In this 9th installment of our ongoing series Cross-Talk, we are looking at the role of Play in Architecture and how it might find its way to a naive and revitalized foundation for disciplinary foundations. 

The mission of Archinect’s series Cross-Talk is to bring forward the positive aspects of the polemic and allow for the resulting conflict to bring to life an otherwise still and comfortable climate of creativity—if there can be one. Cross-Talk attempts—if to only say that it did—to allow text the freedom that the image has accepted and embraced. Cross-Talk attempts to force the no, to contradict itself, to anger, to please and then anger again, if only to force a stance, to pull out the position of the self, of the discipline and of the hour as a means to begin and maintain conversations moving forward. 

Play-Play-Play-Play-Play-Play-Play-Play. Even the most meaningful words waver under the repetitive mental subvocalization performed by the reader, or the stuttering song of utterances if read aloud. The illusion of confidence steadily fades as letters carefully graze the imagined tongue, faster and slower; gentle muscular convulsions accompanied by visual flashes. Scenic fragments weave an unstable fabric of what may be associated with ‘play’: young children fumbling with blocks of wood or trademarked forms of plastic, adolescents throwing or kicking inflated objects to each other, adults engaging in consensual acts of pleasure, actors triggering extreme emotions on stage, dogs frolicking in the park, birds fluttering their colorful plumage in a mating dance, Pac-Man eating his way through a maze of pixels, chess pieces tipping over on black-and-white checkered boards, a shiny roulette ball losing momentum in a spinning wheel, models conceived of experimental materials, or technologies tested to improve buildings and the lives of their dwellers…

Processed as either verb or noun, ‘play,’ despite its numerous instantiations, never obscures the most crucial aspect inherent to all of its forms and shades: a raw potential whose explorative drive pushes the states of being and knowledge, as well as the preexistent boundaries of the physical and metaphysical environment, in a constant effort to derive value from play. Intimately entwined, play has thus accompanied scientific progress since before the Enlightenment.

The Architecture Play, a collaborative project conceived with these oscillating definitions in mind, similarly traces the ludic elements of the architectural discipline while projecting the potentialities of play beyond its preconceived limits. In four acts—a nod to its theatrical definition—the project constructs a complex ecology of actors and networks, of things and thoughts exchanged, transformed, and assembled to probe new avenues for pedagogy, practice, history, and theory of architecture; not simply transgressing boundaries but moving them altogether.

Act One, or ‘The Roundtable,’ took form as an initial discussion between the curators and organizers Ivan Bernal, Anthony Morey, and Clemens Finkelstein together with the key panelists Kathryn Strand, Taraneh Meshkani, and Jon Yoder at the Kent State College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED) on November 9, 2018. The public event, far from a seamless choreography, unfurled as an open discussion with the audience—composed of faculty and students—in an attempt to begin fuse incongruous sets of subjective rules into a common objective. These ‘rules of play’—meant to be followed or broken (is cheating not an integral albeit negatively connoted part of play)—are catalytic frameworks that facilitate the roll out of The Architecture Play’s subsequent phases and will be sharpened and disseminated following Act Two.

The illusion of confidence steadily fades as letters carefully graze the imagined tongue, faster and slower; gentle muscular convulsions accompanied by visual flashes. 

Act Two, or ‘The Symposium,’ will take place at Kent CAED in April 2019. Including the original cast of Act One, the playbill will be extended to include a group of invited collaborators that further the networks of play, enriching the speculative substance by engaging the topics of History/Theory, Practice, Project, and Pedagogy.

Act Three, or ‘The Game,’ will exponentially widen the spiral of participators of The Architecture Play by providing a platform for individuals or groups that exceed the confined laboratory formed by The Roundtable and The Symposium. An open CFP (Call for Play) during Summer 2019 will collect all investigatory contributions—objects, buildings, artifacts, narratives, films, games, stage plays, soundtracks, VR, texts, etc.—by players from within and outside the circle of organizers to form the final act of The Architecture Play.

Act Four, split in two segments, ‘The Exhibition’ and ‘The Documentation,’ will respectively showcase the game play and its artifactual and theoretical productions in a twinned exhibition at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum in Los Angeles and at the Armstrong Gallery at Kent CAED during the following year, followed by a publication that combines the rule book, game play, and supplemental historical and theoretical contextualization, charted for release in Fall 2020.

