Playtime!

The past week I have been wondering about the effect of rigidity in planning and design of the city in continuation from my earlier posts. My earlier posts on this topic focuses on two case studies of past residential projects. The similarity between the two projects are obvious and I was thinking of posting another which deals with the effect of rigidity in planning and design in a much larger scale such as the city. I initially look to Melbourne and New York for the reason that the two cities are planned based on the model of a grid city and I thought the effect of rigidity would be more obvious in cities modelled after the grid rather than one that grow organically. However, through my experience of living in both cities in recent years, I realized that although Melbourne is a far more rigid city in terms of lifestyle and the planning of the city as compared to Sydney, the different characters and demographic in Melbourne has resulted in a more vibrant city than one would imagine in a gridded city with strict planning policy. It was not possible to find an example of a city which over the years have obediently stuck to the regulation and planning policy that was implemented. As such, I expanded my search into the realms of cinematic space for an example of a virtual city that could provide a look into the result of a city that maintained strict regulation and planning policies in the attempt of maximizing the effectiveness of performance in the city.

A good example of this would be Jacques Tati’s Playtime where Tati played Monsieur Hulot in a movie that criticized the modern movement that is pro-function. The clip below is the trailer of Playtime and it shows that the society may function well if all the individuals are performing their routine “dance” but if one were to act differently (which is inevitable in a society with various individuals), the systematic routine is broken. Playtime is a satire of modern times set in a fictionalized and absurdly modern Paris. The film opens with citizens moving from one place to the next, enthusiastically completing daily tasks without waste or want. Everything is in its right place, every shoelace tied and all garbage properly dispensed. The city’s citizens remain submerged in a pristine city-scape characterized by transparency, honesty and efficiency. In Playtime, the modern ideal appears at its logical end. Everything is modular, as the city appears composed by a series of standardized units; there is seemingly complete equality in daily life.

But even a world that is regularized and efficient as the Modern ideal such as the one seen in Playtime cannot eliminate daily life’s unforeseen events. In Tati’s world (or Tativille) every action is one component in the machine of human patterns, but as in many machines, there remains a margin of error. Monsieur Hulot wanders around the street and buildings as if in complete confusion. He is caught in the machine but does not seem to understand it, and his confused meanderings over the course of the film peel away the polished layers of his modern environment to reveal its absurdity. Hulot reveals that a pristine environment does not necessarily create joy in and of itself, but that chance encounters and unpredictable environments instead bring a much-needed humanity to otherwise mechanistic routines.

I find that Tati’s Playtime is a good example to showcase the disparity between the results of a city, which was designed based solely on the objective of providing function and effectiveness which draws from the modern ideal of precision and function, and the actions of individuals who have different characteristics and behavior among each other which are the human aspects that cannot be assumed are identical which would work in a monolithic functioning city. However, I don’t think this means that Tati is saying the modern world is flawless after all the monolithic and impersonal spaces he has shown us but more that in interacting with any space, even ones designed to discourage individual thought and expression, people do end up changing it by their presence.