Tuesday, November 2, 2010

PLAY in the CITY: Parkour and Architecture

As part of the coursework M.Arch program I was required to write a research paper.



I was motivated to explore ways in which emergent fringe activities take the urban initiative and use old space in new creative ways. I belived that these activities are very powerful creative forces within our cities... I just didn't know why...



Reading Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, i discovered a beautiful quote:
“…Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears,
even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their
rules absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and
everything conceals something else…Cities also
believe they are the work of the mind, or of chance, but
neither one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls.
You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy
wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of
yours…or the question it asks of you, forcing you to
answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx”

(Calvino 1974, p44)

These PLAY activities that we see emerging in the urban environment are powerful tools that reveal the desires and fears of urban actors. They reveal shortcomings and conflicts that arrise from our design, procurement and management practices, and they involve all urban players (public, commerce and governance) in a virtual space where these desires and fears can be iterated. The place of play.

So read it.. and then go off and run amok... but be conscious of what you are saying when you play, and be conscious of the dialogue that you are entering into, with both the architecture, and the other urban actors around you.'

Many thanks goes to Mirko Guaralda for his support and supervision this semester.

Peace