Site Selection and Documentation: Seattle

Thesis Statement: City Space as Play Space

In today’s digital age, modern technologies have provided various alternate modes of engagement that satisfy our need for play. These technologies, such as television, computers, social networking, and video games were developed as enhanced, exaggerated, or expanded versions of everyday life. Although these media technologies provide non-goal oriented engagement for adults, they are static and location dependent. By investigating the spatial, visual, social and perceptive qualities that these technologies offer and translating them back into the realm of reality, architecture can become interactive through these applications as enhanced, exaggerated, and expanded versions of the digital play spaces we immerse ourselves in. This new architecture can exist as the play space for adults, and implanting this interactive architecture as a sequence of spaces into an urban context will allow physical activity, mental engagement, and visual stimulation to become an active part of everyday life.

Programmatic Criteria: Participation spaces connected and formed within an urban realm

1. Promotion of maximum involvement

2. Situated within an urban realm

3. Site(s) needs a simultaneous macro and micro scale

4. Spaces formed by the boundaries of adjacent buildings and/or roads

5. Spaces can connect to create a sequence

6. The sequence requires a beginning and an ending site

7. Naturally occurring obstacles and urban phenomena become part of game

8. Sites need to be a range of different sizes to allow for different program

Selected Site: Seattle

How does the Selected Site meet Programmatic Criteria:

1. Promotion of maximum involvement: Selected Site sequence weaves within the city, allowing users to participate randomly at will or follow the sequence in its entirety

2. Situated within an urban realm: Seattle has a dense urban core which sprawls parallel to the coastline

3. Site(s) needs a simultaneous macro and micro scale: Seattle acts as the macro scale of the game spaces, while the individual sites along the sequence are the micro scale

4. Spaces formed by the boundaries of adjacent buildings and/or roads: Many of the chosen sites are bounded by buildings on three sides and a street on the fourth, few are bounded by streets alone

5. Spaces can connect to create a sequence: Spaces are connected by a chosen sequence

6. The sequence requires a beginning and an ending site: The sequence has a chosen beginning and ending, on what are considered the two ends of the dense urban realm of Seattle

7. Naturally occurring obstacles and urban phenomena become part of game: The Alaskan Way Viaduct, the City Monorail, light rail, Seattle bus lines, grade change, and tendency for inclement weather each act as phenomena along the sequence of game spaces

8. Sites need to be a range of different sizes to allow for different program: The chosen sites’ footprints range in size from 25,000 square feet to 330,000 square feet, allowing the different programs to be accommodated for