the interiority of the child herself when encountering harsh spatial conditions and social relationships in the family. 3 Shibli’s novella was written in the particular context of the Second Intifada; prevailing anxieties of that time reflect Palestinian fragmented identity and alienation of children in the third or fourth generation after el-Nakba.4

In this project, fragments and residual traces of daily life construct constellations of images, texts and relics related to particular Palestinian conditions at certain times. 5 These assemblages work as material thinking experiments in dialogue with the interiority of the child and the subjectivities of anyone who interacts with the boxes. Though bounded by the edges of the box, situated material objects and charged relics reveal relationships with larger contexts and real-world spatial conditions. There is a reciprocal relationship between miniature toys inside each box and distant inaccessible places and times.

all images Samer Wanan

2 Shibli, Adania. Touch. translated by Paula Haydar. Northampton MA: Interlink Publishing, 2013

3 In Arabic, the word Masā s literally means to be touched by devils or magic, and hence, being mentally affected to the point of insanity, in Arabic: jonna – the state of seeing, thinking and imagining reality in a different way than it really is. The word is also linked to love and poetry in Arabic culture to connotate a person being touched by love. In a sense, it reaches metaphysical, psychological and mental levels to mean touching the soul.

4 The Palestinian story can be narrated as a series of vignettes in relation to its generations. Jīl, means a generation when a group of people inhabits a space and a time frame within a narrative, primarily during their childhood. In the Palestinian case, we say jīl qabl elNakba (prior to the 1948 catastrophe), jīl el-Nakba (the generation who witnessed the 1948 Palestinian catastrophe and the aftermath of displacement), jīl al-fida’iyin (post-1967 ‘Naksa’ era and the launch of armed struggle), jīl el-intifada I (post-1987 uprising), jīl el-intifada II (post-2000 uprising).

The common thread among all five generations is the Palestinian aspiration for liberation and justice, though with different approaches to achieve this ultimate goal and the not-yet-attainable future. Each generation sees the next one, their children, as the source and symbol of hope, believing that they will continue their struggle to be called jīl el-tahrir (the generation of liberation). The word tahrir carries ideas of freedom and futurity within its folds, a myriad of possibilities to speculate about and (re)write the end of the open-ended story. It is not a coincidence that the word for editing a text and re-writing a story in Arabic is also tahrir

5 In Walter Benjamin’s sense - one interested in the refuse of history, of modernity, of the city, see Chapter 10 ‘Rag-picking: The Arcades Project’ in Walter Benjamin’s Archive: images, texts, signs Verso Books, 2015.

Forest Box explores colonial forestation and the politics of plantation in the Palestinian landscape.

Shadow Box explores Palestinian folklore and folktales and their potential to inform the relationships of land to place.

Olympics Box explores borders and their environments within the Palestinian landscape. Acetate sheets held by 3D-printed holder inside a thin wood box. 21 x 15 x 4 cm

all images Samer Wanan

Sand Box explores archaeology and ownership within the Palestinian context, surveying means and mechanisms. Fragments of card and pins sit in brown sugar, a series of hand sketched drawings folded and attached to the lid with magnets, tin box. 21 x 15 x 4 cm

3D Resin prints and 3D-milled wood pieces with acetate images inside a wood box, 2023. 21 x 15 x 4 cm

Fabric glove with sewing pins placed inside a black wood box. 21 x 15 x 4 cm

Samer Wanan

Play is curated around five topics in a sequence of boxes and short stories representing specific Palestinian conditions. In each of the charged environments, a child’s point of view is adopted, a pre-mediated look that invites exploration which, in turn, makes a multitude of alternative interpretations possible.

To think about this in more detail, let us turn to the Stone Box. The first iteration was made as a gathering device for materials and ideas, specifically the extraction of resources and labour, which eventually led to a particular site and situation. The second time, the box takes the form of a toy that embodies the site’s set of relationships.

The explored site within this box is a contested landscape; the land itself has a unique value due to the sacred association of its stone materials, commonly known as Jerusalem Stone. There is a tradition of extracting material fragments from the Holy Land, which are carried away by tourists and pilgrims as souvenirs and memory objects. Charged relics, in a reliquary box, embody the stories and values of their original geographies. At the same time they raise questions about the destination and reception of this material commodity under its ‘sacred’ status. Stone can move. After being purified — leaving dust, waste and pollution behind — sacred fragments of the Holy Land are placed in synagogues around the world — sites with an indexical connection to the Holy Land through direct contact with its materiality.

With both iterations of the Stone Box, once the lid is closed, the sites of extraction – the quarries surrounding Palestinian communities and from which the stone fragments were gathered, are put in direct contact with places where stone is used as cladding; whether in Jerusalem for the first iteration of the box or in the Israeli settlements in West Bank in the second.

A short story linked to the first Stone Box narrates a fictional city built out of giant stone blocks excavated from different and distant locations. The city has a dual nature with one side depicting everyday life on its surface and the other revealing a magical underground realm. Tourists and pilgrims visit and re-enact historical scenes by entering this hidden realm and touching different stone blocks, each possessing unique spiritual effects and periods of time.

In the second Stone Box a story is reconceived as playing with the box as a toy, putting the child’s body in direct engagement with a surrounding place. By moving the arrangement of miniature paper fragments and stone crumbs inside the box, a larger effect on site takes place. A child is placed in a loop of emotions oscillating between joy and fear, accompanied by a sense of estrangement while struggling to recognise shifting ground after moving any piece in the toy.

First iteration of Stone Box opened: 3D wood relief of a cluster of Palestinian stone quarries, attached to a plaster cast lid; miniature 3D cast Jesmonite fragments of Illés Relief model of Jerusalem, 2023. 21 x 15 x 5cm

Stone Box: opened and spread out.

all images Samer Wanan

Second Stone Box: a close-up view of the laser-engraved wooden surface inside the box with varying inscription depths, addressing the relationship between the text of law and its material embodiment on the landscape.

all images Samer Wanan

Second Stone Box: a close-up view into the quarry sites, fragments of stone held on sewing pins, as are paper flags with the Arabic names of Palestinian villages and towns near the quarries.

Second iteration of Stone Box: top view of the box with the lid open where sites of extraction (bottom) are put in touch with construction sites (top), mediated by fragments of stone collected from the quarries. 2023

Samer Wanan

Short fictional stories mobilise the material construction of these toyboxes. Like Stone Box, each of the other boxes imagines a scenario they would unravel in the subjectivity of the child at play in a particular spatial or architectural situation. Besides the representation of distant times and inaccessible places, the constellations of objects inside the boxes have the capacity to generate effects that extend beyond their boundaries. They collect things inside as much as they project out meanings. These boxes, their objects and stories, are tangible and intangible articulations of Palestinian collective memory. The child is able to re-order things to construct an identity and a personal relationship with home, family and the collective. Play, in this way, acts as a driver for cultural construction.

One can read the five boxes as a series of little explorations and speculations. Though constructed as toys for children, for adults they trigger reflection. Versions of oneself as a child are recovered with a small-scale, manipulable form of play. The boxes lean towards Barthes’s open-ended type of play — an invitation to read Palestinian history and culture in a simultaneously allegorical, tactile and experimental manner.

acknowledgements

I am grateful to my supervisors Professor Mark Dorrian and Dr. Ana Bonet Miro, as well as to Dr Ella Chmielewska for the fruitful discussions during my PhD journey at the University of Edinburgh. This essay would not have been possible without their invaluable input.

SAMER WANAN is currently undertaking an Architecture by Design PhD at Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, part of Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh. He holds degrees in architecture from Birzeit University and Newcastle University.

The constellations of charged boxes and toys create a field that plays out in both directions, from the outside world in and from the inside world of each child, out.

all images Samer Wanan

(for)play and wordplay

YVONNE SINGER

Even as a child it was hard to play except for times at the seashore digging in the sand to the accompaniment of the reassuring roar of ocean waves. As an immigrant child, new to the English language, the game of ‘step on a crack, break your mother’s back’ was an opportunity to be singled out as the only one to step on a crack. It was the same with Hide and Seek or variations of it, another game that is fraught if you do not know the rules and the language.

This is the paradox of play, serious but trivial, innocent but fraught with danger.

So what is the meaning of play? I thought the word and its meaning was straightforward until I began the research. The Random House Dictionary has three full columns on the word play. And there are many theories about play, from psychoanalyst D W Winnicott to game theory.

There are many taxonomies of play: physical play, social play, constructive play, fantasy play, solitary play, parallel play, group play.

Colloquial applications of the word play demonstrate its multidimensionality:

word play, foul play, playful, co-play, f0oreplay, playoff. Play one’s card, play the game, play on.

Play both ends against the middle, play fast and loose, play tricks, playing with fire, play a hunch.

Play by ear, play acting, make a play for, play of light, the play’s the thing, play for time. Playbook, playback, playbill. Playpen, plaything, Playhouse, playground, play by play, playing the field. Played out, playboy, playmate, play offs. Play along.

For me, play is art-making with ideas, dreams, images, words and any materials and forms that serve my purpose. Certainly my play is informed by my personal story and the aesthetic and educational environment that shaped me, but within that arena I can make my own rules and speak in my own voice. Here in this private world, I can be crazy, pragmatic, stupid, unrealistic, impossible, sentimental, nostalgic, depressed, unpredictable, bewildering — that’s all part of the process.

I offer this linguistic and artistic expression of play as it relates to the primal gesture of drawing

drawing as sign drawing as action drawing as thought

drawing a line drawing as a language the syntax of line

And exploring drawing as gesture, as object, as metaphor, as duration, as boundary, I did a long blind drawing, a 20’ scroll, one of many elements in the 1988 installation Contradictions/ Possibilities at Niagara Artists Centre, St Catharines.

The blind drawing was done more or less in one sitting. My rule was to draw using graphite, with eyes closed and using both left and right hands I am left-handed. I did not have preconceived images in mind. My interest was with automatic writing and drawing and I wondered if drawing with eyes closed would provide a more immediate access to my subconscious and so result in a more spontaneous, improvisational experience. The objective was to eliminate the gap between subconscious and conscious action and gesture. I do remember having ideas and maybe fleeting images, like thinking about the female body or feeling anger. It was a meditative and and enlightening experience which I was never able to repeat.

