This text places the element of play at the center of the public experience. Rather than considering play as something that happens only in children playgrounds and parks, play forms an integral aspect of public activity in the urban realm. Drawing from the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga’s 1938 publication “Homo Ludens” and the Situationists International, I propose play as an indispensable element of human existence. Focused on play, architecture moves beyond the creation of functional space, making way for elements that are not directly productive or useful. Instead, architecture becomes the delineation of a field in which play can happen, a field of possibilities, unpredictable developments, dynamic relationships between players and the space in which they operate. The field of possibilities forms a landscape in which architecture becomes a moment that depends on the player’s action. The field as a design tool becomes the platform for a public experience impregnated with elements of play. Within the field, objects become stimulators for playful interactions: folies, movable parts, changing spatial arrangements, unpredictable appropriations of open space etc.

The pursuit of playful public spaces as a basic category of urban life attempts to move beyond immediate public needs and at the same time offers the users the option to modify, adjust to specific desires, create intimate public spaces, and re-arrange on demand, lessening the gap between formal public space and informal daily life.

STOP: Play before culture

¨In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (We Go Round and Round at Night and Are Consumed by Fire), the ancient Latin palindrome and the title of a movie by Situationist International’s leader Guy Debord exemplifies how play can be found in ancient witnesses of culture. Going one step further, Johan Huizinga’s states that play is older than culture and precedes it. Ancient forms of play can be found in palindromes and labyrinths but also beyond human life among animals, using play to practice tactics of survival. As Huizinga notes “animals play just like men” and play is part of nature, an indispensable utility to practice skills and dedicate time for activities beyond the immediate. Huizinga’s theory renames the homo sapiens (knowing man) to homo ludens (playing man), and thereby postulates that play is primary to and a necessary condition of the generation of culture. According to Huizinga, play is not part of ordinary life, both in locality and duration, meaning that it takes place in a specifically designated field, with a certain timespan and with a defined set of rules. By avoiding material interest, play ‘suspends’ rules of daily life to be a parallel world free from real life burdens.  As opposed to battle fields, play fields remain friendly. One of the important aspects of play is that it creates a simulacrum, a field that mimics reality but that at the same time places itself outside of reality, either through a physical field, like in sports games, or through mental fields, like in textual or graphic games. This makes play an important suspect when searching for public experiences that allow people to stop, take a break from the routine, participate in unpredictable encounters. Architecture thereby becomes an infrastructure of limits and possibilities, a stimulating field that suspends immediate needs and releases opportunities for play.

PAUSE: Play as alternative

Play has been seen often as an escape from reality. Nevertheless, play can be seen as a tool, as en element that supports reality, and adds value to urban life. Founded in 1957, the Situationist International, a group of European avant-garde artists and intellectuals, abolished any distinction between play and seriousness, between art and daily life. Against the utilitarian society, the situationists placed the ludic society, reacting to the functionalist spatial organization that had been produced by modernism. In developing tools for alternative spatial arrangements, Guy Debord, an important figure in the situationist movement, referred to a map by the urban sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, tracing the daily movements of a young Parisian woman over the course of a year.  The map revealed the figure of an almost perfect triangle between the woman’s residence, her piano class and school. In reaction to this very rationalist organization of space, the situationists developed the theory of the dérive. The group of artists and intellectuals would meet in a Parisian café and start drifting around the city according to the rules of ambience, the path of least resistance, and the appealing or repelling character of certain places. As Libero Andreotti describes, “This entailed ‘a playful-constructive behavior’ focused on the effects of the urban environment on the feelings and emotions of individuals. Through the derive one developed a critical awareness of the ludic potential of urban spaces and their capacity to generate new desires.”[1] As an alternative for designing cities that search for the shortest distance between A and B, they proposed the labyrinth as a spatial configuration that seeks the longest distance between A and B, sometimes even never reaching B. The situationist artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys took this thought a step further and proposed the dynamic labyrinth, as opposed to the static or classic labyrinth where there is a destination in the center. In the dynamic labyrinth, spatial configurations, start- and endpoints can be changed by the users themselves, aiming at ultimate creativity in moving through and collectively producing space.

A significant historic reference are the over 700 postwar playgrounds designed by Dutch architect Aldo Van Eyck in Amsterdam, placing play at the center of townplanning, again used by Van Eyck as a critique to the functionalist tendency to overlook the human scale. In contemporary urban planning, functionalism may have been abandoned, yet pausing for a second in thinking about the design of public space still seems very much needed. Play may become a tool to create an environment that offers an alternative to a directly useful or productive space. Spatial arrangements and street furniture that can serve multiple uses, that are not necessarily useful, and can form the infrastructure for a space that is not necessarily representative of a predefined social hierarchy. The space becomes complete only after the intervention of its audience, interacting, changing, improving the code of an “open source” environment. Play also becomes an alternative design tool for involving users in defining the program of their public environment (such as the public spaces designed by Danish architects MUTOPIA). Introducing play as an inherent component of public space reduces the intimidating effect of monumental public space and creates spaces where users are no longer visitors but indispensable participants.

PLAY: Play as public experience

Play as an activity that takes place in the urban realm completes the public experience. As in Brueghel’s 1560 medieval painting of children games, without play, the space between buildings has no meaning. Simulacrum and reality are interdependent. Vice versa, once the disconnection between simulated space and real space is complete, the Las-Vegas type of virtual play space renders the public experience useless. In an urban space inspired by play, the public in all its variety and its playful activities completes the space. Rather than a visitor, the public is an integral part of the city. Public space becomes interactive, stimulating, creative, dynamic, and at times unpredictable.

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[1] Andreotti, Libero, “Introduction: The Urban Politics of the Internationale Situationniste,” Situationists, Art, Politics, Urbanism, Xavier Costa, Libero Andreotti, M. Bandini, T. Levin, T. McDonough, G. Agamben, Barcelona: ACTAR, 1997. p20

Els Verbakel is a founding partner of Derman Verbakel Architecture, a lecturer in architecture at Technion Institute of Technology and currently pursuing a PhD in Architecture at Princeton University. Els obtained a Masters in Civil Engineering and Architecture from the University of Leuven (Belgium, 1999), a Postgraduate in Urban Design from the Polytechnic Institute of Catalunya (Barcelona, 2000) and a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University (New York, 2001).