The Floor Is Lava

When children play a game of pretend in a living room, anything is possible with imagination. And yet, the game is still defined by the space and arrangement of the room. The couch may become a cliff that the child-explorers must scale, or the coffee table can become an island floating in a sea of lava. These fantasies are limitless and are one reality occurring in the act of play. But, this reality is also linked to the reality that is the one perceived as children occupying a living room. The size and placement of the couch relative to the coffee table translates to the size of the crevasse of lava the children must traverse, and if the room were entirely empty, the game would change entirely. This is a heterotopia, a place that has a spatio-temporal relationship in which multiplicities occur. The room is a living room, but with the children present, it is a terrain to be explored.

The staging of the Downtown Athletic Club, called out as an example of projective architecture, is not completely unlike this. The freedom of each floor of a skyscraper allows in the same place several items to be occurring in the same plan and place simultaneously. The form limits what can be done or conducted on a floor, due to spatial constraints, but at the same time, the programmatic possibilities are limited by only space and imagination. The diagram of the project and approach give insight into the virtual, into the inventive games of the potential of an architecture.

It could be surmised that projective architecture utilizes concepts, disciplines, and programs through an imaginative layering in an ingenious way reminiscent of creatively solving how to cross a living room/lava floor using one’s couch cushions.