Time to Play maps the sprawling, contradictory territory of play — from parkour in the streets to addiction in casino architecture — assembling a polyphonic argument about how games and sport shape urban life and social behaviour.
About This Book
Produced in the lead-up to the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Time to Play refuses the predictable survey. Edited by SCAU Architecture, it approaches its subject the way the exquisite corpse game approaches a drawing: each contributor works independently, with no overarching editorial hand smoothing the seams. The result is a deliberately unruly collection — interviews, photo reports, illustrations, essays, analyses, and excerpts — that moves between grief in video games, bigorexia, the sacred dimensions of sport, gender equity in French athletics, and the spatial logic of gambling. For designers, architects, and cultural theorists, it reframes play not as leisure but as a lens on power, ritual, and the built environment.
Key Features
- 170 pages of essays, interviews, photo reports, illustrations, analyses, and excerpts
- Edited by SCAU Architecture
- Published by Archipress Editions, 2024
What You'll Discover
- How casino architecture is designed around the psychology of addiction, and what that reveals about spatial manipulation in the built environment
- The overlap between sporting ritual and sacred rites, and the symbolism of colour across competitive sports cultures
- Urban sports — parkour, skateboarding — read as forms of spatial occupation and resistance within city environments
- The freeform, exquisite-corpse editorial structure itself: a method that enacts its subject, allowing readers to navigate the content in any order they choose
About the Author
SCAU Architecture is the editor of this collection, bringing together independent contributors across disciplines to produce a work whose structure mirrors its subject. [Details available upon request]
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 170
- Dimensions: 21 x 28 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9782491906429
- Publisher: Archipress Editions
- Publication Date: 2024
Perfect For: Architects and urban designers interested in the cultural politics of public space; theorists and researchers working at the intersection of sport, ritual, and the city; design students seeking unconventional editorial approaches to cultural criticism.