Thursday 27 October 94

Child’s Play

Not many of us think architecture is child’s play. John Andrews
does.

Professor of Interior Design at the Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology (RMIT), Andrews has recently completed an exciting
experimental workshop where children have built fantastic
constructions out of their vivid dreams and wild imaginations.

Conducted in September with Judy McGinty at Melbourne’s new Philatelic
Gallery in Exhibition Street, “Fantastic Architecture - Fabulous
Constructions” offered a small group of eager five to ten year
olds the chance to make buildings of their own designs during
the school holidays. Working with flexible foam, bamboo
skewers, glue, cocktail sticks, and bits of cardboard, the kids
were asked to whip up whatever came to mind. The results were
quite astonishing.

So astonishing in fact, that many of Andrews’s tertiary level
students had trouble believing that a bunch of five year olds
could come up with such imaginative designs in a matter of
minutes. The works, displayed publicly from 10-21 October at
RMIT, were a salient reminder of how space and form can be
constructed from playful unconscious forces.

Of course, nothing can substitute for all the years of hard work,
training and experience that provides the necessary skills for real
world designers. But the experiment is a welcome reminder of
how imaginative design can be when creative intuition is
stimulated. The stylistic novelty and intriguing compositional
forms that children create are mostly in stark contrast to the rigid
geometries we often encounter in the built environment.

Similar workshops have been held in other countries. They too
have tapped into the chaos of the imagination with impressive
results. Vladislav Kirpichev’s Experimental Children’s
Architecture Studio (which has been functioning in Moscow since
1977) is one of the most well-known. Kirpichev’s non-traditional
program encourages children to make dynamic asymmetrical
assemblages that look like matchstick houses gone crazy.
Letting the children use both constructive and destructive
impulses, Kirpichev’s ’students’ often come up with intricate and
highly complex models that don’t follow rational plans. Andrews’s
workshops follow the same principles. The results clearly show
that the language of form need not be restricted to sterile
rationalism. Not all building blocks have to be straight.

After a quick slide-show introduction to a range of architectural
forms — from cave dwellings to Mediterranean vernacular
architecture and “outsider” architecture — the children run amok
with their glue and wooden sticks. According to Andrews, the
fantastic works the kids create show us “ways of constructing
buildings where the inside and outside became one.” It seems
children have no problem focussing on the interiors of buildings
as much as the exteriors. The same is not always true in the built
environment.

To my mind, many of these constructions look like architecture
turned inside out. The external skin and interior structures are all
jumbled around. Andrews reckons that “the beautiful mess that
comes from play could easily be tapped by mainstream
architecture.” He has a point.

Although the final products on display might seem impossible to
build, they are strangely reminiscent of today’s avant garde
architecture. Contemporary Australian architects as disparate as
Lawrence Nield, Nonda Katsalidas, Ivan Rijavec, and Denton
Corker Marshall (to name but a few) have all at times
experimented with playful unpredictable forms and asymmetrical
structures that are also to be found in these kids’ fantasies.

Andrews’s own work also demonstrates similar stylistic links. His
use of unusual materials and multi-faceted structures held by
gravity result in coherent though profoundly non-rational designs.
It’s fitting that he recently won an honourable mention with his
scheme for an international architectural competition to design a
temple of laughter.

Further afield, the French partnership of Francoise-Helene
Jourda and Gilles Perraudin, Co-op Himmelblau from Vienna,
London-based Zaha Hadid, or Americans such as Michael Sorkin
and even Frank Gehry are infamous for creating jagged and
sinewy structures for the postmodern present. At their most
visionary, these architects give us structures that rest
uncomfortably amongst the chaos of the city. At worst, they
throw the blandness of unbroken geometric solids (standard fare
for commercial developers) into clear and sharp relief.

At the end of the day perhaps the real-world designer has to
decide between the freedom of child’s play and the tedium of
adult work. But given the choice, I know what I’d prefer.