Inglenook: A Game of Architectural Generation
I developed this game a few years ago in collaboration with a couple of friends as a tool for architecture students. It is a tool for learning how to work fast, produce ideas, think in a propositional way, through different materials, design methods and styles. At one point I felt inspired to try to develop it further, and began drawing a kind of quasi-tarot presentation of some of the ‘cards’ but I ran out of energy, and I’m publishing it in more of less the state we left it, in the hope that someone might find it interesting.
The game (which I developed with my friends Christopher Burman and Joseph Augustin for our students at the Bartlett) is in the tradition ‘aleatoric’ (i.e. random, chaotic) creative techniques, like Burroughsian ‘cut up,’ or Peter Schmidt and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, as well as design puzzles like the Nine-Square Grid Plan.
But it’s also an attempt to get students of architecture out of certain very common bad habits. Architecture students are often very bad at getting on with their projects. They obsess about things that don’t really matter — what the building is for, or the beautiful and highly intellectual story they’re going to tell about it — and waste the time they could spend actually developing its design in detail.
There is a reason for this. Successful architects are good at presenting their work, and often describe their projects as if there was a beautiful and well formed ‘idea’ ab initio. Often there is literally a fake napkin or site sketch. It’s a forgivable fiction that works well as a device for quickly introducing a proposal to an audience. But it’s nearly always, in literal terms, untrue.
By and large, ideas start off pretty wonky and get good through the velocity of iteration. Most of what is good about a proposal is discovered along the way. Students don’t generally understand this and thus often spend valuable weeks anxiously ‘researching’ and agonising about whether the idea is a good one, how to start, and so on, when they would be much better off just sitting down and drawing something mediocre and trying to develop it.1
The purpose of the game was to get students to practice making rapid and intuitive decisions within a set time limit. You play it by rolling dice (or using random numbers) to generate a random brief from a set of tables. This imposes on you an architectural philosophy or paradigm, a situation or context, a building type, scale, materials to use, and even a type of drawing or other representation. You play the game by then immediately designing the building that meets that brief.
You would typically receive a set of randomly generated prompts which together generate a more or less paradoxical brief. You might get Proportional, Basalt, Thatch, Within Five Minutes of Your House, French Windows, Make Something Much Too Large.
The only aim is to immediately design a building, based on that prompt. You can take as loose or pedantic a reading of the prompt as you like. There aren’t any win conditions as such, or any particular way to be disqualified.
When we played it, students had a couple of days to finish each response. You don’t need that long. Twenty minutes is fine. Repetition is good, as is doing it with other people.
We chose our parameters to emphasise tectonics (the connection between materials, construction, and style). But it can be run in really any way you like.
As a pedagogical tool, it was honestly no more than partially successful, but it was genuinely a lot of fun, which has its own value.
As a ‘game’ it is extremely half-baked. You really need to break the rules half the time to get it to work. Re-rolling a few times to get something good is advised.
Everything is copied below — dice tables, some short instructions and context. At the end I demonstrate a round of play.
INGLENOOK: A GAME OF ARCHITECTURAL GENERATION
The function of the ‘game’ is to create a broad range of unpredictable briefs which combine material, formal and scenario based cues. Its purpose is to generate the rights sorts of ‘problems’ to provoke creative responses.
A participant receives a minimum of one of each of the following three prompts selected randomly from the table below
Forms (1x)
Types, architectural ‘objects’, structural systems, philosophies or design principles.
Scenarios (1x)
Locations, contexts, adjacencies, motivations
Resources (any number)
Materials, resources, technologies, ways of building
Plus an optional number of
Wild Cards (any number)
Elements which have to be included, or any other sort of creative restriction.
Once you have drawn your cards, you should immediately design your building.
If you like to live dangerously you can also select a random method:
Representations
Types of drawing, model or other presentation tool
DEMONSTRATION — A Round of Play
Let’s summon some random numbers and create a prompt. I receive:
Form — Module
Scenarios — In the middle of a busy street, On an 8x9 metre rectangle
Resources — Limestone, Diamond Saw
Wild Cards — Playroom, Picture Window
Representation — Plan and Section
The scenarios remind me of Brodsky and Utkin’s Villa Nautilus design, in which a weird little house sits in the middle of a traffic island.
Module obviously implies the repetition of some kind of spatial unit. The Wild Cards are kind of self evident but not all that interesting.
The resources are more interesting. Obviously these materials are actually complementary. This is the tool you would actually use for this material. Were it otherwise, I might choose to assume that the tool implies the appropriate material. The combination of both together makes me think of the forms that can be created with single cuts. Various types of polyhedra (a).
In particular, I’m reminded of the oddly menacing stone that appears in the back of Dürer’s Melancholia I. It’s a well-known curiosity, with a curious, face-like shadow on one side (b).
I spent a bit of time playing around with the pyramid as a module, and thought about the tomb of Lars Porsena. It’s a very peculiar lost monument, described as being made from tall pyramids, supporting a bronze globe, with bells and more pyramids on top. It sounds vaguely like a playground, which connects to another part of the prompt.
In the end, I draw an arrangement of melancholia blocks as a kind of wedding cake with a big bell (c,d)
QED.
In some educational systems, you would get around this by simply giving them a brief with a full schedule of areas and tell them to get on with it — in most British schools this is considered unacceptably tyrannical