Abstract
Architecture has moved further and further from the areas of human endeavor that respond rapidly and effectively to society’s needs and aspirations. (Cedric Price, 2003[1975]: 54)
In recent years, the work of Mazzanti Group has centred on the search for an architecture that becomes a mechanism of social inclusion, an open structure that facilitates multiple uses and possibilities. We are interested in inducing actions, events and relations. This approach allows us to develop open-ended forms, patterns or physical structures that influence the construction of social actions and functions. Not, of course, as an application of authoritarian organizational schemes, but as catalysts of new forms of daily interaction. An architecture capable of generating behaviors and new dynamics, inducing people to interact in ways they would previously have thought impossible. The buildings we design are intended to become means for social inclusion that help to improve the quality of life and economic development in deteriorated and poverty-stricken contexts in Colombia. In this way, the aim is to promote social well-being and to construct a more just and sustainable society through architecture.
But how can we predict forms of use and offer other social and ethical possibilities unforeseen by the architect? How can a building become a mechanism for learning and discovery? These are some of the questions we ask before embarking on the design of a project.
In our view, any structure has the potential to be an educational space, one that promotes new forms of knowledge and information. All spaces can become places of play, learning and social interaction. We believe that architectural design should serve educational purposes and not be reduced to the form and function of a given building. We believe that architecture not only has value in and of itself, but in terms of what it produces, that is, in its performative rather than its representational capacities. For this reason we are interested in an architecture defined in terms of what it does socially, ethically and aesthetically rather than solely in terms of its formal essence.
In our practice, we use and study the traditional elements that comprise it such as doors, windows, columns, etc. but our interest goes beyond the kind of architecture that is studied and evaluated by other architects and critics. We are interested in collective behaviour and what architecture is capable of accomplishing in terms of communal urban design. For us, a primary concern is encouraging and supporting communities to appropriate and use our designs to improve their social interactions and quality of life.
The Industrial Revolution produced an architecture based on efficiency, what is known within architecture as the maxim of functionality. This maxim converts the user into a governed and controlled entity in the interests of a specific form of use – those of an efficient machine devoid of possibility. This neglected other ways of using and exploring buildings in which play and creativity might play a more liberatory and imaginative role. The discourse of modernity centred on the role of the author/artist/architect as authority and developed a universal style defined by a closed canon of rules and techniques. The question we ask is: how can a more open architecture emerge – one in which the user becomes a creative agent?
Two simple indicators allow us to measure the success of our projects: the first is its collective appropriation, and the second is the freedom and flexibility of use it is able to provide for previously unimagined human activities. We want those who use our buildings to be creative agents. We aim for our buildings to be suggestive and open to the mental and physical appropriation of the user (not to be functional machines based on calculations of efficiency). To achieve this, we design elements and spaces that are indeterminate, incomplete, but which permit unexpected forms of occupation and use. We encourage those who inhabit and work in our open-ended designs to transform them. This means that we produce an architecture that is more akin to contemporary art installations (which require an active user) rather than to the construction of sculptured works of art as in the modernist paradigm (which requires the user to observe the art object). We propose an open and respectful professional practice liberated from predetermined ideas and dogmas.
Our projects aim to be instruments for generating spatial, social and environmental interactions; an architecture based on open and adaptive configurations; a practice that operates in and between the world of animate and inanimate objects. This instrumentality is not about functional efficiency, but is rather a way of intermediating between particular projects and the complexity of today’s world through which we aim to achieve configurations that stimulate or facilitate new, diverse and contradictory activities within the same time and space, multiplying and intensifying existing complexities and contradictions in today’s world. Rather than dissolving these differences, we want to intensify them whilst generating possibilities for coexistence within them.
What Has Been Lost and What We Want to Recover
What would happen if design was thought of as a catalyst for new environments in which architecture learns how to become an event, where the architect learns to communicate and in which the inhabitant learns to take control and new forms of living are constructed?
We believe that projects defined in terms of play and creativity will open new forms of spatial use based on freedom and on the creative input of users. New ‘heterotopian spaces’, as defined by Michel Foucault (1998[1984]), must be established by contemporary architecture: alternative spaces of liberation more akin to a party or an event, anomalous and empty spaces that activate new social relations. For instance, eventual spaces such as ‘skating in the library’, as Bernhard Tschumi proposed (see Tschumi, 1994), which generate new forms of social negotiation.
The contemporary, changing, and unstable world could use play and free creativity as a tool for giving individuals greater control over social space. Such a tool could serve as a detonator of anomalous behaviours and situations, both new and unexpected, with the power to provoke new cultural and political responses as it engenders and catalyses transformations and social relations.
The Importance of Play
The importance of play, free creativity and chance, amongst other things, lies in their potential to construct moments of interaction capable of instigating alternative human relations to those which are brought about in everyday, proscribed functional spaces. Where there is play there is also the beginning of ‘meaning’. For those involved in it, play is transcendent and full of implications, whether for what is learnt from it or for its alteration of the lived moment. In this way, the importance of play resides in the ‘meaning’ that players give to it. To play is an act of lived experience, whose essence is the effect it generates upon those who participate, opening up experiences between people and communities who would perhaps not normally interact due to the normal, isolated way of using space.