Yvonne Singer, The blind drawing scroll. graphite, 30” x 20’, detail. Excerpted from Contractictions/Possibilities, Niagara Artist Centre, St Catharines, 1988 mp4 in dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ dkpixinvoyo1uvypgxfgr/Yvonne-blind-drawing-inverted. mp4?rlkey=ax11igk5fq6p7ilvk0u412y54&dl=0

Yvonne Singer

Yvonne Singer

Although surprised by the results, I think there is always some level of self-consciousness or self-awareness in such a process. There is a reciprocity between the movement of the arm and body in the gesture of drawing, and the thoughts and images produced, that might be further studied.

From the sketchbook is composed of fragments, enlarged and organised as a montage, in a sequence with its own logic. What compelled me to do this? Perhaps, it was simply curiosity.

These are drawings that are simple, spontaneous gestures enacted quickly, words repeated for their sound, graphic quality and rhythm, drawn at different moments in different sketchbooks, doodles really, throw-aways I thought. As I worked to digitise them and then to edit and select the sequencing , the structure and relationship of the scribbles and words developed their own rhythm and purpose.

Separately these fragments record a moment in time, together they become a script than is read as a meditation/mediation/ gesture; they are more together, less when alone. £

Play is more than just fun.

— Stuart Brown, TED talk, 2009 https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_brown_play_ is_more_than_just_fun

..playing is a creative experience, which makes possible a sense of continuity in space and time for the baby and the discovery of self.

— D.W.Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 1971. https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/winnicott.pdf

YVONNE SINGER, born in Budapest, Hungary, is interested in everyday language and the intersection of public and private histories. Her installations employ multi-media techniques, often with cryptic texts using everyday language to articulate issues of disjuncture and perception.

www.yvonnesinger.com

a disturbance of memory, http://artmetropole.co

Yvonne Singer, From the Sketchbook. The sketchbook scroll, digital print 44” x 10’, 2023

Yvonne Singer

Minotaur plays Ludius Loci

YIOU WANG

Ludius player

Loci of or related to place

shelter, play, work

While it has been speculated that architecture’s origin is the primitive hut – a human-built structure for shelter, security, comfort and a territorial demarcation from the landscape, what this leaves out is the existence of mazes and labyrinths, types of architecture that historically emerged in almost every civilisation, but which are largely under-discussed in the discipline. The maze differs from the labyrinth in its multicursality – having multiple paths, while a labyrinth is a unicursal structure. Because multicursal structures encompass more complex spatial relationships and emergent scenarios,1 for every maze there is a Minotaur, a bewildered, intelligent, explorative space user. The maze with its Minotaur produces a game that precisely fits Friedrich Schiller’s definition: the voluntary act of overcoming unnecessary obstacles.

Unnecessary obstacles. Unnecessary, in contrast to satisfying necessities such as safety, utility and productivity. Instead of efficiency, the maze takes the longest route from the starting point to the destination. Instead of security, the maze introduces potential threats due to myopias. Instead of being built to solve human problems, mazes are problems to be solved.

When architecture deviates from shelter, comfort or function, its relationships are modified. The architecture of play may not at all times be human-serving, but it serves foremost the play experience, the emergence of indeterminate interactions, ambiguity and mental stimulation. Unnecessary obstacles necessary to play hinge on architectonics of space. To overcome obstacles and barriers, the space user must produce extra work. Play and work are two sides of the same coin.

This essay tells the story of my 2023 M Arch thesis project Ludius Loci – a series of speculative spatial productions; medium: a video game that rethinks architecture beyond shelter, comfort and goodness to humanity. Instead Ludius Loci is a complex game system where architecture, user, time and enemy interweave a progression of unscripted events, emergent scenarios. For play architectures and their Minotaurs, their life is in their movement, exploration and interaction, mediated by space.

virtuality and mixed ludology

One of the main innovations of Ludius Loci is the mixed, integrated ludology that is achieved only in its chosen medium – video game. Virtual architecture allows for the creation of dynamic and mutable spaces, engaging the senses and generating meaningful stories. 2 Similarly, in the realm of games, diverse typologies engage the space-user in agential ways. Alea (chance), one of classic big four of game mechanics proposed by Roger Caillois, is embodied in the random composition that incorporates architectonic syntax, such as Crossword (2023), the first game of Ludius Loci. Mimicry (simulation) is present in the role play. Agon (competition) and ilinx (vertigo) in Ludius Loci are interrelated concepts: agon, contention, is embodied in the maze structure, competing against the player avatar in various confrontational ways, creating disorientation, making navigation difficult. Agon also happens at an intra-architectural level where forces of growth and decay in turn shape the structure. In a virtual space where the free movement of the occupant, and the process and effort of traversing consists most of the gameplay, it is an open-world game. The design logic is driven by the process of navigation instead of global formal logic.

Comics as a side quest is directly linked with the real-time graphic render pipeline of the game. As the player navigates through the unknowns, experiencing and leaving traces in space in ways that go beyond static representations, they can snap photos in the real time along the journey and create their own graphic novel at the game’s end. This interactive mechanism links two contemporary art forms, challenging the traditional methodology and aesthetics of representation as static and designer-focused, towards a user-focused, real-time interactive representation.

1 Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. The MIT Press, 2010. p57

2 G erber, Andri, and Ulrich Götz, editors. Architectonics of Game Spaces: The Spatial Logic of the Virtual and Its Meaning for the Real. Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2019.

Yiou Wang

Yiou Wang

Minotaur, the player character

excess

Excess in tectonics liquifies boundaries between the inside and outside, taps into the realm of desire, and creates meaningful, sensuous and affective disruptions to conventional expectations or established norms. 2 In the three games of Ludius Loci, excess is ubiquitous, creating multiple paths with different, unforeseeable outcomes. Just as an avatar in space isn’t a mere scale figure on a 3D render, architecture in video game isn’t a mere digital representation of architecture because it offers unique qualities that go beyond representation. Misunderstanding, risk, confusion, blockage and repetition can all be part of a game experience, which corresponds to everything with which Deleuze argues excess is associated. 3

Excess encourages the sense of growth and vitality in architecture, which a conventional approach deems immutable. The play experience with an aesthetics of excess is as a process of dynamic making, vocabulary, responsivity, affect, confusion and disruption. Producing an excess of paths, many of which lead to an impasse, and by consequence an excess of emergent scenarios, is the nature of multicursal mazes.

Excess is defined in two ways: tectonic abundance of forms and geometry, and elements of ambiguous function or usefulness. Rethinking excess in architecture challenges conventional notions and pedagogies in design which dismiss excess, preferring minimalism, efficiency, reduction and utility.

2 myopias and 3 degrees

The maze cultivates in its player a spatial and mnemonic myopia. Myopia is defined as a spatial condition that requires nontrivial effort from the occupant to traverse their most immediate surroundings. In a spatial myopia, the player cannot rely on spatial cues – such as the difference between two doors, the uniqueness of a staircase – to navigate or to precisely self-locate in a space. In a mnemonic myopia, on the other hand, the player cannot rely on memory to navigate a space, such as in my 2021 video game Moving Maze

Depending on the type of myopia, mazes can be classified into three tiers. The first-degree maze is one where the player can navigate through spatial cues, including signs, differences in objects and furniture, differences in array and composition, or audio cues (no myopia). In the second-degree maze, spatial cues are ambiguous, so the player can only rely on memory for finding the way out (spatial myopia). In a thirddegree maze, there aren’t visual cues or mnemonic devices reliable for navigation. Architecture in mnemonic myopia is

a system of flux, of ongoing transformation, emergence or expansion. When Theseus navigates Daedalus’ maze in pursuit of Minotaur, Ariadne’s thread acts as a materialisation of mnemonic cues, which turns the maze from a third-degree to a second-degree maze. Ludius Loci experiments with second and third-degree mazes.

player

Ludology and architecture converge at their shared focus on the user of the space, who metamorphoses from an architectural occupant to a player. In architecture, we focus much on the occupant’s social role – age, gender, family structure, vocation, lifestyle etc. – but in games, the social role is downplayed; we are more focused on the POV of the player as they problem-solve and traverse the virtual world. An avatar is a digital representation of the player. Compared to scale figures that are used as a tool secondary to architecture, the player avatar is more active, agential and symbolic as it embodies role play and synthesises a set of qualities of an imagined space-user. The identity and design of the avatar closely relate to the global context of gameplay. By positioning the space-user or occupant as an active, mobile and playercontrolled avatar, rather than an objectified, passive scale figure, we emphasise the quality of multi-agential interactions and world-building as a subjective, personal journey.

pov

‘I know they accuse me of arrogance, and perhaps misanthropy, and perhaps of madness. Such accusations (for which I shall exact punishment in due time) are derisory. It is true that I never leave my house, but it is also true that its doors (whose numbers are infinite) are open day and night to men and to animals as well. ... Another ridiculous falsehood has it that I, Asterion, am a prisoner. Shall I repeat that there are no locked doors, shall I add that there are no locks?’ 4

The player of Ludius Loci is the estranged antagonist from Greek myth, Minotaur (Asterion). Despite the popular narrative that the Cretan Maze was built to imprison him, the maze is the only known home from his point of view. The hidden peculiarity of Minotaur’s POV is that he is both an inhabitant and an escapist. It may not seem like a confinement, but an assemblage of architectural elements that together liquify their differences or boundaries, creating repetition and circularity in both space and time. 5 In one sense, the maze is his intimate home; in another dimension, it is confrontational.

4 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The House of Asterion’, from Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. 1962

5 Grosz, Elisabeth A, and Peter Eisenman. Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. The MIT Press, 2006

3 G rosz, Elizabeth A. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press, 2020

1 CROSSWORD: spatial semantics

The first game, Crossword, is a part-to-whole maze that transforms the individual (part) into a collective unity. A local-to-global system of elements operate in space with rules, like rules in language. Generative architecture propagates linguistically like a crossword puzzle.

