Playing Along and Playing Against: On the Uses of 'Leisure' for the Production of Architecture in Liberec circa 1968

• In Event: Free Time and Emancipatory Space in Eastern European Art and Architecture, 1960s-1980s

Abstract

An international architectural symposium and competition on leisure in Liberec, in 1966, embraced “free time” as a topic of vital importance to life in post-industrial society everywhere. It was a theme that the organizers believed could meaningfully bring together architectural teams from Western and Eastern European countries. This paper will follow a playful thread of conceptualizing leisure by the SIAL Liberec architect Miroslav Masák, the key figure in establishing SIAL’s “Kindergarden” (Školka), and his colleagues, in order to complicate their own idea about the easy trans-systemic translatability of the term leisure, and tease out what their work and organization of practice might have to teach us about the specific Second World nexus of leisure time, play, labor and architecture.

Author

• Ana Miljacki, MIT