Arural hillside partially covered in shrubbery obliterates any notion of football in Castillo’s orchestrated collision of orders. It is clear that the field cannot be simply overlaid upon a landscape: by the same token, in their extraneous requirements, playgrounds cannot easily be assimilated to gardens. In the conception of the field, play seems to introduce another nature.
Like the park, mechanical fairs indisputably belong to the leisure domains: moreover, their extensive grounds circumscribe a domain of exceptions akin to Foucault’s heterotopias. No doubt park and fair represent highly contrasting loci: one suggesting an escape into the country, the other an industrial landscape turned tame; one encapsulating botanical wealth, the other a wealth of artifice; one inspired in bucolic nature, the other in the industrial imagination. Equally contrived in their own ways, albeit following contrasting mandates, public parks and mechanical fairs surged roughly in parallel, the latter forged by an entrepreneurial drive that foresaw in leisure an exceptional business opportunity. Here parallels end, for whilst the park became a prime concern for modern architects, despite its engineering feats, the fair remained – at best – in the periphery of their concerns (although it was highly valued by Archigram, Price and the Situationists).
FIGURE 86 Field and topography colliding. Image courtesy of Eduardo Castillo. Copyright E. Castillo
Founded in 1906, the Playground Association coincides with Chicago’s Reform Park Movement with its ‘recreational experts’ (Cranz, 1982) and its early conception of ‘playgrounds’. Chicago thus pioneered ‘active leisure’ enclaves, even though their character and pertinence were hotly debated. Jackson argued:
The urban park is a newcomer to the landscape … medieval towns had of course a number of public places … but no open space in town was set aside – let alone designed – for such a vague purpose as recreation.
JACKSON 107
Unwittingly corroborating the thesis about ludic functions as social templates, Rasmussen’s 1934 London the Unique City and Koolhaas’s 1994 Delirious New York highlighted the leisure component in the urban discourse.
The encounter between the English common, a pragmatic mindset and the ideals of fair play, led to London’s peculiar urban synthesis with its extraordinary provision of parks. Such was Rasmussen’s view. Along similar lines, the encounter of an entrepreneurial spirit and a particular imagination about mass leisure led Koolhaas to declare Coney Island a cradle of the metropolis, as if inventions first tested in the domain of leisure were later applied to ‘serious life’. Collective play nurtured both urban identities.
The green patch matrix that characterizes London’s disperse urban patterns captured Rasmussen’s interest; he perceived in their predicament an embodiment of the sport ethos, also a concrete expression of the will to keep fit, with its inherent moral and physical dimensions that made London a mirror of its emancipated, healthy, and autonomous citizenship. Tracking down the historical role of the commons, he disclosed how certain areas had been sanctioned as sports grounds by parliament during the sixteenth century. The English landscape tradition became a product of direct engagement, he argued, rather than intellectual speculation; of cultivation, rather than design; an expression of liberalism always implicit in its contrived casualness.
Altogether, these nurtured the foundation of the public park. Indeed, London featured a staggering number of them … ‘they might be regarded as some sort of supply service of hygienic importance just as water supply, common sewers etc’ (Rasmussen, 306). Besides supplying clean air, parks were primarily understood as opportunities for taking exercise in the open. The sportive use of the garden embodied a nineteenth-century paradigm shift, whereby sport exalted the experiences of natural space. Henceforth the landscape was increasingly conceived as arena.
The erosion of Hampstead Heath by intense trampling prompted Rasmussen to ponder how its worn out nature betrayed the prevalence of ‘sport, instead of pastoral life’, usage taking precedence over aesthetics. He also noted the massive conversion of parish churchyards into playgrounds as initiated in England by 1855 through the agency of the Metropolitan Gardens Association. By 1934 the process had yielded nearly a hundred cases, with an effect perhaps not dissimilar to Aldo Van Eyck’s better-known insertion of playgrounds in Amsterdam. Diverse mechanisms eased the inscription of casual recreation in London’s fabric.
Rasmussen furthered the urban significance of play in Towns and Buildings (1949) and Experiencing Architecture (1959). He highlighted unexpected linkages between play and certain canonical spaces in the former, whereas in the later he drew linkages between sport and functionalism. In his view, ludic programmes were formidable instruments for the modelling of the modern city (he was oblivious of the urban fair, however). His perceptions emphasized local traits, yet the alliances forged by play to site represent just one ludic possibility, for as we have seen, play requirements can equally turn sites into generic fields. Moreover, as pointed out by Koolhaas, the oblivion of place is inherent to the metropolitan ethos. Hence, the ludic impulse pulls in opposite directions: it either strives towards the generic, or else it nurtures intimate rapports with the specific. Clearly, the mechanical fair belongs to the former.
Its no-doubt hazardous lineage is interesting for it illuminates the transferences made from the domain of the useful into the ludic, as if machine civilization had gone haywire, turning tools into toys. Following the course of obsolescence, abandoned mechanisms were released into unproductive uses.1 In it a gradual substitution of the field for the apparatus ran in tandem with the substitution of composition for clutter. Free fall, acceleration, collision, pendulum motion, high speed rotation and such extreme experiences became ludic tropes. Passively submitted, the ‘players’ confronted formidable forces much like surfers confront wave power. It was the domain of Ilinx and Alea, where subjects relinquished command to fate. However, the apparatus in the fun fair sometimes acquired a truly epic stature, as happened with certain roller coasters and ferris wheels; it was in cinema that its dramatic allure was best represented.2
Technology also magnified artificiality. In Coney Island, as Koolhaas observed, multitudes bathed under the halo of an artificial sun. Once the natural order was thus obliterated, recreation became a 24-hour concern: massive, anonymous, variegated and endless. Clustered leisure facilities offered an incessant laboratory for the generation of fictional amusements.
Unlike the park, the fairground was alien to mainstream narratives; architects did not accord it the prestige bestowed upon railway stations, factory sheds or grain silos. It was a matter of taste as much as propriety. Things reversed around the 1960s when such collectives as Archigram drew inspiration from fairgrounds, their enhanced status furnishing thereafter unprecedented urban and leisure models.
Coney Island’s liminal ludic experiences eventually succumbed to the alternative recreational mode of the park, and (according to Koolhaas) ‘the urbanism of good intentions’ with its sane and sunny entertainment obtained in green scenarios of the kind Rasmussen had advocated. The agent of that particular substitution was Robert Moses, the famed New York commissioner whom Jane Jacobs had denounced as prime culprit in the degradation of neighbourhoods and street life. Moses – who also doomed Kahn’s and Noguchi’s playground scheme in Manhattan – was a sponsor of mass recreational resorts.
Subjected to formal and material definition, orientation, encryption and adaptation, fields registered ludic activity as imprints, as much as choreographies, acquiring an enhanced presence in the course of the twentieth century, when the social mandate for recreational space and equipment became emphatic and distinctive. Much like templates, sports fields often became elements to consider in the fashioning of the outdoors. But sport just addressed the needs of a young and healthy part of the population. In parallel to the unprecedented entry of sports fields in the urban scene, other places were fashioned for children’s use whilst the notion of green space broadened the scope of leisure: the ludic programme was effectively changing the way cities were conceived. Fields hosted the ludic activities of athletes, children and citizens at large: many architects immersed themselves into their respective ludic agendas. How these were qualified by the architects within their respective visions about city and landscape is the subject of the following section.