Architecture and play: the structures of play, venues for play, landscapes of play, playing, drawing as play, accidental play that becomes serious.
ON SITE r e v i e w
architecture and play
44: 2024
ON SITE r e v i e w
On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.
44: 2024
F I E L D
play
N O T E S
For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at https://onsitereview.ca/contact-us
ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review . All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. Each individual essay and all the images therein are also the copyright of each author. these are listed in the website menu in three groupings: issues 5-16, 17-34 and 35-43 editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Kallen Printing, Calgary Alberta https://kallenprint.com subscriptions: libraries: EBSCO On-Site review #3371594 at www.ebsco.com individual: www.onsitereview.ca/subscribe This issue of On Site review was put together in Calgary on the Treaty 7 territory back issues: www.onsitereview.ca of the Kainai, Siksika, Piikani, Tsuut’ina and Stoney Nakoda First Nations; a territory which covers southern Alberta: 130,000km 2 , 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.
Alexa McCrady, Antennae. wood, vermiculite, flashe. 66 x 13 x 13” www.alexamaccrady.com
contents
Ruth Oldham and Emelie Queney Stephanie White Darine Choueiri
2 6 10 17 22 24 30 42 46 48 52 56
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
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
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
64
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.
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 in- between 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.
What is the relationship between architecture and play?
1
on site review 44 : 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.
2
on site review 44 : play ©
Oldham+Queney
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 time- wasting 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-facade- material/ accessed 12.01.2024
3
on site review 44 : play
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: making - talking - 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
4
on site review 44 : play ©
Oldham+Queney
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
5
on site review 44 : play
air mindedness
STEPHANIE WHITE; proposed by David Murray, and help from a host of Hemingways: Mistaya Hemingway, Enid Palmer and Guy Palmer drawings of a very young architect
all images courtesy of Mistaya Hemingway
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?
6
on site review 44 : play ©
Mistaya Hemingway
all images courtesy of Mistaya Hemingway
An anti-aircraft gun on the Isle of Sheppey, probably seen on the walk home from school.
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 Buitenhuis, Peter. The Great War of Words. British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 . Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987
7
on site review 44 : play
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. £
8
on site review 44 : play ©
Mistaya Hemingway
all images courtesy of 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
9
on site review 44 : play
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.
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.
10
on site review 44 : play ©
Darine Choueiri
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.
Darine Choueiri
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.
11
on site review 44 : play
Screenshots from You Tube movies by Smajo Kapetanović in the neighborhood of Dobrinja.
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.
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.
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.
12
on site review 44 : play ©
Darine Choueiri
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.
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 anti- humanistic programmatic city to create liveable environments in neighbourhood units with social, psycho-social and spiritual functions.
Amina Avdagić
The teacher’s route: a drawing by Amina Avdagić, 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 Pančirka, a bullet- proof 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-under- siege-an-interview/
13
on site review 44 : play
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
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 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
on site review 44 : play
14
©
Darine Choueiri
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 inter- generational 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 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. These operate at both the scale of the city and the scale of the neighbourhood punkt .
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
15
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting