Urban Future Lab Founder and University of Texas San Antonio associate professor Dr. Antonio Petrov is an invited presenter of “The Architecture Play,” a November 8 symposium at the Kent State University College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED). The “Second Act” in the initiative—which is a collaboration between Kent CAED and the A+D Museum in Los Angeles—the symposium gathers voices from a wide range of cultural institutions, architectural practices, and academia, who will explore and construct liminal zones of play during a day-long sequence of activities and discussions.
In his presentation, Dr. Petrov traces the connection between architectural play and improv theater, illuminating the ways in which architectural processes are informed by improvisation. Rather than adhering to a script, improv theater interacts and responds; it is the experience of a play as an act that is unplanned, unscripted, and created spontaneously. Dr. Petrov will offer the Urban Future Lab’s view of play as an act rather than contemplation and discuss how this form of play materializes in “acts of doing” that have taken on a new resonance in the lab’s work.
Through a critical engagement with diverse embodied structures of play within the participants’ work, the symposium aims to generate a knowledge baseline of the concept of play in the historical and contemporary architectural discourse, resourcing and designing a growing network of mutual inquiry. “The Architecture Play” began with Act One, a roundtable discussion between the Director of the Architecture Program at Kent, the Director of the A+D Museum, and four moderators. In Act Three, invited panelists will produce an avenue of investigation that will be injected into their teaching, while the Play concludes with Act Four, a collaborative exhibition that will be showcased at the A+D Museum and Armstrong Gallery at the CAED along with a publication.
Participants at the November 8 symposium are organizers Ivan Bernal (Kent State), Clemens Finkelstein (Princeton), and Anthony Morey (A+D Museum); Kent State faculty Taraneh Meshkani, Katie Strand, and Jon Yoder; guests Irene Chin (CCA – Centre Canadien d’Architecture), Gary Fox (Getty Museum), Jia Gu (Materials & Applications), Lisa L. Hsieh (University of Minnesota), Kyle May (Kyle May, Architect PC), Antonio Petrov (University of Texas San Antonio), and Leila Anna Wahba (A+D Museum); and Kent State University students.
