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Architecture and Planning: It’s All Fun and Games

December 29th, 2008

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As I work on wrapping up my end-of-the year, I have a handful of links that deserve commentary, but get a structured dump in the interest of making things neat:

Cities as as systems/games and systems literacy
Thinking in systems can help us make better games, of course. But can thinking about cities as games help us make better games?

Cities are systems, or rather, many systems that interconnect. Like buildings, they can be thought of as having layers, each changing at its own pace. If those layers are loosely coupled, the city — like the building — can adapt.

Recently, new urban layers/systems have started to emerge. They are made up of rapidly proliferating computing power, carried by people and embedded in the environment, used to access vast amounts of data.

At the same time, games have given rise to a new form of literacy —systemic literacy. However, to date, players have mostly inhabited the systems that make up games. They can read them. Writing, on the other hand, is another matter. True systemic literacy means being able tochange the systems you inhabit.

True read/write systemic literacy can be used to craft games, yes. But it can also be used to see that many other problems and challenges in daily life are systemic ones.

Speculative Modeling

Here the author asks a very good question about our need for authenticity in hobby models. His solution is proposed as a project:

A few things collided in my head a while ago:

* How much I like model railway lay-outs (a lot)

* A wondering about why model railway lay-outs always evoke the past - rarely the future

Be sure to follow the blog to keep up to date on the project status, dubbed Lyddle End 2050, or check the tag lyddleend2050 on Delicious or Flickr .

Reflexive Architecture in Second Life

Second Life might be getting a little long in the tooth. Still, productive prototypers continue to find uses for the world. In this case, mocking up smart materials that provide a responsive program give a glimpse into the potential beauty, and visual clutter, of the new modern building of tomorrow.

Original Sin
The New York Times, a little late to the party perhaps, recaps how architects use SL to prototype play and peddle their wares.

Dubai
When it comes to architecture and fun, you have to keep tabs on Dubai. A review of a recent book on the city state underlines the book's subtitle–"The vulnerability of success".

Gamespace
A collection of papers and the outline of a dissertation in development, all situated in the intersection of games and architecture and focused on spatiality.

And, as always, take a look at the Delicious blog roll. I keep that up to date with promising links of relevant interest.

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Architects Just Wanna Have Fun

December 19th, 2008

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I can only imagine what kind of wild parties star architects throw. At least, they give the impression of having a really good time with their amusing structures designed to mask their obvious playfulness with somber theorizing and mannered justifications.

Still, I figure the vast rank and file of environmental designers dream about weird, wild and kooky structures. They just don't get as many obvious chances to express them.

This is the conclusion I come to when thinking about things like the Google SketchUp Gingerbread House Design Competition. On first glance, this is just a bit of seasonal good cheer and some sly marketing fun put on by Google to get its SketchUp community to try some new things. Likewise, this little competition with no prizes touches the exact point I want to make, namely that inside every architect is a child that wants to play with design and make something unabashedly fun.

And Google is not alone in mashing up the architectural competition with holiday food models. Offbeathomes.com (a very eclectic and cool architectural blog I recently stumbled across), has its own portfolio of notable gingerbread homes and points to Bake for a Change , eco-friendly gingerbread house builds .

Now if we could only get the housing industry to put so much creative effort and joy into the production of actual fun domiciles!

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Unusual Buildings

December 9th, 2008

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Call them follies, flights of fancy or simply playful disruptions of more staid architectural design. Whatever the label, people continue to build idosynchratic structures that manage to express imagination, whimsy and fun above all else.

The Village of Joy blog rounds up lists of all kinds of wonderment, from crazy ads to optical illusions. Their collection of architectural oddities ranges all over the topical and geographical map. And while it lacks any clear criteria for lists such as "The 10 Strangest Buildings in the World ", the visual surveys do manage to crack a smile and raise the question–what is it about these buildings that make them attractive, that make them seem like fun?

Also, visit sister site Unusual-architecture.com for photo blogging of the same crazy collection of buildings.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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Mid-Century Modern Gingerbread House

December 3rd, 2008

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Hmm. Seems like this would be an obvious choice. Making gingerbread houses on modernism lines certainly provides a simple method for organizing regular graham cracker elements into recognizable shapes. But credit this creator for assembling the Eames Case study house as a seasonal, eatable decoration !

As it turns out, it works out pretty well in chocolate too.

