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
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on site review 44 : play
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