Gamechangers

In Homo Ludens (Man the Player)1 the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga identifies the following five characteristics of play:
it is free,
it is not ordinary or real life,
it is distinct from ordinary life in locality and duration,
it creates order,
it is connected with no material interest, and from it no profit can be gained.

For Huizinga dance, poetry and music may all be derived wholly from play but he is more circumspect regarding the plastic arts. When it comes to architecture Huizinga deems his hypothesis ‘flatly absurd, because there the aesthetic impulse is far from being the dominant one’. I challenge this assertion in the belief that under certain conditions play can be a powerful force in the creation of architecture. Here, I offer one of my own projects (or playtimes), Forest Cinema, a modest open-air cinema made by a small gang of friends, from scavenged and salvaged materials.