Each element is one of the architectural conventions, doors, windows, stairs, rooms, corridors, columns – all have meaning in regards to user interaction. Such conventions codify the ways the player of places may interact with them, hence an interplay between elements, movement and forces.6 This is the spatial production.

The crossword infinitely expands as Minotaur travels. It is an architecture of space and time. The crossword formed by architectural parts explores the notion of architecture as a linguistic assemblage of dynamic elements, growing from one point into an aggregation, following certain joining rules. It involves a departure from conventional design approaches that prioritise rigid massing, and instead focuses on processes of the crossword. Through the propagation of simple elements, complexity of the system emerges.

Crossword: modules, a part-towhole rule-based architecural generative logic like a crossword made by architectural elements 6

Crossword: seed variations at the same complexity level (wave function collapse)

Yiou Wang

Yiou Wang

6 see Hillier, Bill. Space Is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture. Space Syntax, 2015.

2 VOLVELLE: spatialised fate

What is a volvelle? It is a diagram that can be applied at the foundation of every medium.

Volvelle is an ideal maze, because it is adapted from a temporal model. The wall-stair complex interferes with Minotaur’s navigation by alignment and misalignment, producing occult experiences for Minotaur.

There are always two characters in divination practices: the querent who asks questions and the transmission which can be a character or a medium. In cases of the western horoscope, the medium is the volvelle - a circular calculator with infinite variations.

Minotaur navigates through a circular maze with walls, stairs, and doorways, acting like a querent, and the maze, a transmission in occult practices. In polar coordinates, linear spatial orientations don’t work: the only directions are centre and periphery. Between the centre and the periphery, there is a porous in-between. A maze. Born at the centre, humans never cease to move outward in a meandering randomised pattern.

The concept of navigating in space is analogous to the concept of fate in time. This volvelle maze layers conventional architectural elements such as a doorway, a corridor, and a wall, but it also creates a continuum of scales that the virtual querent always has to size their body to see if they fit, or move in ways such as jumping or crawling. The maze is an active agent exerting influence on the behaviour of the virtual querent. The maze is the medium of transmission. It is the question answerer, as much as it is the riddle itself.

below: sequential metamorphic plans and sections

Yiou Wang

Yiou Wang

Volvelle: concentric gyroid form, top view

Volvelle game views

3 BABELS: growth and decay

Babel towers belong to another type of architecture. An architecture that remains forever unfinished. The state of unfinishedness creates a sense of lifelike presence. A metabolic unfinishedness.

The invisible enemy of architecture is the force that erodes and decays, the embodiment of entropy, decay and destruction. It is the weather, thermal expansion, fire, natural disasters, organismic decomposers that batter the architectural structure. It is the force that turns an architectural structure into ruins that is architecture’s enemy, but by the same force, new lives and new constructions are created. The force that erodes and decays is the same force that grows. It beautifully echoes the mathematic concepts of the selfduality: the force that influences a system or structure that has the property of being equal to its opposite or reverse force, the force of decay is, in the example of fungal growth that gradually fractures a stone, a self-dual of the force of growth.

This level is an open-world game featuring towers structures in different states of growth and decay, where growth creates solids and decay carves voids. Those forces are curves. Spiral, waves, and hyperbola. Their numerous permutations and combinations are the unseen forces that drive the solid and void. They are the genotypes of the architecture. The phenotype is generated by time. Remember when I was walking in the matrix of towers? Those babels can appear in numerous phenotypes with just a few genotypes. What Deleuzian becoming signifies, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, is a shift from one’s former identity in a difference of degree, rather than a difference in kind.7

Yiou Wang

Yiou Wang

7 G rosz, Elizabeth A. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press, 2020

top: Minotaur standing in front of Babel Towers middle: Minotaur and tower formed by growth and decay.

Babel: game view. below: Sequential metamorphosis of Babels

the architecture of the game

The notion of differences in degree is crucial to my understanding and production of maze and architecture games. Different parts along the uneven edges of one structure may exhibit different porosity with different accessibility, but in a maze there should be differences in degree, in order to create spatial and mnemonic myopia. In an animated architecture, the temporal differences are a gradient of transformations in which any two adjacent frames look logically and visually similar. Simple transformations of identical parts, or merging in-between states between different parts, are not only a self-reference but a system of potentials.

In the process of design and play, the maze represents a new mode of architecture that challenges the traditional mastermind notions of design, rule compliance, and space. Virtual architecture is not simply a matter of digital representations of physical buildings, but rather an experiment in creating new spatial logic with emphasis on space as a production, rather than a product. Spatial production is the dynamic interplay among multiple agents, including designer, occupant and other architectural parts, in an evolving sequence. Virtual architecture has the potential to create not only new forms, new ways of interaction, but also new thought and cultural meanings.

In Ludius Loci, player of places, loci is a pun with double meanings. It signifies that this project seeks to establish an architecture of three loci, loci of emergence, loci of circular time, and loci of computational heterogeneity.

Emergence resonates with a continuity of before and after, with expanding complexities unfolding in a modularisation of architectural parts. The model of becoming, according to Bergson and Deleuze, involves dispersion, where an entity is in a different place-time than it originally was by a movement of complication. The crossword maze is a dispersion space, and player on the other hand, their movement, if frozen in solid, will show a dispersion pattern in space. The player and the maze become connected again by their shared gaming properties. In Borges’ retelling of the myth of Minotaur, House of Asterion, Minotaur narrates how the bodies of the sacrificed youth, when they lie down still, turn into markers of his infinitely intricate home maze.

Ludius Loci is my spatial play in which I have been a player. It is the immaterial legacy of my obsession with mazes. It is an archive of my dreams of mazes, my practice of fulfilling the duty in the Borgesian prophecy of maze makers in the world. As a bag of digital games, it is an interface where my mazemaking obsession can be shared by others, designers and non-designers alike.

All three parts of Ludius Loci, player of games, in very different ways speculate how a maze is conceived as an agential aggregation of tectonics of mobility, where the occupant is treated as a curious discoverer, and where space, in turn, is in a state of becoming. £

Yiou Wang

YIOU WANG is a multidisciplinary artist and architect working in the field of new media, encompassing CGI, game, immersive and interactive storytelling. Yiou holds a Harvard GSD MArch; her thesis, Ludius Loci, a series of singleplayer adventure games of architectonics, can be found at Yiou Wang’s itch.io

Liquid Sand, still from Ludius Loci

play ground

IVAN HERNANDEZ QUINTELA

It started with a visit to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Going up the main stairs, I found a small room to the side, a minor gallery within the museum. In it, there were a dozen drawings of what seemed to me childish drawings of stairs, platforms, moving panels and bodies in motion. I found out they were drawings of a Utopian project called New Bablylon by the Dutch artist Constant. I was captivated. Here was a proposal for a city of Homo Ludens rather than Homo Fabers, where inhabitants were in constant action, reconfiguring their space over and over as their whims required it. Construction was play; Play was construction.

Then came the discovery of Johan Huizinga and his philosophy of play. I learned that the Eames made a career of playing within their professions. I watched films by Buster Keaton and Jaques Tati. I studied the work of Alan Wexler and Shin Egashira, of the Situationists and Archigram. I was training myself to be an Homo Ludens

I decided to name my practice LUDENS, as a tribute to Constant and to remind myself to not take the profession too seriously. My first presentation card, to my father’s disappointment, read:

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

Walking at the pace of a turtle

My father argued that no person would hire an architect who announced how slow he was at work. He missed the fact that it was a homage to the Situationists. My second card read:

Ivan Hernandez Quintela Improvising like Mcgiver

By then my father knew I was not only playing, I was playing with all seriousness. LUDENS specialises in educational spaces and public spaces, always testing strategies to get communities involved, not only in the design process but also in the construction process, embracing tactics that would allow users and participants to manipulate and adjust the existing infrastructure. To me, architecture should be at most a sort of scaffolding awaiting appropriation.

A couple of years ago I received a grant from the Mexican government to explore playgrounds as fields of engagement, arenas of participation and spaces for the imagination.

I drew twelve game boards as if they were floor plans for different playgrounds for Mexico City. The boards are not to be interpreted as literal architectural floor plans but more as open musical compositions, in the spirit of John Cage, where each interpreter, architect or urban planner, would approach it only as a diagram of spatial parameters and potential engagement dynamics. In addition, I drew four kit-of-parts installations to activate each game board. They serve as a tool box, as tools of engagement or as inhabitable toys.

Each drawing was drawn on a 21 x 21 cm piece of paper. I imagine the sum of the drawings would generate a set of cards; each drawing, even though belonging to a particular research theme, could be shuffled amongst drawings of other themes to create an infinite set of arrangements for designing playgrounds. Any combination of the cards could provoke an interesting and unimagined game board. As John Cage had once done with a musical notation by throwing river stones over a piece of paper, one is meant to use the drawings as an open tool, selecting cards that might intrigue and discarding the ones that might bore.

The drawings can be used as Tarot cards, each designer giving to them their own interpretation. They are meant to play with the design process to come up, each, with their own version of an open game board that once constructed, can be manipulated and appropriated by different communities of Homo Ludens £

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

A series of examples of inhabitable toys that LUDENS has developed for different events:

1 Magnetic Bench — a series of seats connected by oscillating axes allows people to come together on one side but inevitably make people on the other side come apart so a sort of negotiation needs to take place within the participants.

2 Unstable Disc — a concrete plate has a small curvature on its base to allow for small oscillations.

3 Plane with Stops installation — taking the game of plane, where one jumps from one edge of the plane to the other, to the extreme, a multitude of interlaced planes allows for one to change directions if other participants are on their way.

4 3D Twister installation — taking the twister game to an extreme, three boards of dots are placed in the three different axes, x y and z, to force participant to get into much more complicated body positions.

all images Ivan Hernandez Quintela

magnetic playground

To be pulled in or pulled out, to gather with a lot more people or to find a little private spot within the crowd: this playground is all about distance, about attraction and opposition. Each movement is related to another movement. Each movement has spatial consequences. As you move closer to one element another moves farther apart. It is a matter of selection, negotiation and compromise.

