Play quote by shane clairborne

"Once, there was a small group of kids who decided to go to a park in the middle of the city, and dance and play, laugh and twirl. As they played in the park, they thought that maybe another child would pass by and see them. Maybe that child would think it looked fun and decided to join them. Then maybe another one would. Then maybe a business man would hear thm from his skyscraper. MAybe would look out the window. Maybe he would see them playing and lay down his papers and come down. Maybe they would teach him to dance. Then maybe another businessman would walk by a nostalgic man, and he would take off his tie, toss aside his briefcase and dance and play. Maybe the whole city would join the dance. Maybe even the world. Regardless.. they would enjoy the dance." Claiborne

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

PLAY!

Here is my literature review, written for an upcoming QUT research paper about Parkour and Architecture. In it the concepts of play and unregulated ludic activity are explored, and parkour is described as a highly accessable form of play that is very dependant upon the urban context. Existing research proposals which have not yet been conducted are then explored.

view it here...

...and then go outside and play in the street!

KNOT THEORY

Love it.. An archeo-mathematical view point of Dsankt's Urbex

mediating between messy emergence and ordered evolution

Venturi in 'learning from Las Vegas' writes that Italian architecture has the ability to mediate between the 'vitruvian and the banal', 'fine art and crude art...the contorni and the duomo, the portiere's laundry across the padrone's portone, ... See moresupercortemaggiore against the romanesque apse'. Venturi sounds dissapointed that '...naked children will never play in OUR fountains and I.M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66.'

Using Bachman's definitions of four types of emergence, I find it interesting to entertain the possibility of multple methods overlaid. Indeed, this will be inevitable as people comission different architects who consider emergence and it's effects on architectural design differently. A heteropia of emergence in action.

Venturi makes an interesting proposition... how can this be mediated, allowing for coherence in the urban milieu? If only there was a text called 'learning from Italy'...

I'm determined to read some Rossi at the suggestion of Riccardo Rizzali. I find his thoughts about monument interesting, presenting a very ordered 'type' which may also contain pointers from within a uniquely Italian context.


This mediation will probably play a significant role in my final year design.. I'm anxious to see what form it will take.

I'm also determined to read more Ruskin.

Being critical about emergence

Reading this chapter, I was able to put all the readings about emergence, complexity, evolutionary and adaptive discourses. I had been struggling for some clarity for a while.

A few months ago I wrote this article trying to lay out for myself the variety of different discourse. I had been criticised by peers when trying to converse about complexity and design, my peers finding it difficult to find consistency in the dialogue. I don't think it was necessarily my fault... it's just that the discourse suffers from a lack of criticality generally when it comes to what certain terms mean. evolution and emergence both have a variety of connotations and semiotic 'baggage' which accompanies them. THis makes critical discourse very difficult to engage in.

This article by Bachman allocates these discourses into four categories: wicked, messy, ordered and natural. ALthough this doesn't clear the discourse, it allows an alternative way of looking at the variety of materials which regard complexity and the built environment.

...Although I am sure that Christopher Alexander would take offence with being categorised as messy: it does make the dialogues of complexity a little easier to navigate.

microplexes - a study in emergent urbanism

I found this on emergenturbanism.net and found it very informative, drilling deep into potentials of interpreting emergent urbaism in the context of biology, social networking systems, and computer optimisation.

Discussing the work of Mathieu Helie:

Through this model Helie attempts to show how policy can reduce its predictive role in projecting growth through costly, speculative infrastructure investment, and reduce its organisational role in dictating precisely how growth occurs. The outcome, or so he claims, is sustainable growth based on dense urban form. It’s not without its complications however, as these kind of models are essentially behavioural models for planners and contain ideological statements about policy. They are also still simplistic.

But by building software models with these kind of growth rules, where policy acts like instructional DNA as opposed to the agent of a total, centralised vision, we can analyse how self-organisation can create urban environments with different connectivity properties to our contemporary cities and compare those differences.