Rhyme Paysage

For the bet­ter part of a year I have been pre­oc­cu­pied with the thought: if you were to design a game in the land­scape, what kind of game should it be? And I mean ​“should” in a moral fash­ion, know­ing that a game is not only a pas­time, but, as the New Games move­ment rec­og­nized, an argu­ment about how to be in and see the world.

I have the priv­i­lege of a job that allows me to enlist oth­ers to explore thoughts like that, so I asked the first-year grad­u­ate stu­dents to join me. Our site was the for­mer Dor­ri­an Com­mons, a lit­tle park that was recent­ly con­vert­ed to a park­ing lot to address the whol­ly fab­ri­cat­ed lack of park­ing in down­town Colum­bus. Using some of the tools I have used with stu­dents before, we imag­ined chang­ing the site to a new land­scape that retained the max­i­mum of asphalt and sub-base in new forms, while actu­al­ly recharg­ing stormwa­ter instead of shunt­ing it into an over-sized pipe. 

The stu­dents then invent­ed a new land­scape game, work­ing inside a com­i­cal­ly long series of eth­i­cal guide­lines I gave them (max­i­mize the pos­si­bil­i­ty for peo­ple of dif­fer­ent sizes, ages, gen­ders, incomes, and mobil­i­ties to play togeth­er; build play off land­forms; min­i­mize injury while involv­ing phys­i­cal exer­tion; min­i­mize envi­ron­men­tal dis­tur­bance; you get the idea). The result is some­where between boc­ce, golf, and man­cala. If we define a good idea in land­scape as one work­able IRL, I think this game is the best idea that has come out of any of my stu­dios; and I would be hap­py in five years to see every pick­le­baller doing this instead on the nation’s sim­i­lar­ly under­uti­lized lots.

Final­ly, each stu­dent made their own pur­pose-built land­scape to tile onto the site. What the site lost in coher­ence it gained in vibran­cy – at least, I think so! For our final review, we were lucky to get first-rate review­ers in Kel­ley Lemon and Mar­tin Hogue, who con­firmed what I had already sus­pect­ed – it is a fine group of design­ers and no doubt des­tined for good things.

Also! You may see slight changes and over­all improve­ments to the site, cour­tesy of Gina Giampao­lo, who also ward­ed off impend­ing doom on the back-end. Such fea­tures include: an index that does not stop at ​“F,” the abil­i­ty to post love­ly GIFs like the ones that graced the last entry, and a new type­face that is not hideous­ly expen­sive to license. Thank you, Gina!