The playground is organised on three axes, each containing an architectural element on each edge: a theatre stage, a viewing platform, a shaded roof, a picnic area, a play area and a meditation area, all on wheels, capable of rotating on their axes. The ground has three areas with different textures: a circular pond, a gravel spot and a grass field.

The scenarios can change, one can find oneself having a picnic over the pond, or observing kids play, or meditating next to a performance. There is no perfect scenario, one move affects the conditions of another scenario. The playground itself becomes an ever-changing theatre, an adaptable performance, a kinetic event.

Each area has the capacity to change within itself. A theatre expands and contracts as more people participate in it. A picnic area lifts up and down its seats as people begin to occupy it. A bench pulls people together while pulling others apart.

all images Ivan Hernandez Quintela

musical playground

There is no more primitive way of play than to make sound. Whether making sound with the body or with things, sound seems to penetrate us and make us vibrate. The musical playground is drawn as a musical composition. A grid sets conditions of space. Several giant instruments are located precisely within the grid, but their sound invades other spaces, creating areas of silence, areas of harmony and areas of cacophony.

The giant instruments are inspired by instruments of wind, percussion and strings, but here the body itself is the performer. One is required to enter entirely into the instrument to generate sound, finding oneself immersed in sound. The trick is that you are not the only one playing, other participants will affect the soundscape, so let’s hope some sort of coordination takes place, but if not, there is always the possibility to enter one of the sound cabins, where one plays with one’s echo, or listens to a stranger’s secrets.

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

all images Ivan Hernandez Quintela

observation

Not all play is active. There are moments of contemplative play, where the world unfolds in front of your eyes, and how that world is framed is part of the pleasure. The Observation Points gameboard is about framing, about where one stands in relation to one’s context. How much of one’s context one sees also stimulates the imagination.

The installations within the game board are inhabitable lenses, to see farther, to focus the view, to see from above, to see things in movement, to put attention on details. It is as much about what is shown as to what is not shown. It is about taking position. It is about a point of view.

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

all images Ivan Hernandez Quintela

topographic playground

Thinking back to the greatest of pleasures as a kid I remember running over land, whether it was a forest, a beach or just a plain field. Any obstacle, a fallen tree trunk, a pool of water or a big rock was a perfect excuse to put one’s athleticism to the test. With that in mind, I imagined a playground made of earth, of earth moved to create all kinds of topographical conditions: a mound to climb, a slope to slide over, a crater to hide in, a plateau to look over. Any difference in the topography could become an opportunity to jump, climb, slide, hide, sit, overlook. Play is in the movement through the field, in the attempt to conquer territory.

The topographical Playground is organized on a grid of nine sections. Each section contains a particular topographical condition: a hill, a plateau, a trench, a crater, a dune, a cave and so on and on. One could rearrange the grid in any order, creating different trajectories and challenges. The playground becomes a landscape; the landscape becomes a playing field.

The drawings for this playground are organised in strips with particular topographical conditions in sections, so one can create a unique film of territorial challenges.

Within each module, elements of play can be integrated. For example, a hill could be equipped with a slide to go down from it or have a tunnel to cross it from above or from below. A lake could have skipping stones to cross it or a trampoline to fly over it.

The game board could also work with density: how much of an element is condensed and how the lack of density – the void – becomes an opportunity for discovery, for gathering. Imagine yourself in a deep forest and the relief one gets when finally finding an opening. Or the opposite, the pleasure of hiding behind a density of obstacles that make you hard to find.

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

all images Ivan Hernandez Quintela

treehouse playground

The childhood pleasure of climbing a tree: an obstacle, an adventure, an escape, a new perspective, a nature embrace. Going up, a challenge. Staying up, a moment of rest. Going down, an impulsive jump. The Tree House Playground is a series of climbs, a series of platforms and a multitude of views.

Each tree house has its own dynamics of climbing and of positioning in relation to its surrounding landscape. It would be good if there are trees amongst the playground but it is not absolutely necessary. The installations themselves are climbable structures. They are suspended rooms, rooms in the air. Some are tight, some are extensive, some are introverted and some are collective. But at the end, the main purpose is just to climb up and climb down, to just see one’s surrounding from another perspective.

Ivan Hernandez Quintela

IVAN HERNANDEZ QUINTELA is an architect in Mexico City.

all images Ivan Hernandez Quintela

nest and branch a manual for play amidst rapid change

AMRA ALAGIC, LARA KUROSKY and LEA DYKSTRA

In proposing a tactical design scheme for a neighbourhood in Tirana, Albania, we purposely kept it simple. For us, it is not a design project in the sense of creating a final product, but rather a blueprint to strengthen an already self-sufficient community dealing with displacement and urban change. We have called our project Nest and Branch, because the proposal starts in Njësia Bashkiake Nr. 9 and reaches out to other parts of the city. The name recognises the main building blocks of our tool-kit: eggs and poles. Working with a 73-acre site, we want to have identifiable forms which visually connect all its different parts. Our inflatable forms, eggs, are used for seating and makeshift shapes for play, while the poles provide structure for demountable installations. Other materials in our toolkit are found around the site. All these forms and materials are part of a design manual aimed at fostering collective action within the community of Njësia Bashkiake Nr. 9. The toolkit shows residents how to combine objects such as poles, inflatable forms, crates, fabric and pallets to make play bars, installations and even impermanent shelters.

The Nest and Branch scheme considers social and political structures at play within the site. The national government plans to completely redesign Njësia Bashkiake Nr. 9 under the Tirana 2030 masterplan, led by Stefano Boeri Architetti. The designs released to the public so far have conflicting values. Some highlight the transformation of the land to a forest while others only include mid-rise block neighbourhoods. The only thing they all have in common is keeping the community uninformed, and softening their voices to implement projects. Demolitions are occurring throughout the city to make way for the idealistic masterplan. The conflicting nature of the designs shown to the public paired with significant demolitions, such as the removal of the Albanian National Theatre, has triggered protests advocating for conservation.

Our approach is rooted in community-led initiatives as a way to counteract the top-down changes taking place in the city. Playfulness and childlike enjoyment is at the forefront of the Nest and Branch project, offering residents a retreat from the political intensity of the city.

Problem: The boulevard adjacent to Njësia Bashkiake Nr. 9, running north-south from the city’s centre, is one of the first redesigns to take place within the city for Tirana 2030. A useful network of streets and housing has already been demolished, breaking links within the community. The boulevard, unfinished and leading to nowhere in particular, is partially used. The construction of new luxury apartment buildings within the housing district has also begun. This construction has encroached onto public space bringing dust, noise and unaffordable replacements to the existing housing supply.

Proposal: Inspired by the work of Claude Cormier et Associés, Nest and Branch uses a tool-kit of public installations to help invigorate the neighbourhood. We propose dividing the site into four sections: the Transit Market, the Park and Plaza, the Living Meadow, and Upper Commons. These zones use the spaces inbetween construction and housing.

The site is open and next to the boulevard. Zones from north to south: Upper Commons, Living Meadow, Park and Plaza, community garden, fruit farm, maker’s space, and the market.

Alagic Dykstra Kurosky

1. The Transit Market consists of four symbiotic areas: market, maker’s space, fruit farm and community garden. We suggest that the existing market be replaced with an easily disassembled configuration that connects to the new boulevard. It will be a cyclical network within the housing district, enabling residents to collaborate, share and sell assets. It will leverage common activities found within the district, such as gardening, sorting, collecting and farming. The Transit Market imagines different tool-kit combinations to shape spaces that bring common household activities to a communal level.

The new boulevard is a few metres higher than the entrance to the existing market, providing no feasible entry from above. This market is designed to begin at the height of the new boulevard and step down gradually with the natural slope of the site.

2. The Park and Plaza will be the main gathering space for the community. Nest and Branch proposes different configurations for different activities in this area. With the toolkit residents can tailor their surroundings to suit their needs, whether it’s a space for play, performance or shelter. This area also thinks of how the community can encroach on surrounding construction, allowing residents to take back space that is no longer designated for them.

Current conditions on the site area, as well as in the neighbouring communities were assessed to provide inspiration for the tool kit.

3. The Living Meadow expands and tests the user’s senses. This area consists of an abundance of wildflowers, a raised walkway to make apparent the change in textures from earth to walkway to sidewalk, and hanging chairs to protect from noise or to invite kinder sounds.The largest area of the site, the meadow creates space for plants to grow and animals to roam, although future and planned construction will undoubtedly change the ways these animals can continue to safely roam. Simple tools such as posts and tethers can support the continuation of urban agriculture in this space. They can also double as play structures.

Vegetated channels slow stormwater runoff and treat dirty water with plants and soil. The raised walkway aims to make the interaction with the ground intentional.

4. The Upper Commons: much of Albania lies within an EU-designated High Seismic Hazard zone. The last significant earthquake was in 2019 with a magnitude of 6.4, thirty-four kilometres northwest of Tirana. Hundreds of buildings partially or completely collapsed, and thousands of people were living in temporary accommodations. Considering how emergency housing might exist on site, we propose temporary housing based on a modular kit of posts, poles quickly assembled. This is a scaled-up toolkit, conceptually similar to the open space toolkit elsewhere on the site. Iinstead of master plans in all their rigidity, the redevelopment of any city could be framed by zones and toolkits.

The conceptual house module kit includes materials for an 18 square metre shelter. The materials consist of poles acting as beams and posts, wall panels, a floor panel, a sheet of corrugated metal, and tires. Tires are used for stairs and the foundation as they can absorb seismic vibrations.

Alagic Dykstra Kurosky

Locals have forged their own paths on the ground through consistent use; none of these were eliminated within our proposal. Most of the high-rise apartments in the western portion of the site began construction in late 2020.

1. Transit Market

2. The Living Meadow

3. Upper Commons

At its core, Nest and Branch rethinks how community needs can be addressed through concepts of play contrary to the conventional approach of singular problem-solution thinking. The concept of play within Nest and Branch can be thought of in two ways. Firstly, as the adaptability of tool-kit combinations to evolve, and secondly as the manual’s ability to bring enjoyment and fun into everyday life. £

AMRA ALAGIC recently earned her BArch, Carleton University. She previously worked as a designresearcher at Collective Domain, a practice for spatial analysis, urban activism, architecture and media in the public interest.