Not unlike other plays or games, The Architecture Play will be accompanied by a number of parallel explorations in various media formats, including editorials such as this Cross Talk segment for Archinect, and will become part of the initial players’ studio and seminar teaching, curatorial explorations, and include, by chance, various commentators, articles, etc. Nonetheless transcending the ecology of chance, ‘play’ engages a multitude of dimensions that cannot and should not be confined by categories of ‘failure’ or ‘success,’ intention or side effect, as infamously proves the case of the 17th century French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal, whose experimental endeavor to create a perpetual motion machine, although unsuccessful, is claimed to have laid the foundation for the game of roulette in the 18th century.

Integral part of culture and society, as Johan Huizinga proclaimed in his seminal Homo Ludens (1938), ‘play’ drives the generation and progress of culture as a “civilizing function” that has always already transcended the human to include animals and now, in the 21st century, widened its frame to comprise other posthuman beings and artificial intelligences we ought to engage. The focus on ‘play’ within the formation of the modern subject and modern architecture does not come as a surprise. Whether Aldo van Eyck, who designed hundreds of playgrounds between 1947 and 1978, Constant (Nieuwenhuys), who explored ‘play’ as an element of critical urbanism—Mark Wigley would term this “the hyper-architecture of desire”—or other members of the Situationist International like Guy Debord, for whom the “playful man” became the paradigm of the postindustrial society and the Situationists themselves crucial in “preparing the ludic possibilities to come,” the ultimately onto-epistemological process became intelligibly fused to ‘the architecture play’ of the 20th century.

Two decades after Huizinga, Roger Caillois further explored the types of play in Man, Play and Games (1958) in an effort to define its oscillating nature and aid in its activation for design and philosophical thought. Distinguishing four types—competition (agôn), chance (alea), simulation (mimicry), and vertigo (ilinx)—ranking from the highest degree of play, paidia (chaos), to the lowest, ludus (order), he sketched a stratified topography that is simultaneously unreal, unpredictable, and uninhibited. Bernhard Suits’s utopian fiction The Grasshopper (1978), another two decades, now after Caillois, and in response to the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had claimed the indefinable nature of ‘game’ in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), likewise emphasized the problem-solving capabilities of ‘play’ by conceiving of it as a speculative space-time-continuum in which obstacles may be overcome and subsequently implemented in ‘reality.’

The Architecture Play continues this line of exploration in the beginning of the 21st century. Firmly invested in the process as much as the outcome, the project proposes a new methodology of play as an integral part of disciplinary inquiry. Shedding its negative connotations, pulling the middle finger towards skeptics ridiculing ‘play’ naïvely as unserious or unproductive, the collaborative project means to call the bluff of canonicity as a constant draining of architecture’s evolutionary potential.

Taking position in this disciplinary mesh, the five contributions to this Cross-Talk series will each formulate their individual approaches to the initial set-up of the architectural exploration of ‘play’ as a catalyst for direct implementation in their respective roles as pedagogues and practitioners. Whether answering to accusations of disciplinary isolationism, advocating for innovative technological, curatorial, or theoretical shifts, contributors will pursue the topics of History/Theory, Practice, Project, and Pedagogy by allying their thoughts or by positing further provocations—the rules are still being written.

Readying their tool kit, which ranges from witty criticism to institutional politics, Anthony Morey and Ivan Bernal will push each other’s practical and pedagogical approaches to architecture and ‘play’ in a dialectical ping-pong match—their paddles shrinking while the game’s surface emerges more clearly with every blow. Synthesizing experimental playfulness from her studio teaching and architectural practice, Kathryn Strand performs a dive into the choreography of architectural environments, carving the mediating potential of architectural representation firmly into the fragmented ground she explores between tradition as established practice and speculation. Jon Yoder negotiates the historical and theoretical dimensions of ludic Modernism(s), activating the agency of media and technologically enhanced senses in providing generative impulses for contemporary architectural practice. Zooming in on communication within the complex network of urban spatiality, the parallel realities of social media, and new territorial manifestations of data in the 21st century, Taraneh Meshkani entwines space and time of play into a landscape of chance.

These fragments of inquiry by no means form a complete or smooth object of discourse. On the contrary, meant to raise diverging points and trace the rupturing voids between them, their voices are meant to draw attention to the multitude of forms and means of play and inspire new players to join The Architecture Play.