on site review 44 : play

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 play- world 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. £

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.

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.

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on site review 44 : play

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