Let me try to remember this as best I can…
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So at the end of Thesis Prep II I went down to the studio and talked to one of my classmates who told me, “Dude, you think too much”. Hearing him say that encouraged me to re-examine why I was drawn to topics I chose for each collage. Of the most recent set the party most appealed to me because I had fun and in some sense got to be a kid again. There were bright lights, people dressed up in different costumes and imaginative rooms.
“I find it interesting that you can put a child in an empty room and they’ll find a way to have fun. If you put an adult in the same room, they’ll get bored.”
When Mandy brought her collage into studio we could tell that you couldn’t sit on it. I wanted to play with it so I rotated it around the center of the room as we did with all the other chairs. Some people laughed, I don’t know for what reasons but I didn’t care. I was having fun. When someone later brushed by it and the chair almost collapsed, someone else played along as if an imaginary classmate were actually sitting there.
I want to see if architecture can help us recapture some of the imagination and fun we experienced as kids. Can we encourage people in our faceless cities to interact with each other and reclaim some of that childish innocence we used to love? Is architecture able to do this? Some people like Frank Gehry have designed environments that are different from the generic orthogonal norm. I wonder if that could be the solution.
Architecture is a tricky definition because it facilitates and encourages particular experiences.They can be very prescriptive or very ambiguous depending on the situation. Remember what one of your classmates said about children being smarter than adults and why.
I read one of the theses from last year because I loved the title “City Space as Play Space” and it sounded exactly like a title I would use for my thesis. I didn’t get too far into her writing but I noticed an emphasis on social media, which after thinking about it for awhile, makes sense. It seems like you have a much easier time getting people together by creating events on Facebook than you do by walking around a place and asking people to play with you. I’ve tried it before, and it doesn’t work very well. As adults we don’t know how to react when someone does this so most of the time we’re suspicious. We wonder, “What does this person want”? Social media and technology seems to let us bypass some of the awkwardness we have as adults possibly because of the anonymity the internet has.
“Children are more true to themselves than adults”…because they haven’t been raised to accept and practice the standards our society/culture dictates. You might be able to relate this back to the party collage where some of the costumed people didn’t look how they normally did and had a certain amount of anonymity. You could argue the same is true about wearing sunglasses so people can’t see your eyes.
A few years ago I participated in something similar to a flash mob. An invitation went out online asking people if they wanted to go to a place at a set time and play a music file at synchronized moment. The “Scavenger Hunt” I went to asked that you wore a choice of colored shirts and promised not to listen to the file before or talk at all during the hunt. My friend invited myself and another friend. Two of us wore the same colored shirt and another had a different one. When it started a voice came on to narrate the game with quiet background music playing. The voice gave directions and offered options to us, like one of those Goosebumps books people my age read as kids. Your options varied depending on the color shirt you had on and I quickly found myself separated from the group, although that didn’t bother me. Everyone who was wearing certain colored shirts and had headphones on was assumed to be friendly, so you could play along, smile, and enjoy it. We pretended to search for rare animals, interacted as colored groups with other colored groups, may have played a version of red rover, taken photographs of some of us walking down an imagineray catwalk (we improvised with an existing trellis).
I’m not sure if the architecture matter because events like this (flash mobs), hacking/urban exploration, parkour, etc. don’t seem to be site and environment specific.
One more thought. I wonder what drugs (alcohol, etc.) do to affect people’s willingness to participate/do things/creativity.
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IDEO project from sophomore year posted by request. I’ll upload notes/suggestions from class later today.
[slideshow]