The journal i2 Investigación e Innovación en Arquitectura y Territorio, at the University of Alicante, has invited me to be the editor of the special monograph issue "Juegos y juguetes de arquitectura" (Architectural Games and Toys). The call for papers can be found here in Spanish:
Call for Papers: Architectural games and toys
Editor: Marco Ginoulhiac (Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto)
The i2 magazine invites submissions for a special issue dedicated to Architectural Games and Toys, with the aim of gathering new contributions on the idea of playfulness and the material culture of toys in a contemporary context.
The aim of this call for papers is to gather new contributions to a field of study that articulates the discipline of architecture, the concept of play, and the aspect of material culture that encompasses the set of artifacts traditionally defined as toys. The goal is to reconstruct the narrative networks that link architecture with play and toys in the contemporary context, through contributions that reveal current configurations and meanings, as well as experiences conceptualized within academic frameworks.
Articles on innovative educational experiences, original business proposals, or well-founded design exercises may be submitted, as well as research that seeks to articulate the topics under a new configuration of our contemporary world.
It is an ancient theme, spanning centuries and not immune to the profound changes that have occurred around it. Within it, one of its central elements, play, remains both an emotional and intellectual necessity. In 1958, Roger Caillois, a French sociologist and literary critic, wrote: “ Artists, scientists, and inventors are adults who are socially granted the right to continue playing: to analyze and experiment with the possible combinations of ideas, objects, units, behaviors, etc .;” [1] with which they can produce cultural innovations that are selected and socially adopted. A few years later, Alvar A. Alto confirmed: “I firmly believe that this preliminary laboratory phase must be as free as possible, often entirely free of utilitarian aims, to achieve the desired results. In this exhibition, I have included some of my ‘experimental toys,’ some of which never led to any practically viable architectural details, remaining on the plane of mere play”[2]. In a certain sense, today, it invites us to consider rereading that lead us to conceptualize new meanings of play, of toys, of the media where play takes place or from the artifacts that are used, to verify the role we have adopted in granting the right to "continue playing" and how we do it.
In today's increasingly technological, standardized, and, above all, highly complex society, Caillois's words represent a premise for those who address the topic of play. Architecture, in this sense, is an artistic field particularly sensitive to playful objects, whether intended for education or for the genuine creative process. They reflect, as has been the case in the past, its disciplinary nature and its forms of transmission and reproduction.
Although it may seem so, combining the complexity of architecture with the apparent simplicity of toys in a narrative is not at all innovative. In recent decades, numerous books have focused on this topic, and numerous exhibitions have collected and organized this important part of material culture, defined as the category of architectural toys. While the monograph in the i2 journal may compile articles about toys, it can also explore their contemporary uses and the meaning they may hold. Combining the theme of toys with architecture has often led to the creation of new narratives driven by the multiple themes involved, from the idea of play to that of education, encompassing space, design, and project.
We know that the field of study is replete with numerous contributions that, while maintaining their focus on architecture, combine toys with concepts and strategies from the social sciences, education, psychology, technology, and sociology, among others. For this reason, we encourage submissions of articles that compile research establishing links between architectural games and/or playful techniques or strategies applied to real-world cases of citizen participation, social sustainability, environmental controversies, educational innovation, and so on. Architectural toys, considered a special category of play objects linked to the discipline, have already served as a pretext for numerous lines of discourse and research, and we seek, alongside this, new interpretations. The aim is to open this field of research and explore the application of its findings in contemporary situations.
A large majority of the contributions are based on historicism. They use past experiences and objects as the foundation of their discourse. Many of them are legitimized by factual connections between architects and artistic movements, or by evoking various educational theories in the field of art and their connections to the toys themselves. All of these are of great interest and relevance, but they are always limited to the past and are rarely able to promote a direct transposition of the research to the present.
Given this situation, it is urgent to update the discourse, bringing into the present the extensive and complex network of relationships that has been revealed and studied in and for the past. This urgency is motivated by various reasons, some internal and others external to the discipline of architecture:
Since the 1970s, architecture has undergone a profound reconfiguration, both in its artistic and technological paradigms. On the one hand, postmodernism seems to have been a prologue (and probably also one of the causes) of the typological, formal, and linguistic multiplicity found today in the iconic ocean of social media. It even seems that these platforms have come to accommodate and amplify the desires of those who preached multiplicity as the great panacea for the problems posed by the rigidity of modernity.
On the other hand, digital technologies have altered many of the procedural and productive routines of architectural design. CAD technology, firmly rooted in design practice, extending to robotic production technologies and reaching the most extreme design experiments with the help of Artificial Intelligence, places Fröbel's solids, still invoked today as an example of educational discipline in the arts, in a prehistoric era of architectural composition and representation. The digital realm seems to have eliminated the distance between what Bruno Munari [3] distinguished between fantasy, invention, and creativity, thus negating the importance - not only artistic - given for two centuries of education to playful processes supported by artifacts and toys in the field of the arts.
But the universe surrounding the discipline has also been changing, and the very concept of toy, of play, and, in general, of playfulness, no longer possesses the same epistemological boundaries it had in the last decades of the 20th century. All of these have acquired new connections and even overlaps with, for example, education, pleasure, and leisure, and through this, new values in life and in the management of domestic, collective, and public space. Architecture has responded to these changes with a constant capacity for reinvention, visible both in the field of school architecture, which since the postwar period in Europe has introduced several experiences of very high spatial and typological quality, and in the design of public space, where attention to permanence and use has gone from being a mere urban backdrop to an integral and purposeful part of a life that increasingly aspires to be playful. These new narrative networks can be found in more recent works and events, such as the PLAYGROUNDS – Reinventing the square exhibition in 2014 at the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, where the curatorial effort was precisely to broaden the field of study from both a disciplinary and chronological point of view, thus achieving the necessary updating of all the topics addressed.
Finally, the toy market itself, once a market with its own internal dynamics, is today a very different market, with strong external ties, both in its conception and production and in its promotion to audiences of all ages. From the first street vendors to the catalog market, including department stores, the enormous mediatization of society has reconfigured concepts such as "educational," "pedagogical," or even "didactic" to fuel a market flooded with low-quality, low-cost products. Not only are there new technologies of representation and production, but also new players, new means of dissemination, and a completely new social, economic, and even geopolitical configuration.
Given these premises, the themes of the proposals cannot be strictly limited to the connection between architecture, play, and toys. Maintaining this epistemological triad as a central axis, it is possible to address other areas of interest that permeate contemporary life. Among these, the theme of toys quickly and consistently evokes economic issues or those related to consumer society, as well as educational issues linked to the acute problems of inequality and social integration. In these contexts, play and its collective dynamics represent powerful tools, as they can serve as instruments of control or emancipation of the individual, even becoming therapeutic tools for disorders or pathologies within the field of neuroscience.
[1] Callois, Roger. 1958. Les Jeux et les Hommes. Paris: Gallimard
[2] “Constructive Form” exhibition organized by Nordiska Kompaniet, a large Swedish armament, in 1954 in Stockholm. Aalto, 'The constructive form exhibition in Stockholm, 1954', 1954, Shildt [ed.], Alvar Aalto in his own words, 1998, p. 258
[3] Munari, Bruno. 1977. Fantasia. Bari: Laterza editore