LE AH DYKSTRA , recent Bachelor of Architecture, is currently pursuing a Master of Urban and Regional Planning at Queen’s University. Her current research interests focus on temporality in urban design.

LARA KUROSKY, B Arch, currently works as a Landscape Technician at Architecture 49. She is passionate about understanding the city landscape and its impact on our social systems.

play in three acts

AURORE MAREN

Cast of characters:

Narrator

Three children, siblings: Claira (5) , Thomas (7), and Syblle, (4)

Their grandfather David (86)

Landscape Architect

Act 1

Summer, on a wide sandy beach somewhere in the far Pacific Northwest.

Narrator: Play is a highly evolved sense, and engages a most essential human emotion, Joy. The conversation between the two, play and joy, may create a feeling sense of peace or equanimity.

Claira squats on the sand and draws a heart shape then backs up, moving her hands back and forth cupping a string of hearts in the sand.

Thomas takes a clam shell and fills it with water from the tide and pours the water along the line of one of the hearts.

Syblle runs and jumps over the string of hearts — like jumping rope, she skips back and forth, back and forth….

David, who has been watching the sun dance on the waves, turns to see his grandchildren playing. A smile runs across his face and he whispers a prayer to himself, ‘may the peace created by my grandchildren’s joy spread across these ocean waves.’

Act 2

Early winter, in an open field, once a cow pasture: an aspen grove singing on one side, tufts of yellow tall grass, blackberry bramble and wild rose, scarlet in the fog and sun. Ten poplars hold an arc, various spruce and fir stand as points, marking time.

Narrator: Light is nature’s play. In any creation of space, the play of light, defines the space, gives it its breadth, its depths and height. Light is a dancer; its movement, its presence, its absence is choreographed by time.

Landscape Architect: To create spaces in this field, I must watch Light, the dancer, move through the seasons beginning in winter, thus I may notice the unfolding of spring’s new growth. My shears and clippers and mowing will articulate this movement. I wish to experience in my body, as I walk through this field, a similar wandering path as of that dancer, sunlight. There will be shade and shadow on the vertical and the horizontal. There will be enclosure and opening, solids and voids. There will be places of movement and rest. This is my play, I am joyful here, always.

Act 3

Late autumn, falling quietly, sometimes quickly. Yellow leaves of aspen and alder shroud the grass turned green again after rain. Aspen’s white marbled trunks show a wall, solid, comforting, embracing, holding back the bitter winds. An eagle and a hawk are clearly outlined against the sky; summer’s leaves no longer disguise them.

Narrator: Anticipation is the Play of autumn: summer ends and winter is not yet. Light is more dramatic in its change of movement from shadowed clouds to soft tender fogs, to shafts of sharpened light through barren tree branches.

Thomas pushes a soccer ball through the leaves with his feet, sometimes kicking up a swirl of yellow and gold along with the ball. Claira walks slowly and bends down to pick up a leaf and then another, fingering each leaf carefully and placing them back to back, then spreading them like a fan in her hand.

Syblle runs through the leaves kicking them with her tiny boots until, oops, upside down she falls, laughing she makes her fall into a somersault, leaves flutter everywhere.

David sees the eagle and the hawk, and puts up his right thumb and forefinger to the sky to measure how far apart they might be. He places his left hand on his heart, sighs and smiles.

Narrator: And so ends our little Play. Please make yours as big as your imagination can hold, never cast a cross eye upon it, for play wilts under criticism….

Take your play by the hand and infuse it with your joy. Rest in the memory of it. Let its peace be your pillow, of dreams.

The brilliant and gentle spirit, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, OC, LLD, FCSLA, BCSLA, FASLA, once said about designing for play, ‘All you need is a pile of sand, a pile of dirt and a pail.’

‘The act of play must resonate from within. Play is a pure act of the imagination on the wild.’

Wilding she called it!

— from my conversations with Cornelia

AURORE MOURSUND MAREN

studied English literature in Colorado and Oxford, landscape architecture at Cornell, and clinical social work at Columbia. From an island in the Salish Sea, she travels mostly by boat, does landscape projects, independent clinical social work and tends the inner and outer light of place in words, gardens, paintings and glassworks.

Aurore Maren

BMX Supercross Legacy Track

CAROL KLEINFELDT, KMA Architects

When the 2015 Toronto Pan Am/ Para Pan Am Legacy Track request for proposals for this project was issued, our team thought, ‘what a great opportunity to work on a large scale, sculptured landscape project!, and then thought ‘we have never done anything like this and it will be a real reach for us’, which was the best reason we could think of to try.

This is play in architecture.

When we had the good fortune to be awarded the project, we began our intense research and discussions with those who understood the international sport of BMX Racing and began designing, as a team, one of the most rewarding experiences of our firm’s history. This is a playground structure at an exaggerated scale that suits the large Regional park and the team of clients, architects, engineers, landscape architects, earthwork professionals, contractor, builders and BMX riders. The clock was running down and the game was on!

KMA Inc

KMA Inc

The BMX Supercross Track is difficult to categorise. It is an object in a landscape and a landscape in its own right. It is a structure within a park that accommodates the park’s storage needs, two permanent start ramps for BMX Supercross events, one at 10 metres high and the other at 5m, a permanent, concrete and steel screened structure and a 517m ephemeral dirt track. It has a board-formed retaining wall over 27m long and ranging from 0.5 to 6m high. The track has been certified by Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) certification board and as such the only track in Canada, at the time, to be recognised.

The site of the track (determined prior to the design team being engaged) in Toronto’s Centennial Park was quickly found to be at a low point of the park and its drainage catchment area was enormous. More fun for the team! Building a dirt track in essentially a catchment area required an extensive underground drainage system, influencing structural and civil engineering interventions. These flows had to be managed to allow the track to be dry within 30 minutes of a rainfall, one of the criteria for BMX competitions, and the water quality had to satisfy the requirements of the Toronto Region Conservation Authority as a designated wetland area lies immediately to the south of the site.

Start gates, at 5m and 10m.

all images: Scott Norsworthy

While the drawings, drainage and detailing of the track are precise and unique, the built features were created in a very low-tech manner, like a soap box racing car. Off-the-shelf, various diameter, galvanised hollow metal tubes used to complete the structure’s roofing separation, partitions and safety barriers, gave us the advantages of a light-weight, inexpensive and readily available local material which is highly durable, maintenance free and aesthetically acceptable to the intended user group. The tubes create an everchanging shadow on the concrete surfaces and appear as a lantern at night, marking the location and subtly bringing life to the landscape and assisting the safety for night riders.The anti-climbing barrier at the end of the retaining wall, designed like a dinosaur’s tail. plays a tune when the wind blows.

The various concrete forms were simply made in a process known for centuries. Earth jumps and banked turns were created by talented bobcat artist/ operators with intimate knowledge of Supercross racing requirements and standards. They are able to read the crest placement of the jumps along the track on the section drawings and finesse these to capture the exact height of each peak and the depth width of each valley between them. Racing activity in rain, snow, compaction, etc. affects the track so that it requires constant maintenance, like many large sport venues. It is very much a living architecture.

The aesthetics of concrete allowed the practical considerations of storage, ramp heights and retaining wall sections to be expressed as individual architectural elements within a single structure. Board-formed concrete, prefinished concrete block and the smooth-faced framing members of the Starting Gates add to the distinct language of each element – at once separate and unified. These elements will age to become a naturalised feature in keeping with the site.

This playground/sculpture/structure is intended to bring excitement, comradery and fun to fans and participants of all ages and backgrounds as well as being an elegant representation of architectural play and team work. The huge prize for everyone was the Gold Medal winning ride by Canadian Tory Nyhaug who went on to become a worldrenowned BMX Champion. £

High Start: galvanised hollow tubing used in roof, partitions and safety barriers

all images: Scott Norsworthy

Project Information

2015 Pan Am and Para Pan Am GamesBMX Supercross Legacy Track

Centennial Park, Toronto, Ontario

Building area: 575m2 built form; 2.55 ha. site area

Budget: $4,012,924.00

Date completed: 2015

Client: City of Toronto

Architect: Kleinfeldt Mychajlowycz Architects Inc.

Carol Kleinfeldt – Partner in Charge

Team members from KMA: Carol Kleinfeldt, Roman Mychajlowycz, Gerald Lambers, Chris Torres

Consultants:

Structural: Halsall Associates (WSP)

Electrical: Smith & Andersen

Landscape: Arium Design Group

Contractor: Gateman Milloy Inc

Specialist Consultants:

Elite Trax Inc. (Track Design Consultant), EMC Group (Civil Engineering)

Photographer: Scott Norsworthy

Board -formed retaining wall and climbing deterent with wind chime. Starting gates of galvanised tube at the top.

South elevatio: concrete climbing barrier/retaining wall, cooncrete block panel and framing members.

South elevation detail

Finish line: crests and valleys of the jumps are variable, affected by weather: therein lies the calculation and the challenge for the riders.

Tory Nyhaug at the finish line.

CAROL KLEINFELDT, B Arch, MOAA, MAAA (retired), FRAIC, LEED AP, is principal of Kleinfeldt Mychajlowycz Architects in Toronto.

all images: Scott Norsworthy

gamechangers

TIM INGLEBY

In Homo Ludens (Man the Player)1 the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga identifies the following five characteristics of play: it is free, it is not ordinary or real life, it is distinct from ordinary life in locality and duration, it creates order, it is connected with no material interest, and from it no profit can be gained.

play is free

Central to Huizinga’s first point is that play is never a task, rather, it is done at leisure in one’s free time. Although the making of architecture is often a task that impinges upon one’s free time, the open-ended and non-linear nature of it offers some liberty and agency in its undertaking.

