Play and Architecture

* Doctoral research project *

Play is a voluntary situation of pleasure, creation, and free expenditure — the very antithesis of a secondary, separate activity that contains its own end. It constitutes an optimistic mode of existence, a complete, rich, and coherent organism, a space-time that exacerbates the human capacity to be free in one’s being, one’s relationship to the world, and one’s relationship to others.

What, then, can architecture and play have to do with one another?

Today, common architectural practice is reduced — sometimes to the point of absurdity — to managing a juxtaposition of different specialized fields of expertise, framed by technical and legislative concerns.

On the margins of conventional practice, however, a multitude of creative, committed, and original approaches are emerging, as if the force of human invention, so constrained on one side, inevitably develops on the other.

Considering play in its essence allows us to find it where it is not named — always alongside the free and creative human being.

Using this theme as a reading filter constitutes a critical starting point that makes it possible to uncover project situations in which the hierarchy between habitual values is abolished, social constructions are called into question, moments are experienced as ends rather than means, and knowledge gives way to the senses and the imagination.

What might characterize a playful architectural practice?

* the situation

Citing Huizinga, the Lettrist and Situationist movements appear to be the first to make explicit mention of play as a mode of action to be integrated into life, as an element that creates freedom. As early as 1955, they drew the link between play and architecture in Guy Debord’s article “architecture and play” in the bulletin Potlatch.

The deliberate establishment of a “situation” is what characterizes the approach of certain groups of contemporary architects. This particularity implies considering the project not as an end, an object, or even an image forming the lasting epilogue of a process, but as the support enabling a moment to be set in place. For these architects, it is a matter of observing the multiplicity of presents that an architecture is capable of generating, and of making use of them. The temporality of these architectures is, from this point of view, paramount — whether by placing emphasis on the precise moment of a project’s elaboration, or by limiting the lifespan of the architectural object. By freeing oneself from the weight of the durable, there is no longer any question of the habitual, of utility, of profitability, of the everyday, of constraints or reference points, but only of invention in the present moment.

What is at play in architecture considered as a support for lived instants?

* the joyful expenditure

Through their shared interest in the potlatch, the Situationists and Marcel Mauss draw the link between play and gift. The potlatch is a collective and festive celebration practiced in primitive societies of the northwest Americas, associated with a punctual moment of multiple exchanges, and taking place within a vast system of relations between social groups. For Mauss, the force of this practice lies in the fact that it is a relational system based on infinite exchanges, rather than a unilateral gift that enslaves the one who receives it.

A number of contemporary architectural practices employ the gift as a phase of a vast symbolic human exchange. They frequently originate from personal initiatives and are rarely remunerative for the practices involved. They can be considered as the optimistic beginning of the establishment of new human exchanges: an offered space-time, often festive, which would in turn generate a creative reaction. These architects become givers in the sense articulated by Mauss: not generous and disinterested, but rather in anticipation of a return and the continuation of an exchange.

What do these architects hope for, in the manner of the Letterists distributing their bulletin — precisely named Potlatch — free of charge, and expecting in return the reaction of readers and the formation of a revolutionary group?

*deconstruction/reinvention/subversion

The basis of a game requires the creation of new rules, at least momentarily. This invention is only possible through a detachment from pre-existing rules. Like Georges Bataille’s non-knowledge, Friedrich Nietzsche’s gay science, or Anne Cauquelin’s doxic practices, these architectural practices constitute means of positioning oneself within the world in a particular way, and allow for the deconstruction of the ease of habitual reasoning and the self-censorship of the imagination that follows from it. Various architects commit themselves to critiquing norms and limits, reclaiming them and diverting them by redistributing them in inventive ways.

How can the necessity of flexible, changing, and non-fixed rules be integrated into the constitution of an architectural project?