Workshop: Play> authority, limits and creativity

Play >
authority, limits, and creativity

Venue: Istanbul Technical University, Taskisla Campus,Taksim
Date: August 22 - 28, 2009
Moderator: Jeremy Voorhees, Temple University, Tyler School of Art, Dept. of Architecture

Where order reigns, well-being begins.
Le Corbusier

It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is one of compliance, the world and its details being recognized but only as something to be fitted in with or demanding adaptation… In a tantalizing way many individuals have experienced just enough of creative living to recognize that for most of their time they are living uncreatively, as if caught up in the creativity of someone else, or of a machine.
D.W. Winnicott


Objective
The objective of this workshop is to reconstitute the city as a field of play. Saturated with players, strategies, tactics, rules, laws, momentary and sustained advantages, the city sets up an arena of opportunity. Reframed as players, the citizens, tourists, and commuters are recast in architectural terms beyond the vague inhabitant. This population becomes less a group to discipline or entertain, and more a group to mobilize. The street corner becomes a place to hide. The hill in a park, a place to gain a clear vantage point. The material structure of the city becomes a scaffold to enact desires.
The space of games and the space of the city
The relationship between games and space is idyllic. Each line, each edge, every target, is both an expression of difference and a tool to vitalize those differences. As such, every demarcation in space corresponds directly to a difference in rules as well as a series of opportunities to exploit those differences. Players take up the space of the field actively coordinating, competing, and collaborating. Their awareness of space and each other is heightened to recognize both situations of patterned strategies and moments for opportunistic improvisation.
The elements and effects of these spaces are fundamentally architectural. However, the specificity and intensity of playing is not directly transferable from the explicitly organized, discrete spaces of games into the more diffuse, complex series of boundaries and meanings in the city. Lines and edges lose their intensity and recede. Targets are individual and fleeting. Players slide between anonymity and singularity. Playing, though, never fully disappears. Motives, though multiple, are not indecipherable. Players, though many, still take up the field. Rules, under the guise of law or social norms, still regulate activity.

Two Paradoxes of Playing

Two integral paradoxes appear at the very foundation of playing.
While play is recognized as an activity characterized by creativity and improvisation, it is also an activity specifically and unquestionably organized by rules. You may not touch the ball with your hands. You cannot pass the ball forwards. You must attempt a basket within 24 seconds of gaining possession of the ball. The assumption that we are more free and more creative in the absence of rules stands in stark contrast to the reality of playing. This paradox becomes the question, “What kinds of rules bias creativity and improvisation and what kinds of rules stifle and coerce?”
More surprisingly to architects, each change in space exactly corresponds to a difference in rules. Four players must stay behind the half-line. A basket is worth more points outside this arc. The ball must land in the opposing quadrant when served. Deriving from Foucault’s analysis of institutions and extending through Tschumi’s programmatic transgressions, the architectural assumption has been the less coincident activity and form are, the more capable we are of designing more engaging spaces. This paradox becomes the question, “What is an appropriate, and by extension designable, relationship between form and the logistics that govern them?”

These two paradoxes, between creativity and rules and between the coincidence of logistics and space, drive the investigations of this workshop. This seven day workshop will begin by analyzing the spaces of the city and documenting the relationship between physical attributes of space and the games we play in them. The second part of the workshop will involve designing a series of interventions in the city meant to facilitate, antagonize, and resituate the meaningful dimensions of playing.