The influential nineteenth century educator Friedrich Froebel thought play to be of central importance to learning, as the spontaneous expression of thought and feeling. Play as the source of all that can benefit the child is never trivial; it is serious and deeply significant. A Froebel education offers gifts and occupations, including building blocks of increasingly complex geometry. Frank Lloyd Wright was educated in the Froebel training system; Robert McCarter finds the qualities of Froebel’s ‘gifts’ in the formal and spatial invention and compositions of Wright’s works, not least his Prairie houses. 2 Wright perhaps never really stopped playing, using play as a way of serving his own purposes as much as those of his clients.

In a definition of play that is both a simplification and amplification of Huizinga, Brian Upton states ‘play is free movement within a system of constraints’. 3 Froebel likewise acknowledged that while freedom to try things out is an important aspect of creativity and symbolic representation, so too is the tension that exists between freedom and constraint. In architecture the tempering of the purely aesthetic impulse by briefs, clients, site and a host of other constraints, though limiting, is ultimately valuable and does not preclude the act of creating architecture from being play.

For Huizinga dance, poetry and music may all be derived wholly from play but he is more circumspect regarding the plastic arts. When it comes to architecture Huizinga deems his hypothesis ‘flatly absurd, because there the aesthetic impulse is far from being the dominant one’. I challenge this assertion in the belief that under certain conditions play can be a powerful force in the creation of architecture. Here, I offer one of my own projects (or playtimes), Forest Cinema, a modest open-air cinema made by a small gang of friends, from scavenged and salvaged materials.

play is not ordinary or real life

The capacity for architecture to transcend the ordinary is never greater than in the mind or on the drawing board, and no more so than when designs are conceived with little or no intention of being built. The sublime was the intention of E L Boullée and C N Ledoux, and their contemporaries J-J Lequeu and A L T Vaudoyer. Many of their projects were never realised; few were intended to be. Those by Boullée in particular are polemical; their impossibility emboldened him further. In his 1783 Museum for Paris, Cenotaph for Isaac Newton of 1784 and his 1785 Bibliothèque du Roi, the abstract classical forms, exaggerated scale and repetition of architectural elements en masse that characterise his architecture – all extraordinary qualities at the time – could only emerge by leaving real life behind. This then is play at work.

Huizinga recognises that ‘the consciousness of play being ‘only a pretend’ does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture’. Some of the emergent characteristics in Boullée’s designs for the public library and the museum, new building types of the eighteenth century, are today typological tropes that reveal the potency of how, in Huizinga’s terms, play can turn to seriousness and seriousness to play.

Play is also distinct from ordinary life in locality and duration. All play requires a playground, a ‘temporary world within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart’ within which ‘special rules obtain’ in Huizinga’s words. For the architect, our minds, drawing boards, workshops and occasionally the construction site, provide places in which, while occupied, the state of play is maintained.

1 Huizinga, Johan. Homo ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949

2 McCarter, Robert. Frank Lloyd Wright. London: Phaidon, 2007

3 Upton, Brian. The aesthetic of play. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2015

Tim Ingleby

The worlds within worlds in these playgrounds are subject to many special rules that establish game-like conditions. Publications such as Vitruvius’ 30-20BC De architectura, Alberti’s 1452 De re aedificatoria, Ruskin’s 1849 The Seven Lamps of Architecture and Le Corbusier’s 1948 Le Modulor

can be read as manuals or guides that record and codify rules governing wide-ranging conditions including scale, proportion, composition and superposition. Though such guides may aim to be comprehensive, it takes more than reading and understanding them to become an active player in this game. The creation of architecture has much in common with folk games: our understanding of how to engage with it is transmitted by word of mouth, example and practice. Games historian David Parlett talks of how the most basic level of experience of folk games is ‘that the rules are something inherent in the game itself, or more accurately since a game is essentially a mode of behaviour, an abstraction existing in the minds of all its players.’ 4 In such games, as in architecture, there is no single definitive version, but instead multiple local variations, the rules of which are carried individually but broadly accord with others, creating a shared understanding.

play creates order

Tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, enchantment, captivation, rhythm, harmony. These words, carefully chosen by Huizinga, describe the beauty of play. Do they not also perfectly capture the aspirations and qualities of architecture? What phrase could better describe the conception of architecture as his of play –‘Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection’?

play has no material interest, nor profit

This is the least elaborated characteristic in Homo Ludens, perhaps because it seems so self-explanatory. This is deceptive. The architectural profession has multiple forms of practice from which no profit is gained but this does not make projects undertaken pro-bono, speculatively, or for competitions, de facto vehicles for play. Projects undertaken for oneself in one’s own free time and relieved of duties of care to others, may be more conducive situations for play. The extreme example of a house by Neil Minuk for his own family springs to mind. Awarded the inaugural AVL Prize for Pigheaded Artists (prize: one polyester trophy and €7,000 cash) the 2003 building was commended for being ‘a dangerous house because it jeopardises peoples’ safety to create an experientially rich and aesthetically-pure environment”. 5

Just as professionalised sports, e-gaming and casino games provide avenues by which players can materially benefit, so too is this possible with architecture. The mechanism for this is age-old and encountered also in dance, poetry and music: patronage. Architects situated at the vanguard of a movement, and/or who might be considered à la mode, are well-positioned. Emil Kaufman carefully recounts how Boullée,

4 Parlett, David. ‘Rules OK or Hoyle on troubled waters’, Board Game Studies Conference 2005, Oxford UK. 2005

5 AVL Prize for Pigheaded Artists. www.e-flux.com/ announcements/42939/avl-prize-for-pigheaded-artists/ Acc31/10/2023

Ledoux and Lequeu each benefitted from patronage, leading to groundbreaking creations ranging from the bold to the sumptuous often in opposition to their patrons’ tastes and requirements, but nevertheless indulged.6

forest cinema

On an idle summer’s day three friends and I decided to make a cinema in a nearby forest. Intended for nobody other than ourselves, this was no commercial enterprise, more the sort of den-building activity my childhood never yielded. We set about using a pile of found and reclaimed materials that included a length of burlap cloth salvaged from a playtime experiment on a nearby lake a previous winter.

Huizinga defines play as

‘a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and the consciousness that its different from ordinary life’.

It thereby develops movement, freedom, rules and boundaries.

The salvaged materials were our game pieces, which needed to be moved for there is no play to be had in staring at a static pile of materials.

To move pieces in a predetermined way is also not play: the absence of a fixed plan required improvisation that gave freedom to our movements.

This freedom was not limitless however, our agreed goal was to make a cinema and the conditions required for this (the need for a screen, lines of sight, etc.) created a tacit set of rules that prevented our movements from being aimless.

The constraints imposed upon us by our materials, the forest, fading daylight and gravity, created a set of boundaries and limited our game’s duration.

This game is repeatable and, depending upon the players, materials and location, each time the moves and outcome will be different yet, in their own way, capable of achieving a temporary limited perfection by imposing order on the chaotic constraints of a site. Forest Cinema offers a manual to this end.

rulebreakers

While playing our game, various challenges presented themselves that changed the game state. Positioning our makeshift screen we encountered a young sapling. The screen might easily have been brought forward or the sapling (temporarily) bent behind it, yet we did neither and allowed it to partly-obscure the screen. Huizinga writes of play as ‘stepping out of real life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition of its own’ echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s sentiment of ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’.7

6 Kaufman, Emil. ‘Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol 42, Part 3, 1952

7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria: Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford, 1985

We experience this state of being through books, plays, films, and other art forms which immerse us fully. The buildings in which we commonly encounter these arts have become increasingly deferential to them — white box galleries and black-box theatres are often neutral to the point of being anodyne. Even the lavish interiors of the Opéra Garnier or the Bolshoi Theatre are left behind when the lights go down. I remain unconvinced of the necessity of this. In our cinema, the forest’s presence was inescapable: the rustling leaves and swaying branches compromised audio and picture quality alike. Our chosen film was average at best and yet paradoxically real life felt ever more distant.

A sapling which pushed up and out through the mosquito net roof calls to mind Sverre Fehn’s 1962 Nordic Pavilion or Lacaton and Vassal’s 1998 Cap Ferret House. This was intentional; the imitative instinct is a strong aspect of play theory. By actively compromising our view, the architectural allusion that came most strongly to my own mind was Peter Eisenman’s 1975 House VI. This house in Cornwall, Connecticut is (in)famous for what Eisenman called its ‘unassimilable idiosyncrasies’.8 These include a non-structural column that sits at the dining table like an uninvited guest, and a slot window that continues across the floor, consigning the married owners to separate beds.

Client accounts of House VI ’s conception speak of an engaging and collaborative process in which they were active participants.9 Their indulgence of the architect and his uncompromising design paints them equally as patrons and players in this game. The idiosyncrasies of House VI cause the architecture to constantly exert its presence on the occupants, challenging them to adapt to the house rather than the house to them. Within the building, everyday activities are registered but assume extraordinary qualities precisely because in Eisenman’s playworld conventional norms of real life are left behind.

Such knowing mistreatment of columns, solids and voids defy unwritten but commonly accepted rules of architectural composition. Although the term cardboard architecture coined by Eisenman may suggest levity, his work nevertheless observes the constraints of budget, program, site, building and zoning codes, technology and the laws of nature. The axonometric drawings that describe the various processes and transformations clearly express that an underlying logic and order remains. Such liberty within a system of constraints is not so far removed from Wright’s play-like process of volumetric composition of platonic forms, consciously or otherwise informed by Froebel’s gifts.

forest cinema rules

1 Choose a pair of mature trees no further apart than the length of the ratchet line used to join them.

2 Walk a few feet and repeat: ensure each line is broadly parallel and their heights gradually descend.

8 Eisenman Architects. House VI ,1975. www.eisenmanarchitects.com/House-VI-1975 accessed 31 /10/ 2023

9 Frank, Suzanne Shulof, Kenneth Frampton. Peter Eisenman’s House VI: the client’s response. New York, Whitney Library of Design, 1994

3 Drape a continuous length of fabric over the ratchet lines, stitch around the ratchet line to hold in place, forming a giant tiered hammock.

4 Hang a bedsheet taut between two trees at the lowest end to form a screen.

5 Suspend a tarp from the highest line to form a back wall - if long enough run beneath the hammock and join to the bottom of the bedsheet, to make a floor.

