AR Reading List 052: play

As the Play issue is announced this week (AR May 2021), this week’s reading list looks back at seven essays on places and practices of play from the archive. Play can be taken up as a doctrine, an interplay between different elements adopted as a central value in design, or its activities can be supported through architecture – in the spaces opened up to performance, to exploration, or to sport.

Vitruvius Ludens, AR March 1983, John Summerson
‘Stirling is essentially a great player – even something of a gambler – an architect cast more distinctly than most in the role of homo ludens. Architecture as play is a familiar idea.’

After Pokémon Go: How augmented reality is rewriting the city, AR online August 2016, Andrew Knott
‘The game becomes a tool for increasing footfall, for monitoring and manipulating players’ consumer habits. It’s certainly augmented some property prices’

Adventure playgrounds of the post-war era, AR September 2013, Barbara Penner
‘Kozlovsky notes that architects’ concern for children coincided with the “child-centredness” of the postwar welfare state, when the government was grappling with the impact of wartime measures like evacuations on traditional family structures’

Street urchin: Mothers’ House, Amsterdam, by Aldo van Eyck, AR March 1982, Peter Buchanan
‘Hence the irony that an architecture conceived of as humanly liberating, and founded on social concern, should ultimately be antisocial. Yet in being so it was perfectly matched to other social trends: to the flight into suburbia and the nuclear family; to the fragmentation of life into discrete roles played at different times in different places’

School buildings in Rosmuc and Inis Mór, Ireland, by Paul Dillon Architects, AR June 2019, Lisa Godson
‘In the resourceful spirit typical of the islands, Ó Culáin encouraged the growth of handball on Inis Mór. He has succeeded so well that the tiny school population of 56 now numbers four world champions among the students’

Bossa nova beat: the symbiosis between Brazilian architecture and music, AR October 2019, Guilherme Wisnik
‘Despite being a compulsive worker in his surrender to design, something to which his devoted experience in Brasília attests, Niemeyer vehemently rejects the image of the labourer. He thus invented a fictional ‘double’ of himself, who would always guide him towards beauty as a supreme value’

The pub music hall and the beginnings of British theatre, AR March 1949, Harold Scott
‘Tavern keepers have always had an eye to the amusement of their patrons, but effective entertainment, when not merely a question of convivial gatherings supplying their own, needs organization’