gamechangers

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

5 AVL Prize for Pigheaded Artists. www.e-flux.com/ announcements/42939/avl-prize-for-pigheaded-artists/ Acc31/10/2023. No longer, 05/03/2024, available. see www.e-flux.com

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, 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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.