22 minute read
play in wartime schoolscapes
DARINE CHOUEIRI
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 occurred in the lower parts of staircases, considered the safest in the apartment blocks. This practice 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.
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 delimited 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!’
1 Berg, Leila. Look at kids. Penguin Books, 1972. p 68
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
2 Ibid. p 44
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
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
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 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.
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
4 Unesco Digital Library. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000064848
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.
5 Caillois, Roger. Man, Play, and Games. Free Press of Glencoe, 1961, pp 9-10
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 Austro-Hungarian architectural heritage to the detriment of that of the Yugoslav socialist period, these are considered the non-aesthetic 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
7 ‘Rauschenberg Shifted Path of American Art’. All things Considered, NPR News: https://www.npr.org/templates/ story/story.php?storyId=90411572
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
8 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.’
postscript
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.
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.
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
Instagram: DarineChoueiri
