What they are
The MSxB are installations, halfway between a toy and a microarchitecture.
The name is due to the fact that they are devices producing a space, each with its own qualities. As a consequence, they facilitate the experience that’s connected to that space.
The quality of a space can lies in the proportion between solid and void, light and shadow, opaque and transparent, dense and rarefied. If it’s significant, it stimulates the psyco-cognitive capabilities of the one who experience it but, more than all, it adds pleasure to this experience. In fact, the Machines are also big habitable toys and, as the more amusing toys, they’re open to many interprepretations and ways of playing.
In such a way, they leave a free space (now metaphorically…), a fringe to be filled by the children’s imagination, who continously reinvent their use.
Play and space, are both a discovery.
The playing concept
The Machines are therefore conceived as open elements, objects that could inspire different experiences of playing, only partially predictable.
They don’t bring back up any particular image or impose any given illusion (the castle, the little house…): in this sense they’re neutral, as a cardboard box or a plank can be.
The idea is that a fulfilling playing experience can be reached through simple objects, that could be recombined so to create many different scenarios.
Moreover, some of the Machines admit a small (but acceptable) amount of risk: if play is a simulation of the real life, it’s only through playing that a kid learn how to evaluate it. That’s why risk is a fundamental growth factor.
For this, the Machines propose a different playing concept from the one recurring in the ordinary playgrounds. Hyper-protective regulations, plus a repetitive, banal manufacturing have transformed these places into corrals ruled by any kind of mental and physical restrictions, where the (few) playing dynamics are always the same.
Through simplicity, the Machines reintroduce imagination.
A program
Machines can be of many types, for public spaces as well as for private ones, with low or no control, made with different materials and budgets, and different levels of maintenance. Of course, the project strenght is not in a singular machine as in its totality: that’s why, even as a first step, it’s necessary to produce at least a small group of them.
The first Machines will also work as a trigger for a later phase, an experimental workshop in which experts in other disciplines could get involved: psycologists, pedagogists, toys producers.
The experimentation could be extended including the children’s active participation: something that will contrast the toys production paradox by which, in the end, they’re all devised by adults.
An experiment
This experimental character is one of the main connotations of the project, and as such it must be interpreted, so as to make it also one of its strengths. Accepting that it is the activity itself that continually directs the next steps, corrects errors, refines objectives: a bit like in a sketch, when the final design originates from the continuous dialogue between hand and mind, between doing and thinking.
Links and reviews
Previous
Next
Giancarlo Artese
Architect, I began as a designer, doing research and experimentation, then designing for industry and eventually with the foundation of Objects/Projects, a furniture production company.
Member of the editorial staff of Ventre, an alternative architecture magazine.
Since the 2000s I’ve been involved in architecture, designing and building villas, hotels, infrastructures, first as a partner of Altromodo Architects, then founding artesestudio.
In 2011 I conceived and produced Sevenhits (www.sevenhits.com), a social media on passions.
Founder of Made in Earth (www.madeinearth.it), a non-profit organization, with numerous achievements to its credit.
Several awards, including a Honorable Mention at the B. Cappochin Architecture Biennale; finalist for the 2015 Italian Architecture Gold Medal, section Social Work.
Contacts: g.artese@artesestudio.it