Play is free action outside strict necessity, a movement of imagination, chance, and invention. It creates its own rules but also bends or breaks them, producing spaces where meaning is rehearsed, tested, or transformed. Philosophy has long circled around play. For Schiller, play was the highest form of freedom—where humans reconcile sense and reason. For Huizinga, in Homo Ludens, play was the root of culture itself, not a distraction but a generative act. Gadamer later described play as an event that exceeds the player, unfolding its own rhythm, something larger than intention. Play is never pure innocence: it can be competition, conflict, even cruelty. Play in design process can be both program and philosophy. Spaces of play allow people to test boundaries, situate freedom, kill time, or experience estrangement. To design for play is to accept unpredictability as part of the life of a place. Arendt and Marx remind us that labor is necessity, work is production, while play resists these economies—unproductive, excessive, sometimes even wasteful. That resistance is also its power.
“The tool is trying to counter the friction of power and reposition power as cooperation and co-creation early on to generate mature design briefs from the get-go. And that the process of participating for all parties is not a drudgery of boredom, frustrations and resulting anger or dismissal of feedback loops”
Almost every park needs a playground area and children’s playgrounds are one of the toughest typologies to design. The equipment available is either ugly or beyond budget, especially in the public realm. Then the programme is repetitive — poles, slides, swings, climbing walls, sandpits. For the designer to cover the developmental needs of all ages […]
Sara Eichner is a visual artist and designer with a keen interest in data visualisations and cartography. She works with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and programming languages like Python and uses design software to translate data into comprehensible visual stories. Her work is people-centred and she often uses data to represent less-heard voices. Eichner is […]
The book by the legendary Danish landscape architect, Carl Theodor Sørensen (1893-1979), originally published in 1966, is for the first time published in English, with a foreword by Joost Emmerik and an Introduction by Lodewijk Wiegersma. Published by Blawdruk Publishers and Sonja Poll, the 39 Unusual Gardens for an Ordinary House is a landmark book […]
HPO is an art and event-architecture group from Ferrara. Their work has been, among other venues, presented at Milan Design Week and 18. Venice Biennale.
In the interview, we discuss the marginal position, DIY, incomplete architecture and the importance of play.
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is also […]
Landezine met with Taktyk at the XII Barcelona International Landscape Biennial in November 2023, at the same place where we made the first interview, seven years ago. Taktyk’s work is a collage of collaborations showing sensitivity to the site, tackling its most vulnerable spots. Sébastien Penfornis and Thierry Kandjee seek through prospective visions, on-site works […]
The production of landscape architecture projects has been in recent years outstanding, and our entire professional community has much to be proud of. But as always, there is a flip side; like in architecture or any design discipline of the globalised and speeding-up world, we are faced with a sea of sameness. Too many buildings […]
It is with sadness that we learned about the passing of renowned Canadian landscape architect Claude Cormier. In 1995, he established Claude Cormier Architectes Paysagistes in Montreal and, in nearly three decades, received a plethora of awards for his work, both in Canada and internationally. At Landezine, we featured a selection of projects by his […]
Urban biodiversity? Yes, please! Nevertheless … … Due to the transitional phase of our understanding of nature in the light of the Anthropocene, there are still some important notions, contradictions and misunderstandings that need to be addressed. To do so, we will operate with terms like nature, ecology, biodiversity, landscape, and aesthetics, and we’ll focus […]
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