Fun and Games: The Suppression of Architectural Authoriality and the Rise of the Reader

Authors

  • Elizabeth Keslacy University of Michigan

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7480/footprint.9.2.869

Abstract

Between the Roarkian caricature of the heroic modernist and the spectre of the contemporary starchitect, there was a period of resistance in which architectural authoriality came under fire. One of the most explicit challenges was issued through the use of gaming and simulation in both architectural education and practice in the 1960s and the 1970s, particularly in the work of Juan Pablo Bonta and Henry Sanoff - both of them architectural scholars, educators, and game enthusiasts.  By tracing the importation of gaming and simulation techniques into architecture, this paper will show how architectural games sought to refigure the architect as a collaborative figure embedded in a network of experts, participants and constituents, and to modulate the architect’s design authority by foregrounding the contributions of viewer-interpreters to the creation of meaning. Situating their work within gaming precedents, from war and business games to urban planning gaming-simulations, I show how architecture games - particularly design games - worked to develop the architectural reader as a creative force, in some quarters going so far as to posit interpretation as the basis of design. 

Author Biography

Elizabeth Keslacy, University of Michigan

Elizabeth Keslacy is a doctoral candidate at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan and a Dissertation Fellow at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library. She is at work on her dissertation, entitled 'The Architecture of Design: the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Museum of Design (1896-1976).' Her dissertation research explores architecture’s shifting affiliations with the decorative arts and design in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tracking the changing forms of utility imputed to historical ideas and objects between the pre-modern and Postmodern periods.

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Published

2015-12-20

Issue

Issue # 17 | Autumn / Winter 2015 | The ‘Bread & Butter’ of Architecture

Section

Article

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