To play is to learn, and it is also to teach, and to create, and to find, and to tempt fate, and to befriend, and to experience, and to remember, and to represent, and to superimpose, and to compete, and to enjoy, and to surprise, and to amaze, and to communicate, and to feel, and to think, and to live, and to win and lose, and to satisfy, and to travel, and to collect, and to direct, and to dream, and to venture, and to risk, and to be happy and sad, and to talk, and to fantasize, and to trust, and to confess, and to confirm, and to tolerate, and to expose, and to train, and to practise, and to move closer, and to know, and to romp, and to entertain, and to suggest, and to contribute, and to wake up, and to seduce, and to plot, and to draw, and to build, and to project, and, above all, to project and imagine. There are also negative definitions, the least, in which the action of playing refers to deceiving, to cheat, to waste time, to take advantage, to be disloyal, but even these negative actions require the knowledge, skills, and intelligence of the malicious person who is practising them.
The game extends our childhood and allow us to spend time with the kids, to learn from them maximising to the limit our ability. Together with the ingenuity development, the game brings us a magical dimension, an indispensable dimension for creation and it is part of its essence: fate, that breaking of the causual relationships, which reaches unpredictable results in a non-accidental process. Before the forseeability of modern architecture almost all of us recognise in contemporary architecture a complex system of fortuitous hypotheses. In current literature Paul Auster has introduced fate as plot dimension in his works; in The Music of Chance, the game takes real prisoners those who first were competitors, involving the collecting and the representation as ways of the game of life. The artistic avant-garde of last century used fate to develop its pedagogical games; I am thinking of Marcel Duchamp on a ladder dropping three pieces of one-meter long rope over canvases painted in Prussian blue to generate the curves of his templates, “Trois stoppages étalon” (Three standard stoppages, 1913-1914). I also picture him correcting the result of some drafts and trying his luck again, until the “accidental” shape adopted by the ropes was at his convenience. As usually, the architectural project succumbed to the delayed influence of the artistic “game”, the game by the sidelines.
Juan Luis Trillo de Leyva
TECHNICAL DATA
DESIGNER: Pedro Romera García, Ángela Ruiz Martínez |Romera y Ruiz Arquitectos S.L.P.|
COLLABORATORS: Jorge Hernández y Rocío Narbona Flores |ARCHITECTS|
