Super Ordinary
University of Waterloo School of Architecture
M.Arch Thesis, Graduated with Commendation
April 2011
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Ordinary life oscillates between dichotomies: from work to leisure, from reality to fantasy, from private to public. These are the distinct and definite “floating worlds” that bring order to the chaos of experience; their boundaries are the containers of finite games. We are in perpetual motion, moving from game to game.
SUPER ORDINARY is an exploration of James Carse’s concept of the INFINITE GAME. It is an architectural investigation of the potential in that motion to transcend the serious and experience the truly playful, to suspend finite games within an ethereal infinite game; an attempt to manifest a place without boundaries in a world defined by them.
Lamport Stadium, in the Liberty Village neighbourhood of Toronto, is the setting for this journey. Built for professional sport as a separate and bounded place, the games of Lamport Stadium are theatrical. It is a floating world: on its field of play, we enter a space of defined roles, rules, and time. Its games are finite: we are open to possibility and chance, but only as a means to end the game, rather than continuing the play. Here, space is a predefined container for our experiences.
However, truly playful spaces are perpetually redefined by our experiences. Carsian space liberates personal narratives from finite games; it is a space that generates, rather than categorizes, experience. Ergo, rather than the site of finite games, SUPER ORDINARY imagines Lamport Stadium as an INFINITE GAME.
The limitations of finite play—field and bleacher, player and observer, inside and out, and so on—are blurred, and the stadium becomes a place of potential and of possibilities, of adventure and of imagination; here, through our irresistible oscillations, we can at once submit to the ecstasy of the place while forging our own narratives. It is a building that is never quite finished, but activated by the playful explorations of its users.
