SP06US. LAFAYETTE, LOUISIANA, USA.
PROJECT PLAYHOUSE | GREENhouse: CULTVATING PLAYSPACE WITH SCRAP
In the spring of 2006, the Healing House of Lafayette, Louisiana - a local non-profit dedicated to helping grieving children – invited students working with the International Design Clinic to be one of three design teams to design and construct a playhouse for charity. Wanting to maximize their impact, the students immediately decided to give away the money donated for materials and fabricate the playhouse using primarily found or reclaimed elements. To realize this ambition, the students needed to find a material that was free and readily available, create a method of working with this material that would answer the demands of the project, and execute their design – all within four weeks.
The unique pressures offered by these parameters were matched by equally pressing desire to incorporate more dynamic forms of interaction, play and learning than generally found within the playhouse typology. To support this initiative, the students used expertise from a range of fields to create several key principles of play, including the following items:
1. THE PLAYHOUSE MUST GRAB THE ATTENTION OF CHILDREN at various stages of development and CREATE A COMMUNITY OF PLAY FOR CHILDREN OF ALL AGES.
2. Given the fact that children do not always have the cognitive development necessary to express themselves with words, THE PLAYHOUSE MUST ENDEAVOR TO CREATE THIS COMMUNITY THROUGH ACTS OF PLAY. The playhouse must therefore encourage its occupants to discover together, trade notes, and help one another discover new ways to play.
3. To maintain this play, THE PLAYHOUSE MUST CREATE A DIALOGICAL RELATIONSHIP WITH ITS OCCUPANTS. Instead of imposing a specific brand of play, the offered environment must defy convention and instigate the creation of new occupations and uses.
4. Finally, THE PLAYHOUSE SHOULD ALLOW THE CHALLENGES POSED BY THIS DIALOGUE TO PROMPT CURIOSITY, INSTIGATE CREATIVE EXPLORATIONS, AND ENCOURAGE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT.
These design initiatives, when combined with the various budgetary, programmatic and scheduling conditions already mentioned, placed enormous pressure upon any potential tectonic solution – resulting in weeks of failed attempts. Not until the end of the third week of the project did the students locate an acceptable material: hundreds of small scraps of dimensional lumber that had been thrown away by local lumberyards.
As the students collected these scraps over the next week, they played with their new material to see what it offered, eventually landing on a response that not only took into account the unique properties of the found material, but did so in a way that would allow the construction to take place in an extremely short amount of time.
The resulting tectonic approach allowed the students to assemble a playhouse in less than five days using primarily found or recycled material. The resulting work not only raised around $7000 for a local charity that helps grieving children, but it has since been donated to a group that works with battered women and abused children.
