LUDIC SURVEYS OF NOWADAYS
EditorialFrancisco Moura Veiga
The relation between architecture and Play is a long standing one. Or, to be more precise, the relation between a certain approach to architectural design and the situationist understanding of Johann Huizinga’s work. After all, it is not by chance that Constant populates his New Babylon with Homo Ludens. But more recent developments have taken the potential of this relationship to a new level: the digital revolution. Games now permeate our lives in ways they hadn’t until the digital turn. Notions of play are intertwined with our daily affairs, imprinting specific ways of engaging–therefore envisioning–our interactions with our social and physical contexts. This inaugural issue of Territories of Play addresses with this new reality by posing the question: how can the mechanics of Play expand on how we understand and project our environment?
In his latest book (The Rules We Break, Princeton Architectural Press, 2022),
Erik Zimmermann touches three key points concerning this question:
To play is to explore possibilities, to test limits, to move beyond the functional and utilitarian and into the realm of the unexpected and inappropriate. Punk rock played with the conventions of how to make music. Political revolutions play with the established order. New ideas play with old ideas. In experiencing play, we are training ourselves to be flexible and creative. To be critical. To not just accept things as they are.
From it, one can easily infer that looking into Architecture through the lenses of Games and Play might allow us to move Architecture beyond the expected, to be flexible, and to foster criticality in ways which the discipline by itself is not able to do. Territories of Play puts this to the test.
A multitude of voices from the realms of Game Design, Architecture, from Sociology, and from Design are invited to a transdisciplinary discussion on Fun, on the common and the eccentric, touching pedagogy, politics, and games we all play: The columns of Anna Hentschel, Andri Gerber, David Malaud, and Johanna Pirker set the sound structure for the issues’ speculative construct. At the core of the issue stand the works developed by students of the D-ARCH in the scope of the Territories of Play seminar, in which they reframe Zurich according to the characteristics of their games of choice, from Go to mini-golf, Minecraft to Monopoly. An interview by Vanessa Grünig featuring Patrick Heiz and Ulrich Götz demonstrates that a zero-sum-game with Architecture and Game Design is indeed the best game one can play (full of Easter eggs). The essays by Marina Montresor, Marine de Dardel, and Steffen Hägele map out the present and the future of Voluptas’ endeavor into the wide-open world of Play. And René Bauer’s critical game disrupts the magazine game genre in a most political way.
All these pieces take the question posed by the issue and deconstruct it into further lines of inquiry. Though they boast copious amounts of learning opportunities, you should not expect definitive answers. What would be the fun in that?
Francisco Moura Veiga is an architect and an editor. He is a teaching and research assistant at the VOLUPTAS Chair at the ETH Zürich, where he is conducting his Doctoral Research Project on learning in architecture, as member of the Joint Doctoral Program of The Learning Sciences EPFL ETHZ. He is the principal of A Forschung, the founder of Publishing in Architecture and of CARTHA Magazine.