In this installment of our current Coss-Talk outing — The Architecture Play, we talk with Kathryn Strand and the various forms and values of play and their value to Architecture today. 

The role 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. 

Parallel Play. Playing a game of Chutes and Ladders is not about winning or losing. It’s about parallel play. Flicking the spinner, moving your pawn, climbing and sliding along a finite game board with infinite possible outcomes. A structure without the benefit of agency or space for virtuosity. And yet for the youngest players, the fun of the game is never in having the luck to be the first to reach space 100. Instead, it is the misstep (the novice move) that transforms into opportunity—a way to put a spin on the rules and see new potentials by modifying the end goal—that makes the game worth playing. Individual agents moving without strategy or interaction, the field for resistance and exchange nevertheless multiplies. The objects of play transcend their goal use: A spinner is spun (again) for spinning sake. Chutes are climbed. Pawns take on a life of their own.

Why play if you can never win? The 5185 processors used by the machine learning AI AlphaGo Zero are now unbeatable, so accepting its challenge is an exercise in playing for the sake of play. On the flipside, could AlphaGo—with its agency dependent on the absolute clarity of explicitly stated rules—find novelty in Chutes and Ladders? While the rules of conduct for the real world are a less perfect, unfixed, and murky game, inventing new moves and building new knowledge alongside and beyond human awareness is massively parallel play.

In “Translations from Drawing to Building” (A.A. Files, 1986), Robin Evans sorts through scenarios for reframing the limits of architecture in response to issues with translation, ultimately arguing for work that sits between the abstract and corporeal. Parallel over alternate. “A tug of war works better between rugby teams than between opposed concepts or practices, yet this is the way we insist on playing games. I would like to avoid this partisanship, so much more effective in drowning out sense than articulating it.” But what games are worth playing? Beyond choosing teams, imagine a single rope splitting into an array of distinct, but interdependent threads. The goal of this sort of play is learning through charged exploration—fumbling and maneuvering to negotiate an expanding range of possibilities.

Working backward through Sociologist Mildred Parten’s continuum of social interaction in play provides a framework for considering its role in the creative process in architecture. This means not just fitting play into current modes of practice but finding ways that it may inform and shape new modes of thinking and making.

Cooperative Play. Negotiation and compromise push the boundaries of parallel play. Associations are formed and broken. Engaged in similar activities in the same place and at the same time, peers/colleagues/acquaintances work alongside one another—bantering back and forth, copying techniques and imitating maneuvers—without any coordinated effort. It is the identity, interests, and dexterity of the individual that moves the idea and puts a spin on the play; agency that separates the novice from the expert.

Between the designer and maker, cynicism and presuppositions abound. While the designer often naively speculates on possible material futures grounded in theory and aesthetics, the maker/fabricator is assumed to be wed solely to tool and performance limits. Yet in this purely partisan play, cynicism can, in fact, be revealing. The architectural project exists in the overlay of and transition between the accumulations of experiments in designing and making. Accepting no single result as the definitive solution, the introduction of each successive tool, technique, or collaborator is a device for tuning previous iterations—allowing them to resonate together and evoke new spatial opportunity. The play is a rapport that’s reciprocally constructed. It’s not just making the thing but making the thing that makes the thing.

Solitary Play. Cognitive and social theorists have only recently recognized the inherent complexity and value in Parten’s classification of the unsophisticated nature of solitary play. The base measures on her social continuum bely a sophisticated level of cognitive engagement. There are beauty and challenge in working alone. To sit in isolation, as the outside world falls away, is to open yourself to the heightened creativity of internal dialogue, altered experience, and flow state. In contemporary psychology, the negative schizotypal characteristics of over-inclusive thought and remote association are reframed as positive expressions of creative ideation and production. Here, Paul Rudolph’s Rapidograph pen pochè, individually formed in obsessive parallels as a constantly evolving stream of consciousness, becomes a window into the restorative and transcendent nature of solitary play. And now making the lines becomes making the code to make the lines—an endless array of computer-controlled drawing machines acting and adapting in parallel; sitting in Rudolph’s place. With line and thought mobilizing as operation, Parten’s continuum blends and assimilates, revealing an altogether different field for play.