What We Learned From PLAY: How Design and Architecture Embrace Playfulness

Across architecture, art, and design, the projects we encountered suggested that play does not necessarily remove us from reality. Quite the opposite: it can make us more alert to how spaces are organized, who gets to participate in them, and how tightly our behavior is usually scripted. From basketball courts and labyrinths to swinging bells and experiments with chance, here is what play taught us.

Achille Castiglioni and Bruno Munari understood this long before playfulness became a design-world adjective. At Fondazione Achille Castiglioni, an exhibition bringing the two Italian designers into conversation revealed curiosity as part of a rigorous working method: Castiglioni collected toys, glasses, gadgets, and everyday curiosities, while Munari experimented with the photocopier through his Xerografie Originali. Their pleasure in things was not separate from their practice. Looking, collecting, testing, and occasionally doing something simply because it was amusing became ways of generating ideas.

Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event

The same freedom appeared when children were asked to draw faces without worrying about anatomy, proportion, or good taste. In Draw Me A Face, their drawings were translated into makeup looks, preserving misplaced eyes, irregular lines, and strange combinations instead of correcting them. The experiment exposed something adults spend years learning to suppress: an idea does not need to be reasonable before it can be interesting. Play makes room for the unfinished, the absurd, and the apparently wrong—precisely the places where something new can begin.

Public space is full of quiet instructions. Benches tell us where to sit, paths where to walk, fences where to stop, and signs what not to touch. Looking at projects by designers and artists working differently, we found another possibility: architecture can signal that unusual behavior is not only tolerated but welcome. Thoughtful interventions can give adults permission to climb, linger, splash, balance, wander, or simply behave less predictably in the city.

Sports courts demonstrate how little it can take to change that relationship. Basketball and tennis courts are among the city's most standardized environments, governed by familiar dimensions, lines, and rules. Yet artists and architects have repeatedly treated those same surfaces as civic canvases, using color, material, landscape, and construction to turn ordinary sporting infrastructure into recognizable pieces of public space. The rules remain, but the atmosphere changes. A court can still tell you how to play while simultaneously suggesting that the city belongs to you.