gamechangers
TIM INGLEBY
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.
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 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.
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.
1 Huizinga, Johan. Homo ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949 2 McCarter, Robert. Frank Lloyd Wright . London: Phaidon, 2007 3 Upton, Brian. The aesthetic of play. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2015
54
on site review 44 : play ©
Tim Ingleby
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting