What do we mean by the word escape? The word escape is derived from the Vulgar Latin word excappare; literally it means to “get out of one’s cape,” or, “to leave a pursuer with just one’s cape”.1 In his book entitled Escapism, Yi-Fu Tuan2 states that, “the concept ‘escape’ [...] means both literal flight and steps taken to change or mask an unsatisfactory condition.”3
The word escape, most typically applied to instances such as physically escaping a pursuer, social setting, or situation of confinement, also applies to the ephemeral and metaphysical escape from reality. As our mind wonders, we leave behind our bodily cloak. This is to say that the act of daydreaming is also a form of escape. Tuan describes daydreaming as “escaping our own corporeal wrapping.”4
When applying the word escape to architecture, many people think of an example such as escaping from a jail – that is not the kind of escape that this thesis discusses. Instead, think of an activity that is an escape for you. This may be playing a videogame, reading a book, or perhaps it is going on a vacation. For me, among other things I have mentioned, I listen to heavy metal music. Heavy metal creates the atmosphere that helps me to escape. This thesis investigates how to design an environment that helps bring about an architectural atmosphere that engenders escape.
Some may criticise the act of escape as being a waste of time. However, while these escape-inducing activities can be viewed as unproductive, Steward Brown5 has found that, “a little bit of ‘non-productive’ activity can make one enormously more productive and invigorated in other aspects of life.”6 Part of what this thesis explores is how to use our desire for escape more productively. Escape has two sides: in moderation, it can have numerous benefits; however, in excess it can have harmful repercussions. The benefits can include peace of mind and greater creativity. However, the detriments, caused by excess and addiction, include the lack of focus, interruption of family or social life, and even death.
Escape is a diversion, or distraction, from everyday life, that produces pleasure7. We escape in a few different ways: pure diversions, games, and play. All three, according to their definitions are activities done which provide amusement, and each can be a method of distancing. Pure diversion is an activity which completely diverts our attention; reading a book is an example. A game is an activity with rules and a goal in mind. Play, according to Brown8, is defined by seven properties: apparent purposelessness, voluntary, inherent attraction, freedom from time, diminished consciousness of self, improvisational potential, and continuation desire. Pure diversion and games are structured forms of escape. These are activities which have been created, or structured, in order to escape. Play, however, is an unstructured form of escape. It involves improvisation, and acts of creation. In many ways these forms of escape can overlap each other; games and play can become pure diversion, and while participating in a game people can often play. Play is the method of escape on which this thesis will focus. This thesis will not focus on pure diversion, or games.
Everyone finds themselves needing an escape sometimes. We need escape-time to recharge our batteries, relax, and de-stress. The current condition of most Canadian cities is not conducive to an escape within them, nor within the buildings of which they are composed. Ray Oldenburg, an urban sociologist from Florida, discusses this at length in his book, The Great Good Place (1989). He describes a city’s third places9. First we have our home, second we have our workplace, and the third place is where we escape. Third places are informal gathering spaces where people may come together on neutral turf to pause, interact, enjoy conversation, and develop friendships, taking pleasure from being part of the larger spatial community10.
Within more dense pedestrian-oriented urban spaces, third places offer compensational social spaces away from home and work. More common in earlier times, for example, The Baths in Bath, England during the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, were places where people voluntarily turned to in order to enjoy their leisure time and social relations. People would come from all around to take the waters in Bath as a way of rejuvenating themselves.
These third places are often missing in North American cities such as Cambridge, Ontario. Our cities are zoned as commercial, industrial, and residential, breaking them into numerous isolated sections without consideration for places of escape.
Supernormal Stimulus
Our cities have changed a lot over the past few hundred years; between globalization and new communication systems, our world has shrunk, and alongside this, new production methods have sped up our building processes. Many Canadian cities are growing quickly, catering to the automobile and consumer, rather than to the pedestrian and human being. Fast-food drive-thrus and vast plains of asphalt parking lots have taken over the countryside. Populations have speedily escalated and our places of escape have become hard to find.