6 Run lengths of rope between trees along each long edge – one at high-level, one at low.

7 Wrap mosquito netting or similar around and across ropes to form walls and roof.

8 Attach netting to tarp/bedsheet with clothes pegs to form (almost) an insect-proof enclosure.

Huizinga deems that one who trespasses against the rules or ignores them completely is a spoilsport — a type who robs play of its illusion must be cast out for the threat they pose to the play community and for the risk they might cause the playworld to collapse. Such a charge could be levelled at Eisenman for the way he broke rules, that that had hitherto governed the creation of architecture, by free movement within a system of constraints. Huizinga writes that heretics or outcasts may at times go on to form their own community, governed by their own rules. We recognise this in the group known as the New York Five with Eisenman at its centre, or the grouping of Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu two centuries earlier.

Far from their transgressions causing the play-world to collapse, they instead gave architecture different forms, parallel yet distinct from what came before. They attracted patronage, acolytes desiring to join them, copycats imitating them and further heretics who themselves break away. The cycle is thus repeated resulting in the multiplicity of architectural movements that abound today. In this reading of architecture as a game that is played, so-called rulebreakers have the potential to be revolutionaries, and spoilsports to become gamechangers. £

All constructions and photography by Team HILL:

Hockett / Ingleby / Lawes / Leeson

TIM INGLEBY is an architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Northumbria University. He is interested in how things are made, what they are made of, and why we should care about such.

joy as an act of resistance

HARRISON LANE

The idea of joy, the feeling of joy, and the experiences with it are something I am deeply interested in and I have a feeling that you all might be, too. I also have this feeling that as we are wading through it all — the wake of the pandemic, major social injustices, the world on fire, my dog peed on the carpet, am I killing all the bees by not having wildflower gardens? Oh no, is there lactose in this? — it has become difficult to remain, or even want to be, joy-full. Joy, fun, play, or even laughter are almost punk rock in their defiance of the weight of all other issues we collectively and individually shoulder. So, my leather jacket-metal stud-teenage angst-loud music-sweeping bangsesque response to this feeling is: What does joy look like while it resists? When it defies convention, plays with archetypes, and has fun with an idea? The answer lies in the things that make me happy: imagining, drawing and building. Here, I want to understand joy through a series of pointed questions about what joy even is, then rendered through the conduit of resistance to explore how it can manifest or come to be understood physically through built works.

what happens when you feel joy?

When people experience joy, a symphony of physiological responses occurs which radiate out through the body. Exactly which area of the brain is difficult to point to, there might be a few actually, but we all know what it feels like, right? Our hearts beat faster, we start to sweat, and our faces flush revealing rosy cheeks to the world. It might be at times a little embarrassing, but our bodies can often reveal how we’re feeling: our central nervous system signals our brain that what we’re experiencing is joyful. The brain responds to the effect of Tom Cruise in the 1988 cinematic masterpiece, Cocktail, releasing a mixture of endorphins, dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin into the rest of the body, changing the cardiovascular and circulatory systems, hence the flush as your heart rate increases, even the perception of temperature within the fingers.

If this all sounds rather lovey-dovey, that’s definitely because it is. Oxytocin is associated with the deep and highly soughtafter sensation we call love. Released when breastfeeding, while in labour, engaging in romantic activity, oxytocin is relatively new to the evolutionary drink list of hormonal responses and is thought to have been developed to remedy a myriad of survival and reproductive challenges. A flurry of wellness and nature-supportive websites regale the public that it is thought to even be released while hugging a tree, with the scientific world more hesitant to agree. Despite this, the benefits of being in nature are undeniable and Canadian healthcare professionals nationwide are seeing what it’s all about, with over 10,000 of them actually prescribing nature to help what ails you, including stress and anxiety disorders.

thinking happy thoughts

Being in nature is important, barring that hugging a tree might make you fall in love, but it can help soothe sometimes debilitating conditions. We owe these new or unconventional treatments to research in a continually diversifying field of psychology. It is impossible to research the field of happiness without at least mentioning Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky. A professor of psychology at University of California Riverside, she has authored numerous papers and books regarding happiness, ways to achieve it and ways to keep it. She was also the first to posit the happiness pie chart, where she discovered that 50% of someone’s overall long-term happiness is inherited, and circumstantial influences like salary account for only 10%. The remaining 40% is what we can actively change, like committing to a goal, expressing gratitude, practicing acts of kindness, all categorised in the intentional activity section. But what about people who don’t need much help with the hard stuff? Resiliency, a word I kind of loathe, is critical in enduring the times between the high points. Overall, individuals who demonstrate greater resilience will be more active in the cognitive control area of the prefrontal cortex and less so in areas associated with processing emotions. So how do you foster it? Can you really learn to be resilient? The answer is: sort of, yeah. It takes a bit of work, can be difficult to achieve if you’ve got a lifetime of hardship; however, the building of resilience is totally accessible. Number one is having a strong support network around you for when you stumble. It doesn’t necessarily need to be family, it can also be a chosen family or some combination of the two. This, and several other criteria like physical activity, selflessness, and mindfulness basically ensure that a person will be and remain resilient.

Conveniently, the same criteria may also lend well to longevity. Currently, there are five locations around the globe identified for a seemingly miraculous effect on the length of life. Known as blue zones, people of vastly different cultural and economic backgrounds live way longer, happier lives than most other places due to interpersonal connections and a healthy (ish) lifestyle (I say -ish because in the Netflix mini-series Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones, a particularly honest centenarian reveals that the tea linked to her long life was in fact her family’s recipe for wine). Interestingly, these Blue Zones are hyper-focused and cannot be examined at a regional scale, but at that of the city, village or island. Beyond strong interpersonal connections, blue zone people have a continued purpose even if no longer working (though some just seemingly don’t stop and terms like work seem inappropriate in place of vocation or raison d’etre), and sustained physical activity.

One response to joy which I haven’t mentioned yet might be the most recognisable one: laughter. While the cliché ‘laughter is the best medicine’ does hold some merit to beneficial mental health outcomes, it is also examined closely by sociologists and psychoanalysts alike. Laughter of course is generally the response to something humorous. Two main theories of humour, superiority and incongruity, differ slightly, however their overarching ideals are that within a joke a winner and loser exist (superiority), and that for something to be humorous it must be incongruous (incongruity theory) in relation to an object or concept. Laughter is the result of this incongruity.

but who’s thought a lot about jo y?

Now, a shift from the physical effects of joy to the metaphysical concepts of joy through an extensive skimming of philosophical thought of the people who think and write extensively on the subject of human existence, happiness and attaining it.

Although philosophers have been grouped according to commonalities of their observed views, while some are aligned geographically like Plato and Aristotle, the mind map’s organisation is primarily thematic. Overall, Transcendentalist thought paired well with several Daoists, and overall spirituality hugged the perimeter of Buddha, Rumi and even Emerson (who was particularly prickly in terms of placement and I am neither satisfied nor happy about where he ended up). Marx, Durkheim, and Adam Smith are by no means shockingly grouped, as they all held that a real Protestant work ethic would result in pure joy. The Bummer category holds Kant, Voltaire, Huxley and Nietsche all aligned in that joy is simply a fallacy. The shrug guy ¯\_( : J )_/¯ emoji section comprises individuals who seemingly can’t make up their minds and/or are the real mavericks in thinking and thus do not really align with anyone. Naturally, this section is what I most closely align with on a personal level. In the following section Kant, Camus, and Locke will be explained further.

Have I mentioned that I am a builder of sorts? Well, I am. It’s something I really enjoy doing and have come to find particular value in the flow state I enter while executing a project, which is in fact about a hundred thousand little puzzles and processes in part of a much larger goal. I wondered if I could synthesise or come to understand the complexities of the theories laid out in the psychology and philosophy section in greater detail through building. These meditative practices on joy garnered the names Weirdo 001-010, and are rendered thematically by colour according to philosophical interpretations (red), psychological (yellow), and humour (blue), i.e. weirdo 001, left. Of these weirdo interpretations, four have been physically constructed. In ideation, the weirdos as a whole were meant to challenge and resist conventional ways of building, either known by me or overall in the realm of woodworking and furniture design. To do so, a series of obstructions were laid out for each, which force innovative previously unforeseen opportunities. In essence, the obstructions disrupt and resist convention. Metaphorically, they’re meant to make me fumble around in a room I’ve never been in, desperately looking for the light switch, only for the lights to reveal a chair.

weirdo 003 was the first to be constructed and encapsulates the psychological theory of intentional activity, namely goal setting and to a lesser degree, mindfulness (through flow state). The goal-setting theme was then deployed for myself and the user, where the chair was to be made of found material exclusively, had to be finished within a single eight-hour period, and the occupant would be asked to balance for as long as possible which I believe to be either highly difficult, or bordering on damn near impossible.

The materials were gleaned from a neighbouring dumpster of the community-based woodshop (Ottawa City Woodshop) where I mostly work. Collecting usable material proved difficult however I set to work after approximately 30 minutes of rummaging. The seat and fulcrum were milled and glued first as they would require considerable gluing time to be viable. Flattening, trimming, and planing to desired and uniform thickness ran the clock down about 30 minutes as well, with gluing eating up another 15. The backrest and crest were then constructed in tandem, which of course meant more milling, trimming and flattening. The spindles of the backrest required extra thought and a somewhat creative solution to uniformity with the lathe as a natural option however, the speed at which I was moving led me to use a filleting bit and a router table. By this point, the seat had been resting for approximately one hour and could be dressed and cut to accept the fulcrum. To round the base of the fulcrum a lathe was used in a somewhat unconventional manner, a term known as off-axis turning which I will go into more detail when describing weirdo 010. I checked the clock and 55 minutes had passed totalling five hours. “What?! That can’t be right.” It is amazing how much time can hemorrhage away from you while changing blades, explaining to confused onlookers that this is a rocking chair and is about goal setting and joy, you’re desperately looking for glue, and cursing a forgotten pencil across the room. With the holes drilled to accept the backrest into the seat and into the crest, and the fulcrum sized appropriately to be laid into the base of the seat, I pre-sanded all components and then glued it all together. All in all, this chair took seven and a quarter hours to complete and the users of the chair adorned nothing but smiles despite falling drastically short of their goals. Success!

