PLAYTIME

there are 5 parts that i find interesting in the movie.

the first part is the the scene that Kyle mentioned before.
those cubic cells in the office building seemed so organized and easy to recognize the order from above but as Hulot went downstairs on the escalator, the above eye-level partitions of those cells made him confused and lost in the homogeneous surrounding. This reminds me that the conflict between the user inside and outside of the cells. Higher partitions keep the worker inside from being interrupted by distraction such as people passing by and noise, but also, the partitions could have been designed to carry identity and directional reference.

Second part is the juxtaposition of the two incidents in in the transparent apartments and the connection of residents’ action and reaction. when the man on the right apartment was taking off his cloth, the mother on the left cover her daughter’s eyes and when the man on the left bent down showing his bottom towards the right, the couple on the right leaned back. I don’t know if others see this or not. But tome, this scene turned the apartment building into a big stage showing everything in the building. Things happening in those windows can be seen as connected or individual events depending on the spectators’ imagination.

The third is the scene of the restaurant. It was meant to be well designed as a well-functioning restaurant. But everything was in disorder. The ill was too narrow, the bar chair was too tall, the AC was blowing towards the customers, the mechanic box was taking over the main circulation, the window for the kitchen to deliver food was too small, the little height difference was not easy to be sensed. Combining all these, the restaurant turned out to be a chaos. But users in the space managed to find their own way to use the wracks and kept having fun like the American used the fallen ceiling as a partition of his private party and the door man holding the handle pretending there was still a glass door. Activities and alternative usages emerged even though the design was not perfectly satisfying.

The forth is the emphasis on the glass. There were a lot of scenes showing the reflection and transparency of the glass. As the glass has become a widely used material in architecture, the way architects use glass should be more careful. Otherwise it would also cause the problem, like Hulot misunderstood that the manager was in the next building while the manager was actually in the same room waving to Hulot.

The last part is the implication of the city as an amusement park in the last scene using carousel and swinging boat and so on. It’s like saying the world has become a experiment lab for architecture. All kinds of new materials and styles are being designed and give us unexpected special experience. Like the way Gehry, Zaha and Koolhaas amazed us. And the architecture incubator under construction in Shanghai.