Not only do our cities feel fast paced, the context of the society that shapes them has rapidly transformed as well. Contemporary society has zero tolerance for boredom. News headlines are focused on what sells, and what sells, is what captures our attention. Media is therefore more heavily laced with the negative happenings in society as opposed to the positive. Often using spin and toying with public fears, news stories are geared towards raising our blood-pressure and our stress levels in order to keep us captivated so we do not change the channel. A whole market geared towards creating new ways to captivate our attention has emerged, with new strategies being refined down to a science. Often they are using what Niko Tinbergen, a Dutch Nobel laureate, called “supernormal stimuli.”11
A supernormal stimulus, or superstimulus, is an exaggerated form of an existing stimulus. It induces a response more strongly than the stimulus from which it evolved. In the 1930’s, Tinbergen studied bird behaviours. He created numerous dummy eggs which were larger and brighter than typical eggs. These eggs were placed in a simulated nest, beside a real nest with eggs. Painted with black polka-dots and Day-Glo blue, the dummy eggs outshone the song bird’s smaller pale blue eggs speckled with grey. Tinbergen observed song birds brooding dummy eggs so large that the birds would continuously slide off and repeatedly climb back onto at the expense of their own eggs, which would die as a result of the abandonment. This is the phenomenon called supernormal stimulus.12
In a similar case, we see the potato beetle meet its demise. We have developed gardening techniques, such as the use of trap crops, which work in this fashion to protect vegetables. When given the choice between potatoes or petunias, potato beetles will choose petunias. However, petunias are also toxic to the potato beetle, thereby eradicating the pest.
Humans, also influenced by supernormal stimuli, have devised trap crops for themselves as well. Not only methods, such as those used by television and commercials, but technology as well, is being developed which acts as superstimuli, or trap crops. They make us buy more, consume more, and sway our attention more.
Multitaskers
Many within our society have now become addicted to this technology, juggling e-mail, phone calls, text messaging, Internet, television, video games, and other incoming information. Our western society has become the new generation of multitaskers.
Multitasking is a way of escaping; often we engage in numerous forms of multi-media-based escapes alongside our mundane daily tasks. According to Adam Gazzaley13, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, we are now experiencing one of the most significant shifts in our human environments: that of nonstop interactivity. As multitaskers we are frequently choosing to use developed media in order to escape any moment of boredom, or inactivity. This media lends itself to highly structured forms of escape, such as games and pure diversion.
A little over a decade ago, those idle moments while standing in line for coffee, or while waiting for the next bus to arrive, were just another fact of life. Now-a-days, cellphone makers such as Motorola™ have been using the term “microboredom” to describe the ever-smaller splinters of free time from which new cellular technology offers an escape.14 We now toggle IPhone™ apps, listen to an array of music, and play videogames to fill in the gaps; these are all forms of structured escape. These activities give us a shot of dopamine. Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter in the brain, it makes us feel exhilarated; it can also be addicting. In the absence of dopamine, people feel bored.15
It is a myth that multitaskers are more productive. Often they are much less productive. A recent study16 by Microsoft™ research scientist Eric Horvitz confirms this. He found that workers at the Redmond-based software company took an average of 15 minutes to return to a task they had been working on after being interrupted by a phone call or text message. In addition, Gray Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, has said multitaskers have trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, and as a result they experience more stress. What is more is that the stress hormones which are released have shown to reduce short-term memory. Therefore the repercussions of this multitasking, while including cuts to productivity, creativity and deep thought, also have an effect on our short-term memory.17
Many people have taken this multimedia-based escape to the extreme. According to the American Medical Association an estimate of at least 10-15 percent of videogame players meet the criteria for overuse.18
Extremely dependent players have quit school, lost marriages and jobs, missed meals and neglected friends [...]. The most harrowing have been several news stories from Asia about players who have died after several days of gaming marathons where they haven’t eaten or slept, and young children in the U.S. who have died due to neglect while their parents were busy game playing.19
Declining Creativity
Now that many of us are completely plugged-in to a structured, technology-based form of escape, it is harder than ever for our society to unplug. Studies by Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford, have shown that even after we have unplugged the lack of focus continues to persist.20 These habits are beginning to re-wire our brains, having an adverse affect on our memory, patience, concentration, mental health, and perhaps most importantly, our creativity.21
According to Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the United States’ premier aerospace research facility for more than seven decades, innovations and creativity had been suffering within their company since the late nineties. Having successfully landed men on the moon, their employees were known to have exceptional problem-solving skills. No matter how big and ambitious the task, they would say “we can do that.” After these employees retired it became more and more difficult to replace them. New employees were saying “that can’t be done” instead.22
The fact is, there are many things out there which may not be very good for us; however, our inner weaknesses, or lack of self-disciplines, continue to give way to the stimulation provided by outside forces. Deirdre Barrett, author of Supernormal Stimuli (2010) and evolutionary psychologist at Harvard Medical School’s Behavioural Medicine Program (2010), explains how we now have access to candy sweeter than any berry, meals larger than we should eat, and pornography more provocative than anything real, and that gratifying the instincts for these can have often-dangerous results. Our unfettered instincts, if left unchecked, lead to hazardous excesses threatening to our civilization.23
We are seeing the growth of disorders such as: attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obesity, stress, nature deficit disorder, short-term memory loss, lack of patience and concentration, mental health disorders, and perhaps most importantly, a decline in creativity.24
In the era of test-centric education reform and growing fear of liability, many districts considered recess a waste of potential academic time or too risky. [...] Between 1991 and 2003, the percentage of students who attended physical education class dropped from 42 percent to only 28 percent. [...] Ironically, the detachment of education from the physical world not only coincided with the dramatic rise in life-threatening childhood obesity but also with a growing body of evidence that links physical exercise and experience in nature to mental acuity and concentration.25
In 2004, one of the first studies to link television-watching, a structured form of escape, to ADHD was published.
“Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center in Seattle maintains that each hour of TV watched per day by preschoolers increases by 10 percent the likelihood that they will develop concentration problems and other symptoms of attention-deficit disorders by the age of seven.”26
Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods27, has found that a connection to nature has shown to decrease the effects of many of these disorders.28
Nature
Nature offers a way to escape. Nature is not created by man, it is the wilderness and it gives us free reign to engage in an unstructured form of escape; that of play and daydreaming. Edith Cobb, author of The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood (1993), maintains that the inventiveness and imagination of nearly all of the creative people she studied was rooted in their early experiences in nature.
It is our instinct to escape, and nature often plays a role. As New York City expanded, quadrupling in size between 1821 and 1855, many were drawn to the few existing open green-spaces that were available; most of these had been cemeteries. People needed these open spaces in order to break away from chaotic city life and clamour. Often not enough, it became apparent that citizens needed a public park in which to escape. Fredrick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux developed the Greensward Plan which became the winning design for Central Park. It is now a vast expanse of 3.41 square kilometres where people of all backgrounds and ages engage in countless activities or just meander through while caught up in a daydream.29
The flight to the suburbs, or urban sprawl, is another symptom of the yearning for an escape away from the city to get closer to nature. However, suburbs, far from being nature, are consuming areas which would most closely represent nature, thus actually eating away at the countryside we cherish.
Nature has many healing qualities. A connection to nature has been proven to improve human well-being.
Although studies remain sparse, various investigations have documented diverse psychological and health-related benefits of people`s contact with parks and open space, including relieved stress, increased peace of mind, enhanced coping, improved physical fitness, and greater creativity.30
Since nature plays such a role in terms of our health and wellness, this thesis will use nature as a learning tool for planning and design to encourage intended spaces of escape.
This thesis will demonstrate why play, an unstructured form of escape, is the most beneficial method of escape. It will serve as a tool to aid in the design for a healthier human lifestyle and greater creativity. By using the lens of architecture and an understanding of nature’s ability to heal, a series of case studies will be investigated in order to discover a method of achieving escape. Ten strategies will be identified. Their headings are: nature, complexity, dynamic, loose-parts theory, scale, the primitive, along a path, mystery, risk, and unmonitored feel. In order to develop a strategy of design, they are organised according to three human desires: a desire to explore the world around us, a desire for a dynamic stimulating environment, and the desire to be active and move our bodies. Once we understand why we desire these three things we can then understand how to develop a method of design that can incorporate the ten strategies, what to avoid, and what to strive for within our designs.
Chapter 1 will describe the method of escape which this thesis focuses on, that of play. Chapter 2 describes the conditional, dispositional and contextual environment necessary to activate a play-based escape. It is in this chapter that we learn about the processes necessary to engage in play, how nature plays a role in these processes, as well as the three desires we have which, once satisfied, aid in activating a play-based escape. Chapter 3 provides an analysis of the case studies which have consciously, or unconsciously, promoted play-based escape through designed spaces. Chapter 4 describes the design strategies according to the three desires, and Chapter 5 is an illustrated example of a designed space using the application of the synthesized strategy in order to promote an atmosphere of escape.