Depending on the scale, commitment or attraction of the activity implied in play or group activity, its effects on people vary. In some cases, it can be used to bring about improved physical health or a sense of social or individual identity. Play is, generally speaking, psychologically or socially efficacious inasmuch as players get satisfaction and entertainment from it, building social and community links.
The architectural project is understood as a set of operations and rules within a certain context. By using a free and open framework for architecture, a new understanding of its contemporary condition is brought into view. How to act, move or work can be constantly redefined by the individual or the community. The result is a social impact that promotes the development of intuitions, behaviours and techniques which enable the user to interact in diverse ways in a given context.
If we understand play not only as a leisure activity but as a complex phenomenon based on a system of operations and rules, it can paradoxically have the capacity to transform contexts or self-regulated human relations. The real importance of play lies in its capacity to transform pre-established social contracts and visions.
We need to vindicate the idea of creative play as an architectural instrument for generating designs that not only serve to solve problems, but which also facilitate fantasies and the creation of alternative, unforeseen modes of life.
Redefining of contexts and imaginaries, whether physical, cultural or social, is the end we seek, and the rules are the means; it is about strategies and explorations that guide play and architecture towards the aim of free creativity. From this perspective, architecture and play, as social and functional phenomena, find themselves in a paradoxical relation. They are structures governed by rules and norms which, on being appropriated, understood and used, allow the redefining of pre-established, rule and norm-governed contexts.
Architecture as an Open-Ended Project
Our buildings aim to open and enlarge human and community relations. Based on the perspective of play and free creativity, we use certain strategies that facilitate the free appropriation of possible uses and human actions. We are interested in the following concepts: (1) spatial and formal anomalies as aleatory spaces; (2) physical interchangeability and mobile artifacts; (3) incompleteness; and (4) temporal instability.
Spatial and formal anomalies indicate and allow for a condition of rupture and create thresholds wherein unpredictable and previously unimagined behaviours and interactions can occur. Thus conceived space becomes a mechanism for unstable, aleatory improvisation, which breaks with routine and makes each user act differently. Physical interchangeability (mobile artifacts) enable changes in use and conditions, multiplying possible actions and human relations in which space is defined by groups of users. Incompleteness as an ontological condition of our designs permits the user to complete or transform the structure and space. This mode of incompleteness allows the design and its potential uses to keep changing with time. Instability, for us, indicates this potentiality for temporal changes. Despite what was initially designed, different generations of users can go on adapting it to their needs and changes.
Thus, rather than a completed and closed architecture, we propose the development of open and adaptive systems comprised of anomalies, games, modules and patterns of association, amongst other elements, that can be adapted to diverse situations, whether these be topographical, urban or programmatic. This strategy generates more than buildings because it creates physical structures capable of growing, changing and adapting to particular or temporary circumstances. It is an architecture that allows for changes, unforeseen events and exchanges conceived more in terms of a method rather than a permanent structure, which exists in virtue of its capacity for change and its flexibility for users.
When we do the first drawings for a project, we always ask ourselves what it is we want to bring about or multiply with the use of a building, in addition to what the client or programme indicate as the main objective. We aim to generate community relations and diverse human actions, multiplying their possibilities; this can be seen in the following projects:
Marinilla School: Besides being an educational infrastructure it is also a place for the exchanging of flowers, where domestic space becomes public, to be used by the city. Hammocks, rocking chairs and flower beds for planting orchids are available for the user to complete and identify with. The project is based in a city known for its culture of flowers and conversation, where the home becomes the street and the street becomes one big living room.
The Libertadores Library: This building is more than a place for quiet study: it is a space for jumping around, sleeping and eating. The inclusion of PVC, circus tent-style coverings enables an alternative use of the library. The traditional use of the library and the standard relations amongst its users has changed, turning it into a place not only for the storing of information and silent study but for multiple forms of social interaction (see Figures 1 and 2).
Exterior: The Libertadores Library by Ekoomedia. © El Equipo Mazzanti.
Interior: The Libertadores Library by Ekoomedia. © El Equipo Mazzanti.
The Anglo-Colombian School: This building is constructed on the basis of concave and convex forms on the floors and roofs. These anomalous spaces multiply its possible uses; for example, a concave space can be an auditorium which can also be filled with water to become a swimming pool. In turn, a convex space can become a bookshelf upon which you walk in order to find a book, or it can be turned into a communal sofa for sleeping on or listening to stories. The shape and size of the classrooms are determined by the students and their group activities, whilst the walls are acoustic and thermic curtains which make the space flexible and expansive.
The architecture that we imagine is a ludic laboratory based on the alternative appropriation and transformation of social practices. Our aim is to abandon the idea of a predetermined use of space, in which functional control is central, in order to propose architectures based on the social interactions of users rather than the imposition of the architect. Through an architecture conceived in terms of flexible interventions that change in response to the imagination of others, customary, everyday elements change their use to become an event.
Footnotes
Address: El Equipo Mazzanti, Calle 69 #10–06 Bogotá, Colombia. [email: