L'architecte joueur

The child who plays invents worlds of his own idea. This book, the result of an exhibition, proposes to take this metaphor seriously, and to theorize the architectural creative process from the concept of "play". By crossing the psychoanalytic theories of Winnicott and the philosophies of Gadamer and Bataille, the investigation ventures into the world of play, this transitional space which is located in the mysterious interval linking our subjectivities to external reality, and which makes possible the communication of a work, its sharing between a creator and society.

From architectural objects, imagined or built, chosen in the playful moment of the 1950s to 1980s which followed the collapse of the modern paradigm, the research deploys four paradigmatic play worlds: labyrinths, theaters, constructions and strategies. The study of Constant’s New Babylon, Aldo Rossi’s Teatro del mondo, Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, and Buckminster Fuller’s World Game thus allows us to decipher four player postures and their creative techniques: the situation, the symbol, the diagram, and the map. The result is a matrix of four fundamental rules of the game, a reflective tool capable of guiding designers through the twists and turns of the architectural game that arises from the emergence of their desires.

The whole dialogues with works presented in the exhibition “Architects at play”, thus forming a series of cabinets of curiosities, which successively provide insight into the different worlds of a playful architecture.

David Malaud is a state-certified architect and holds a doctorate in architecture from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles-Université Paris-Saclay. His research focuses on understanding the creative process and the imaginations mobilized in the context of architectural and urban projects. Still in dialogue with a practical research activity within the TVK agency, which he joined after working four years for the Atelier International du Grand Paris. He is also a founding member of the association Learning from Detroit which is conducting a survey on hospitality in urban areas.