Territories of Play - Spoilsport

Abstract

Spoilsport will expand Voluptas' research on Play and Architecture. It will test Playfulness as critical design tool for deconstructing rule-making mechanisms and surpassing them. Students will play a typological design game based on collaborative competition: together defining criteria for success, competing towards answers to these criteria, and again collaborating in choosing the best answers.

Objective

The main learning goals are twofold: basic principles of critical design thinking formulated as "Playful Reframing", and the ability of constructive self-and-collective criticism. As secondary goals, accuracy in argumentation. and representation through references.

Content

"The player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a “spoilsport”. The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion—a pregnant word which means literally “in-play” (from inlusio, illudere or inludere)". Excerpt of Johann Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens – A Study of The Play Element in Culture”, 1955 This course will invite students to take the stance of a spoilsport in relation to established typological norms and rules. By doing so, the edges of knowledge on typological definition should be expanded in unforeseen ways, allowing new interpretations of existing architectural stapples and the formulation of new design approaches to long-standing norms and rules. Withdraw from the current, play a different game.

Resources