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Here’s your mission: We’ve made contact with extraterrestrial life and they are visiting Earth! Build Boston’s first E.T. resort.
Visitors to Boston’s First Night accepted the mission, using pink and black foam blocks. This young visitor tested out a resort structure, happily tore off the roof, then decided to create a door.
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Older builders created giant structures, inventing new ways to attach blocks as they went.
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The blocks became horses and crutches.
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Grownups tended to hover on the periphery, but some jumped right in.
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As the day progressed, some blocks lost their tabs, partly reducing their usefulness for building, but creating smaller blocks. These were used to build Jenga-like towers, or floor patterns, or simply for material exploration using fingernails and teeth.
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“Humans are so adaptable,” said artist and urbanist Kate Balug, who had created the mission. When Balug moved to Boston, she noticed a distinct lack of playfulness in public space. We New Englanders are known to be reserved, and our public spaces are dominated by passive enjoyment. Maybe the ubiquitous statues of historic figures subtly intimidate us into following the rules. Balug is addressing the problem head-on; she co-founded the Department of Play, with a mission to “bring a spirit of empathy and wonder to public life through immersive, irresistible, and aesthetically appealing collective experiences in public space.”
Balug wants to use play to imagine a better city. Instead of endless public meetings with the usual gang of suspects, why not create a “magic circle” where the rules don’t apply, so people can rearrange their community without feeling limited by a planner’s rendering? Check out the Department of Play website to see other experiments in city-as-playscape, including a crosswalk puppet show using headlights!
The post Block Party, Department of Play, First Night Boston 2014 appeared first on Playscapes.
