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. 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 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 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. 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 6 Kaufman, Emil. ‘Three Revolutionary Architects, Boullée, Ledoux and Lequeu’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society , Vol 42, Part 3, 1952 7 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria: Samuel Taylor Coleridge . Oxford, 1985
4 Parlett, David. ‘Rules OK or Hoyle on troubled waters’, Board Game Studies Conference 2005, Oxford UK . 2005 5 AVL Prize for Pigheaded Artists. www.e-flux.com/ announcements/42939/avl-prize-for-pigheaded-artists/ Acc31/10/2023
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on site review 44 : play
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