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The paediatrician/psychoanalyst Winnicott, identified the space between the interior, imagination and the perceived outer world / society as the location of cultural experience; “this intermediate area, is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is ‘lost in play’ and ‘is retained in the intense experience that belongs to the arts… creative and scientific work”. The project will examine Winnicott’s notions of playing and reality and how these might relate/inform alternate modes of architectural design practice.

SECTION 01: PLAYING AND REALITY

This section sets out Winnicott’s theory of the role of play and transitional objects in the emotional development of a child and how this can be viewed as the foundation of exchange within all cultural interaction; a method which sidesteps the imperatives of real time/space/resources and as a tool to extend ‘ways of seeing’.

SECTION 02: OTHER FORMS OF PLAY

Winnicott began to isolate a science of the imagination and cultural activity. He considered the “potential space” (which is in direct continuity with the play area of the child) as both sacred to the individual and where creative living is experienced. He also regarded the experienced interplay between originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for inventiveness, which in turn emerged from the interplay between “separateness” and “union”. This section will examine other forms of play such as the dynamics / nuances of light.

  

SECTION 03: THE THIRD SPACE

Clarify the intention and nature of interstitial space – a spatial apparatus which heightens awareness and perception of the experiential – and illustrate the quality of the third space* using stop-frame images.

* The third space is the imaginatively transformed ‘every-day’, which we become aware of through the lens of the interstitial space.

 

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SECTION 04: THE STUGA AND THE CITY

The stuga is therefore an instrument to examine and criticise assumptions about habitat through: Latitude, Light and Place. The design is about using architecture as an investigative and didactic apparatus to challenge and extend the boundaries of orthodox and to unsettle the complacent, constructively. I.e. the “value of the other” as seen in the film island, cemetery island and 30’s architecture festival, may produce a new critical island of architecture, art, film and drama. Could there be an architecture that challenges the Scandinavian norm, the same way they use their art? The stability of culture doesn’t depend on freezing a moment in time, but a continuous critique – “permanent revolution”.

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SECTION 05: APPLICATION OF PLAY IN A SPECULATIVE PROJECT

This section will serve as a recapitulation of the method catalogued in Section 04 and apply them to a speculative project for Långholmen. This in turn will be used as a robust critique of the play strategies which informed the proposition.

SECTION 06: IDEA AND PROCESS, A PEREGRINATION

Långholmen’s form is a consequence of neglect and exclusion from the city conversation; originally used as a customs house/ shipyard it was an undervalued component of the archipelago, to became a prison or place of ‘other’, which reinforced a sense of not belonging or the ‘undesirable’. Because it is not a part of the collective consciousness – out of sight, out of mind – by default, it has a mongrel identity which complements and comments upon the mannerliness of the rest of the city.

SECTION 07: POSTSCRIPT – THE AMOEBA AND CACTUS

A critical re-evaluation and conclusion.

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