The Playful City: From the 1960s Strive for Spontaneity to Today’s Space of Entertainment - Reading Notes
Article: “The Playful City: From the 1960s Strive for Spontaneity to Today’s Space of Entertainment” by Jorn Konijn
Work by the Eventstructure Research Group (ERG)
*My notes in italics
Quotes:
They witnessed the construction of a 30-metre long worm-shaped plastic object. Inside, the object seemed to host a smaller, also worm-shaped object, like a giant pillow … Curious but wary, the child entered the tube. There was not much to do inside, but it was fun to run around in there.
I like “there was not much to do inside” because, Im starting to believe, that when things don’t have obvious and prescribed uses, then they become much much more interesting and allow visitors the opportunity to transform those things/spaces as needed.
Besides public squares, the objects were also installed on lakes, on the city’s canals, and in the public transport system.
Omni-present open eded urban structures!
Constructing situations
In the late 1950s, the Situationists developed a programme for radically transforming not only the art world, but all of contemporary everyday life.
Art, according to the Situationists, had become no more than commodity fetishism, so they focused their efforts on the physical city as related to by its inhabitants: the street and the building.
[The Situationists believed] all boundaries between public and private, work and leisure must be removed
The notion of play was a key element in their approach toward achieving this goal. Play should flow spontaneously from the desires of each individual, so that finally there would be no sense of boredom, and no distinction between moments of play and non-play (work). Rather, play and everyday life would move naturally from one to the other in such a way that their separateness would finally disappear in a rich and poetic stream – in other words, play and work would become one.
What would this look like?
Behind this seeming playfulness, the Situationists had a genuinely “ambitious desire to actually change the world, to disentangle a world trapped by its obsession with capital and consumerism.”
The architectural type according to which their ideas were ultimately shaped was the labyrinth. The labyrinth encourages spatial disorientation and confusion with its complexity, and thus opposes the kind of openness and transparency advocated by early modernists such as Le Corbusier. In the labyrinth, each space, each passageway, each thoroughfare, is directed as much toward chance and surprise as it is toward action and progress.
Love this idea!
The Situationists had two main objectives. First, they wished to transform the experiential nature of the modern city from one of boredom to one of play. Second, they aimed to restructure modern aesthetic experience by rejecting functionalism. To them, functionalism privileged transparency over opacity, the static and “rational” separation of spaces (domestic, commercial, traffic, etc.) over forms favouring complex, dynamic relations between different functions (such as the labyrinth).
This was a direct critique of functionalist modern architecture which the group considered disrespectful to “the whim of individual people”. It was architecture that “you are just living in” rather than architecture that is “your product and something that is directly in conversation with you”. What the ERG proposed through their simple, straightforward actions, was an architecture of constant transformation.
Half a century later, the same ideas developed by the Eventstructure Research Group now provide the theme for the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 International Venice Architecture Biennale: work, body, leisure.
While the aim of the Situationists was actually to transform work into play, in such a way that work, play and the body eventually would become one.
Lookup:
Constant Nieuwenhuys
And Artists who made “happenings” or The Situationists
Brickhill Museumplein, Amsterdam (1969)
Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 International Venice Architecture Biennale: work, body, leisure
Ant Farm & Hippie Modernism Exhibition at The Walker
Thank you to Dana or Arnab! I can’t remember which of you shares this article.
Photos from Article:
“Pneutube”, Frederiksplein, Amsterdam (1969)
“Brickhill”, Museumplein, Amsterdam (1969)