From the solitary hut to the cosmopolitan ark, we build worlds we inhabit or co-inhabit. The world of play is located in the mysterious interval that connects our subjectivities to external reality. It sometimes happens that architectures crystallize in this ephemeral space, for a while becoming the stage of our lives, the horizon of our habits. This power of imagination is at the heart of the curatorial system in which childhood playgrounds and those of architects, artists, and designers meet.
The exhibition presents works from various authors, combining materials from the collections of
CIVA in Brussels, Drawing Matter in
Somerset, Fundação Marques da Silva in Porto, and private collections. It brings together architects such as
Aldo Rossi and Raul Hestnes Ferreira, Anne Van Loo and James Gowan,
Louis Herman De Koninck and
Cedric Price,
Buckminster Fuller, and Fernando Lanhas, Akarova and Renaat Braem. The exhibition display, designed by Ivo Poças Martins, knits together multiple objects, revealing latent meanings and playful readings of the architect’s works.
At Play: Exhibition design
A single, pink, 90-metre-long wall zigzagging across Garagem Sul’s gallery defines a variety of spaces used to present At Play.
The design follows David Malaud’s leitmotif of playfulness as a way for children and architects alike to imagine and create worlds. Garagem Sul, the Lisbon exhibition premises, is literally a former parking facility. The wall’s structure varies according to the exhibition four main concepts, concepts governing the way a child’s perception of the world develops through play: body consciousness, language, memory, and abstract thought.
The layout is a clash between the memory of the forms built in Brussels and Lisbon’s concrete column grid. More columns were added to the existing ones, with the new ones tilted, rotated, and broken to disrupt their former Cartesian order, while serving to mark the main entrance, close a passage, or show visitors their way out. The space is populated by further objects and shapes sampled from various references. There is a scaled version of VSBA’s “ghost buildings” in Franklin Court in Philadelphia housing a collection of models by contemporary Portuguese architects, a cut-out passage as the cartoon-like explosion of "This is not a love song" by Didier Faustino, and niches mimicking
Aldo Rossi’s beach cabin, the original of which is on display in the same room. There is also a circular sandpit and table with wooden building blocks to cater to younger visitors of all ages.
Little or no paint was used to create this colourful environment. The walls are pink, their colour derived from the use of bare fireproof plasterboard; the green objects (fake columns, display cases, plinths, and other custom-designed elements) are made out of water-resistant MDF. Both the pasteboard and the exposed metal frames have a minimum number of cuts and were used in their original factory dimensions to enable them to be easily disassembled and reused.
The exhibition Archaeological Fragments of Portuguese Architecture is presented in parallel to the main exhibition, enclosed by a light-blue curtain suspended from the ceiling. It is built using elements recycled from previous shows—the curtain itself and a long, white powder-coated steel table—which are reorganized to generate a new experience for the visitor. Both the contents and the resulting scenario benefit from the original assemblage of existing elements.