The following construction, weirdo 005b, examined John Locke’s belief that the pursuit of happiness is the foundation of true liberty and thus, happiness. Here, joy is interpreted as comfort while the canted-curved plane of the day bed invites the user to pursue it. Due to the proportions and ergonomics of the piece, only a short time of repose is found before a shift would be needed to regain comfort. To achieve a compound curvilinear form, kerf bending of oriented strand board (OSB) was chosen as the construction method, as I had never attempted it before. Of what I had seen and read, kerf bending is used with plywood, where the grain orientation of each layer rests perpendicular to the layer before it, allowing for equal strength longitudinally and transverse across the sheet. It is also generally used with uniform bends and I can honestly say, never with complex compound curvatures. OSB was chosen as the best material due to the ungovernable,

general mayhem of the grain direction, which was thought to allow for more complex curvatures. The kerfs were set at 12mm,  fanning to 50mm at the opposite side with a depth of approximately 9mm of the total 11.10mm sheets. Each sheet was then liberally coated with glue and a horrifyingly stressful duo of ratchet straps were used to pull into the desired form. In the past, my overindulgence of clamps has been noted and this was no exception, with about 15 all employed to calm my nerves and sustain required pressure to make sure this weirdo didn’t end up especially weird. After 24 hours, the clamps were removed and despite my suspicions, the form endured. Because of the varied modes of occupation I could imagine, and all that I couldn’t, the legs were set into the plane of the lounge at haphazard angles to suppress a myriad of force vectors someone might transfer while continually shifting, chasing the carrot of happiness on weirdo 005b

French philosopher Albert Camus, found within the shrug guy section, posits that the search for meaning can corrupt one’s chance at meaningful happiness. It is inherent to the human condition to seek this meaning within the universe however, only through an ongoing acceptance of absurdity can one find purpose and meaning and thus attain joy. For Camus, this vision of happiness can be described by imagining Sisyphus, doomed to forever roll his precious rock up a mountain, to be actually enjoying this absurd task. While I may not roll a rock up a mountain, I do continuously, almost feverishly sketch chair designs. Relegated to the margins of my notebooks, the crumpled napkins on flights, and sometimes even the surfaces of the desks on which I work, half-baked elevations of chairs can be found. I cannot stop doing this and only after reading Camus did I realize that the designs are all pretty similar. For weirdo 006b, the endless design I keep working out has finally been made. It is a Windsor chair, more specifically an American Windsor, my favourite and astonishingly difficult to make. The difficulty lies in the legs, which are turned by hand using a lathe. The tenons at the pinnacle of the leg, which are accepted by the seat, are conical and must be made exactly

the same angle and width as the others, as any difference in dimension will result in a leg too far up or too far down in the seat, compromising the structural integrity of the whole. For reasons unknown to myself now, I decided that at no point would I use a measuring device of any kind throughout the construction of a chair that requires almost surgical precision. It is clear to me now that I am a fool. Eyeballing everything, I attempted to match the angles and proportions of all four of the legs as best I could. The first leg is by far the easiest, but each subsequent leg leads to minor deviations which can completely derail the success of a chair. By the fourth leg, the pressure amounts to metric tonnes. Miraculously, they fit into the seat fairly well. The backrest spindles were constructed similarly to weirdo 003 and a router table. Emboldened by my success with the legs, my choice of drill bit versus the spindle diameter was about 1mm off resulting in some looseness. While the absurdity of designing and building a chair without a measuring device is certainly absurd, to really send it home all the effort and stress was for a chair that can’t be used because it is without a seat.

The last weirdo to be completed was weirdo 010 and it is representative of this Emanuel Kant quote: ‘Unfortunately, the notion of happiness is so indeterminate that although every human being wishes to attain it, yet he can never say definitely and consistently what it is that he really wishes and wills.’ 1 For Kant, happiness isn’t really there, mostly because we can’t define it for what it is. What a bummer. The results of this construction were then determined to be indeterminate, sort of. I devised a game which, by chance, would dictate what I made through off-axis turning on a lathe. Six intersecting lines at either end of a square piece of lumber were randomly assigned numbers by Michael Utley and Evan Kettler and would become corresponding positions between points on the lathe. Cards were then drawn which would dictate the position, causing the piece of lumber to swing closer and then farther away than the depth of cut by the chisel held by yours truly. In the end, the sculptural form was enjoyably made by chance, is objectively pleasing to look at (as determined by the fact that people keep offering to purchase it from me), and yet serves no real purpose and while they are sought after, I have also been asked multiple times what exactly they are.

Well, that’s it, so to speak. I am by no means a philosopher nor psychologist and these interpretations may prove to be really, really far off according to any authority on the subject or upon reflection some years down the line. Despite this likelihood, I embarked on this journey to synthesise these diverse perspectives and theories through tangible manifestations— enter the weirdos, to better understand what may be the most complex faculty of existence. In the end, as I reflect on the joy found in the creation of these unconventional, sometimes useless pieces, I am reminded that joy itself is somewhat of a weirdo; resilient, ever-evolving and pretty hard to define. It is in our acts of resistance, our pursuit of meaning amidst absurdity, and our willingness to embrace the unexpected that joy finds its most vibrant expressions. So, as we continue to navigate the complexities of life, let us carry with us the spirit of the weirdos—an ode to joy that resists, questions, and, above all, persists.

Long live the resistance. £

HARRISON LANE is a furniture designer, builder, and currently completing a Master’s thesis in architecture at Carleton University.  instagram: @hdslaneoh

1 McLaughlin, Jeff. ‘Immanuel Kant - On Moral Principles’ Jeff McLaughlin, editor. The Originals: Classic Readings in Western Philosophy. Kamloops/Victoria, BC: Thompson River University, 2017. pp, 276–77

calls articlesfor

www.onsitereview.ca/ callforarts for due dates and specifications

45:housing :: fall 2024

It is increasingly evident that health and lifespan are dependent on the quality of housing one is born into – a factor that one does not choose at birth, but which determines one’s future.

The present housing crisis across the world, whether in refugee populations or G7 cities, is a crisis that will play out over the next 70 years.

Clearly it is not only the materiality of housing, although that defines a complex of class and wealth signifiers from top to bottom. It is also access to housing of any sort that is at issue.

Something is preventing access: and there is a panoply of reasons: climate, race, family structure, gender, wealth, age, employment, accrued wealth, lack of accrued wealth, wages, investments, citizenship, language, religion, tradition — every social condition on the planet has aligned to determine access to housing.

At what scale should we, as architects, designers, urbanists, builders and thinkers, be thinking?

Which models offer a way forward?

Should we look back, laterally, or just keep ploughing on with what we have?

Social safety nets are underpinned by housing; should this relationship be changed?

Should we be looking at governments, institutions, corporations or the individual?

Who is getting it right?

Proposals please, by May 31, 2024

46:travel ::: spring 2025

Why do we travel? Is it to see new things? to rack up a gazillion photographs? to touch something elemental about unfamiliarity? to leave the quotidian behind for a while?

What, historically, did travel bring to architecture? Is there anything essentially imperialistic about travel?

What do studios abroad, obligatory offerings for any self-respecting architecture school, bring to the study of architecture?

Does travel always imply distance?

Is emigration travel or displacement? What does travel displace?

Peter Cook once titled a lecture: I travel to find what I already know. Is this the promise, or the danger, of travel?

Proposals please, by November 1, 2024

J S Lowry, Hillside in Wales, Abertillery, 1962.

Francis Towne, Castel Madama, above the River Aniene, near Tivoli. 1781

Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, Villa Lante, Italy, 1982

books and manifestos

from the indomitable muf:

Golden Lane Estate Play Space

muf was commissioned by the City of London to redesign an inaccessible and under-used sunken play area for under-5s contained within the Golden Lane Estate.

Adjacent to the Barbican Centre, Golden Lane is Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s first project. muf worked closely with pupils from the local Prior Western primary school in a collaborative exploration of how children play.

The newly designed play area provides wide array of play possibilities. The area contains  hiding places, a stage for impromptu performances, a geometrical climbing structure and slide.. All of these possibilities are spread across a multi-levelled urban rockery which contains rocks of various colours and textures, including a handful of reclaimed saddle stones.

muf.co.uk

muf.co.uk/portfolio/golden-lane-estate-play-space/

David

Malaud, Architects at Play.

Lausanne:INFOLIO Editions, 2023

https://www. librairievolume. fr/product/larchitecte-joueurdavid-malaud

The child who plays invents worlds of his own. L’architecture joueur, takes this metaphor seriously to theorise architectural creative processes based on the concept of play.

From architectural objects, imagined or constructed, chosen in the playful moment of the 1950s to 1980s which followed the collapse of the modern paradigm, Malaud’s research deploys four paradigmatic game worlds: labyrinths, theatres, constructions and strategies. New Babylon by Constant, Teatro del mondo by Aldo Rossi, Fun Palace by Cedric Price and World Game by Buckminster Fuller decipher four player postures and their creative techniques: the situation, the symbol, the diagram and the map, a matrix of four fundamental rules of the game.

Architects at Play, 2019-20: the result of research into play and the imagination, built experiments and mythological narratives. The exhibition, curated by David Maloud, brings together two characters: the architect and the child.

The exhibition is also a clear invitation for children to play, presenting several ways to do so: a slide, a sandbox, a rock to climb on, a tower to hide in, a small theatre. Through playing both children and their parents will grasp the exhibition’s content in a slightly different manner.

https://civa.brussels/fr/expos-events/ evenements

Pierre Antoine

ON SITE r e v i e w architecture and play

Metis: Mark Dorrian + Adrian Hawker, Lightbox drawings, 2024 Acetate prints, cut, folded, layered and photographed on an LED lighbox

METIS is the practice of Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker: http://metis-architecture.com

The lightbox drawings are part of a project to be exhibited in a83 gallery, New York. Mark and Adrian teach in ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh