play ground
IVAN HERNANDEZ QUINTELA
A couple of years ago I received a grant from the Mexican government to explore playgrounds as fields of engagement, arenas of participation and spaces for the imagination. 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 . £
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:
I van 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.
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on site review 44 : play ©
Ivan Hernandez Quintela
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