Playing, Critically

The Start of the Start

This project was first conceived in response to the Insights Through Asia Challenge (ITAC) 2025 open call by the Asian Institute at the University of Toronto, which invited field research in Asia on the theme of changing world order. Our proposal, titled Radical Play, located Japan as its research site, a relational object, and took as its initial prompt the artist–philosopher duo Arakawa and Gins’s experimental architectural works under the concept of Reversible Destiny and their central philosophical scream, “we have decided not to die”—a radical provocation of play. Their work sought to resist the human condition of mortality by creating environments that physically and mentally challenge inhabitants, fostering a continuous process of learning and adaptation that keeps the body and mind in a state of active awareness, thereby promoting longevity. In many ways, it echoes a child’s way of embracing the world through play and inhabiting place.

The largest iteration of this concept is the Site of Reversible Destiny in Gifu’s Yōrō Park. The park is designed as a landscape of deliberate disorientation, where uneven ground, tilted structures, and unexpected perspectives force visitors to navigate instability with their whole bodies. In Japanese, Yōrō (養老) literally means “to nourish or care for the elderly,” which, when read alongside Arakawa and Gins’s obsession with mortality, sparked one of our initial questions: what might a play space for seniors look like?

From this starting point, our research planning opened outward. We became curious about the reciprocal relationship between play and design in avant-garde movements in Japan, and about how different forms of aging, be it demography, architecture, or social awareness, become visible in the built environment. These questions were not only theoretical but embodied: play itself became a method of research, a way of learning sites directly through the body, treating disorientation, wandering, and encounter as ways of generating knowledge. What if play could also become a method for conducting field research?

Expansion: Networks and Encounters
As research planning expanded, we became fascinated by traces of play can be found in the Metabolists’ design enterprise and curious about their legacy in Japan’s contemporary built environment—from Expo ’70 to Kodomo no Kuni, which hosted Isamu Noguchi’s first completed playground. We were also drawn to the Tokyo Toilet Project, first encountered through Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, and to the Setouchi Triennale as a regeneration model for depopulated aging islands. Together, these gave shape to a set of questions about how design and play intersect with demographic shifts, longevity, and legacy.

Through a network of personal and professional contacts, as well as the diverse interests of team members, the itinerary grew well beyond its starting points. Encounters along the way introduced us to spaces that were part architecture, part performance, part daily ritual: tea time with seniors in Tokyo, an architecture appreciation workshop with local architects, researchers, and artists, the Kanjirō Kawai House in Kyoto blending the gestures of living and making, and contemporary examples by SANAA, Sou Fujimoto, and Tadao Ando. Each site layered a different mode of play onto our research, while also raising questions about aging, maintenance, and legacy.

Play as Method
For this project, we approached play not only as joy or leisure, or children’s entitlement, but as a way of thinking with our bodies, an embodied method for researching urban space, design practices, public art, and how life is shaped across generations. Play became a delay, a way to suspend predetermined outcomes and research assumptions, inviting observation, chance, and wandering.

This notion of play resonates with Henri Bergson’s idea of duration: lived time understood not as discrete units, but as becoming, flow, and transformation. By refusing closure, play opens up ways of generating knowledge through purposelessness, disorientation, and encounter. It also unsettles disciplinary boundaries. Within our team’s diverse backgrounds—architecture, visual studies, East Asian studies, media studies—play offered a shared language to approach sites from different perspectives, outside of strictly academic protocols. In this way, play became both method and critique: a way to inhabit research as something open-ended, embodied, and collective.

Aging as Context
These embodied approaches unfolded against the backdrop of Japan’s rapidly aging society. Sites once designed for children or imagined as future-oriented utopias, such as Kodomo no Kuni in the 1960s or Expo ’70 in Osaka, are now part of a landscape marked by demographic shifts and material deterioration, where the very generations these spaces once addressed are themselves aging. For instance, renovating public toilets has become an opportunity to renew social awareness around accessibility, gender, invisible labour, and corporate philanthropy. Meanwhile, art and architecture projects on islands like Naoshima and Teshima are framed as strategies to regenerate aging populations and fragile economies. Across these examples, we explored how the thread of play intertwines with questions of longevity, legacy, and renewal.

Questions We Asked
We asked how play shifts across contexts, and what it might reveal about the infrastructures and conditions of urban life. We wondered how seniors play in Japan, and what play spaces mean to them. Could avant-garde design practices—from the Metabolists to Isamu Noguchi, Arakawa and Gins—be understood through play, and what legacies of intergenerational public space have they left behind, especially in works by contemporary designers such as SANAA, Sou Fujimoto, and Tadao Ando? Could play itself become a method of research? And, as we traced spaces across different decades, we asked how questions of aging and maintenance—whether of social norms, bodies, buildings, or communities—might reshape what play means in the present and future.

Sites and Itinerary
We pursued these questions across sites shaped by specific urban contexts and historical conditions:

📍 Tokyo: The Tokyo Toilet Project in Shibuya reprogrammed accessibility, dignity, and care in everyday design. At the Mitaka Reversible Destiny Lofts, play itself became a way of living. We also joined an architecture appreciation workshop with architect and researcher Masamichi Tamura, paired with a tea-time chat about senior life and play with local women.

📍 Yokohama: Kodomo no Kuni, opened in 1965 as a vast children’s park, was designed by Metabolist architects and became the site of Isamu Noguchi’s first completed playground. Today, it marks how postwar visions of childhood play now intersect with a society where that generation is itself aging.

📍 Gifu: Arakawa and Gins’s Site of Reversible Destiny challenged us to navigate disorientation as a form of embodied research, while SANAA’s Kitagata Apartment Building offered a radically pared-down vision of shared living.

📍 Kyoto: The Kanjirō Kawai House, where we trace gestures of play in traditional craft and space-making, accompanied by side notes on spatial design and underground architecture.

📍 Osaka: The grounds of Expo ’70 and the ongoing site for Expo 2025, markers of Japan’s shifting visions of modernity and collective futures. Expo ’70 embodied the utopian spirit of the Metabolists, while Expo 2025 promotes new sensitivities but also traffics in spectacle and capitalist speculation.

📍 Naoshima and Teshima: Islands where art, architecture, and landscape reconfigure play as encounter and immersion. Introduced as strategies to revitalize aging communities and economies, these projects also raise questions: how can such practices resist aging, remain alive, and continue to evolve alongside contemporary art practices?

An Ongoing Exercise
This website gathers our field notes, photos, reflections, and questions for the next stage of the research—fragments of how play unfolded as research, and how these spaces reveal the entanglements of design, politics, and imagination. It is not a conclusion but an ongoing exercise: a starting point for continuous curiosity, questioning, and exploration.

Team
This project was collectively developed by Yan Wu, Lily Lu, and Michelle Choi from the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, with research contributions by Mattea Shuen, who recently completed her undergraduate studies at the Asian Institute, University of Toronto. Yan Wu is a practicing contemporary public art curator and a PhD student in Architecture, Landscape, and Design (Visual Studies) at Daniels. Lily Lu and Michelle Choi are architectural designers and recent graduates of the Master of Architecture program. The field research took place from August 4 to 17, 2025, across Japan. Yan led the writing of website texts, while Lily and Michelle led the development of the website and its social media presence. Unless otherwise credited, all photos and videos were taken by the team members.

Last updated: 10/21/2025

08/08: Gifu Kitagata Housing Project by Kazuyo Sejima (SANAA)

08/08: Gifu
Kitagata Housing Project by Kazuyo Sejima (SANAA)