HOMO LUDENS | HOMO FABER [AzCA Playground]

The Homo Ludens | Homo Faber project is a 4500sf privately owned custom playground that is open to the public. The design aspires to employ architectural space, form and material to render a stimulating play environment specific to the ergonomics and imaginations of the 2-5 year old user group. The project is conceived as a dialectic conversation between two social forces, the cultures of risk and security. They both facilitate freedom, exploration and growth but only in concert, a balance that is delicate and controversial. Security provides the necessary degree of safety and comfort to encourage children to thrive and is rendered through compliance with the safety standards established by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission.  Risk is the exposure to uncertainty and is rendered through the creative negotiation of those standards to provide children the opportunity to challenge their physical and psychological comfort zones.

Pedagogically, the project provided students an educational experience that is analogous to professional practice. Every student was involved in all project stages, working as a collaborative requiring each to act alternately as leader and follower. Students learned to listen to stakeholders, earn their trust and thereby authority over the design; once empowered they also learned to be responsible and accountable for the stakeholders’ interests. Students engaged in pre-design research; expeditiously drawing upon the knowledge and experience of relevant experts.  Students learned to work collaboratively through an iterative design process that began with ten proposals and concluded with a single design that was authored by no individual but by the collective. The act of making was considered a kinesthetic exploration of the aesthetic/technical dimensions of architecture but most importantly it facilitated a negotiation with reality, resulting in an architectural product subject to use and evaluation by the user group, early childhood educators and the general public.