12 minute read
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.
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.
A series of examples of inhabitable toys that LUDENS has developed for different events:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 is an architect in Mexico City.
