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...'

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

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.’

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

This idea of dialogue and combativeness makes me think of the Antepavilion 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.

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 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

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

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