And the idea of marrying the clean lines of crackers to modern designs has at least a few followers

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Art Gallery Game

December 3rd, 2008

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From the always remarkably smart and interesting Life Without Buildings blog:

A sculptor with a sense of humor (”postmodernist fun,” some have said), Chris Saucedo creates site-specific work that transforms galleries into gameboards and back again. In the above image, a small scale-model of the New Orleans art gallery, Good Children, has been built in the form of one of those get-the-ball-through-the-hole games. Installed next to the model is a scaled depiction of the game’s “ball.” Thus, space becomes an unplayable, implied version of the carefully crafted “game” where visitors actually occupy the board. Saucedo’s installations repurpose and reprogram architecture without actually building anything or changing the space.

What's most interesting here is the implication that a place can be turned into a play space through the manipulation of spatially anchored signs, and even more odd, that the final space becomes "playful" even though you can't actually play with the space, only in the space. This isn't a particularly unusual move, either. When someone decorates their home office after Disney's Haunted Mansion, for example, you don't turn your desk into a ride, but a sign for the ride. The desk becomes playful even though you can't ride it.

The implication here is that we have a set of signs for play and for fun. And despite some notion that play and fun are activities, it seems pretty clear that they are also strong concepts. Putting a poster of some idyllic beach on your office wall isn't just about daydreaming, it is also an invocation of the fun, an invitation to let the mind play at the notion of leisure.

This also reminds me of an event a few years ago promoting Second Life. We were at a bar in San Francisco. On screen was a virtual version of the bar, recreated in Second Life, with various online avatars partying along side in parallel. The superimposition of the real and the virtual was a happy co-incidence rather than anything jarring or stupidly fake.

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Haunted Virtual Mansion

November 30th, 2008

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What do you get when you mash up the American historicist fantasy of the home with the haunted house house, destination leisure, videogames and an insatiable taste for post-modern irony?

This:

This video provides a walkthrough of a Counter-Strike mod simulating the famous recreation in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom of the equally famous original facsimile haunted house in California’s Disneyland (The Disney World version is set in Liberty Square rather than New Orleans and oddly features a Tudor manor facade with ornament pulled directly from the chess board).

What to make of this? Well a few points come to mind and deserve some sort of integrated theory at some point:

The haunted house is a popular form of American myth
There is a specific form of haunted house that is distinctly American, although tightly tied to the Gothic revival in architecture of the early 1800 and conindicing with the rise of Gothic horror literature (such as Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818).
The original Haunted Mansion shows the link to architecture is more tenuous than that to literature (since the Disneyland building looks like an antebellum mansion with a strong Greek revival portico and nothing of the Gothic).
However, the Disney castmembers who acts as guides in the ride model their behavior after dour Victorian maids and butlers.
Part of the fun of a Disney park is that it obviously plays with being real, while remaining childish and intentionally not real.
Which leads to a twin facincation with its reality/unreality that transfer through to a virtual recreation inside a game engine.
The video viewers facincation is, in part, a marveling at the level of detail that went into the recreation of the Mansion as a 3D model. An equal part of the attraction is reliving the ride in simulated form, recognizing detail that makes the artificial recreation feel more real.
The unifying principle of the Disney Haunted Mansions and Mansion simulations relates directly to their visibility–how much they look like amusing, stsylized version of places that only ever existed in imagination and literature.

Finally, I should point out, there are many more of these ride recreations. Ride simulation remains a healthy culture!

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Will Wright: Architect

November 23rd, 2008

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There's a wonderfully contemplative puff piece in the New Yorks Times about SimCity/Sims/Spore creator Will Wright.

The story lists short answers to oddball questions. The one that caught my attention was:

Recurring dreams: They are architectural. They are about very specific buildings and houses. I remember them down to the level where I can make blueprints of them.

Sure, you could make too much of the quote. Then again, I'll hang onto this as one more scrap of evidence in my growing suspicion that what architects have been doing for a long time is what videogame designers have started doing recently.

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The Ludic Age

November 18th, 2008

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During this year's Game for Change conference, quick thinker and creative mind Eric Zimmerman dropped a new concept on the audience, "Maybe, ", he suggested, "We are living in the Ludic Age ."

His point was well received by a room full of people hoping to change the world through play and games. And his concept made sense on the surface. The industrial age led to the information age and now that we are drowning in all that information and technology, maybe games were helping us figure out how to deal with it all. Whether we had entered the age of games or not, it seemed plausible to at least hope we were.

As I work through the question of "What makes a place fun?" I find another reason to give Eric's idea further consideration–the ebb and flow of the romantic and rationalist tendencies in culture.

If we think about Romanticism as reading truth in the visible and the human response to that truth, contrasted by the Rationalist tendency to seek natural truth beyond the surface, in the observable matter of the universe, then we set up the dichotomy that sticks with us to this day. Is truth empirical science or human experience? The Romantic movement is most closely associated with the an 19th Century reaction to the Rational efforts of the industrial age. Faced with the ugly truth of people treated like parts in a machine and tied to a ticking clock, the Romantics were concerned with the shape of experience and the power of narrative. The Romantic and Rational have pushed back and forth ever since.

Today, the Information Age, the Digital Age, is another Rationalist turn, whereby computers are seen as the basis for encoding all experience as binary quanta. Perhaps no one has voiced an objection to this point-of-view more eloquently than computer pioneer Joseph Weizenbaum when he wrote:

"Beginning perhaps with Francis Bacon's misreading of the genuine
promise of science, man has been seduced into wishing and working for
the establishment of an age of rationality, but with his vision of
rationality tragically twisted so as to equate it with logicality. Thus
have we very nearly come to the point where almost every genuine human
dilemma is seen as a mere paradox, as a merely apparent contradiction
that could be untangled by judicious applications of cold logic derived
from a higher standpoint Even murderous wars have come to perceived as
mere problems to be solved by hordes of professional problem solvers." (Quote in The New Media Reader, p374)

This from the man that programmed ELIZA a piece of software that famously simulated a psychologist. He was deeply concerned that we trusted our rational mode too much, up to and including considering his computer science experiment a viable tool for helping people with their psychological problems. His call for a new humanism stopped short of a Romantic point of view, but its decisive criticism of the Rational opens the door for an alternative.

Living in the shadow of Weizenbaum, as it were, perhaps now we see a Romantic turn, a return to the idea that play, imagination, creativity and sublime human experience matter more than the output of a computer. Perhaps, the "Ludic Age" is really a response to the Rationalism of the Information Age.

Turning to architecture, it's hard to argue that the super stars of architectural design have not already made the shift back to the Romantic mode. Koolhaas' Dubai projects can stand for the time and speak to a sensibility more Ruskin than van der Rohe, more play than work and more ludic than information. In short, more fun.

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Get Small — Landscape, Scale and Fun

November 17th, 2008

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What makes a place fun?

Scale seems to have something to do with it.

As any SimCity player can tell you, part of what makes that game fun is playing a powerful being that can dink with a giant city. It's fun to feel big, or at least, it's fun to look at tiny things.

London-based slinkachu creates tiny urban tableaux from miniature figures placed in satirical and surprising settings. You might find police investigating a drowning victim in a puddle, or thrill-seekers riding a real snail. Pictures of the tiny people close up and then from a pedestrian point of view makes clear the exaggerations in scale and through these contrasts the comedy works.

San Francisco-based artist Krista Peel has created a large number of doll house-inspired miniature art projects. Her 2009 calendar project, Public Park provided a 52" x 30" HO scale park and invited fellow artists to create scenes to place in the park. The Candy Land-colored scenes combine miniature whimsy with a landscape that seems real enough that you find yourself wishing that it was.

What's the critical place of scale in fun? These projects suggest a few answers–surprising juxtaposition, childlike wonder at toy-sized objects, unexpected collisions of naive and serious content and, well, there's just something magical about tiny pretend people.

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Public Art WTF? Part 2

November 10th, 2008

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Viewed from a distance, the pile of big read beans, or bags, on the east end of the 16th street pedestrian bridge, looks sort of like a pile of frosting or a Dr. Suess Christmas tree. Once you get closer, the color is a deep red that makes you think of blood and the limp elements look like sand bags, or melted candy. It's an image both disturbing and funny.

Lacking any other context, at the moment, than police tape, it's not clear whether the piece is a temporary exhibit, still unfinished, or some well-intentioned comment about the war. As I looked at the sculpture a man walking by muttered, "Body bags?".

Public art can serve a number of functions from creating beauty and repose in a busy place to asking questions and engaging citizens. And at this point, while I don't care for the piece much on its own, nestled in the looping concrete and steel ramp of the pedestrian bridge, it provides a jarring moment in the otherwise cleanly modern city stroll. It just gives you something to look at (in fact the color and shape demands that you look at it) pulling your eye way from the shops, apartments and city traffic all around you. This is active public art that demands a dialog. Not surprisingly, then, graffiti has already appeared, a sort of aesthetic comment left on the base of the piece like some urban blogger answering the boisterous argument of the original work.

I don't know if the bloody beans sculpture is any good. But it is fun!