PlastiCity: Games as tools for urban transformations and redefining our environment

PlastiCity is an experiment in the employment of gaming technologies for social and cultural ends, but "plasticity" is also a key theoretical concept in neuroscience, to help understanding how entire brain structures, and the brain itself, can change from experience. Finally "plasticity" is a concept in the arts that has been used by Brancusi, Markus Brüderlin and others to talk about sculptural properties of various art forms. While we cannot go so far as to translate Brancusi’s statement of “Real architecture is sculpture” into “Real architecture is a game”, we might nevertheless be able to claim that “Unreal architecture is really relevant for real architecture.” In other words, game art can turn into an architectonic statement. Inversely architect Will Alsop suggests that architecture might turn into „big painting“. Alsop has a painting background and uses painting as a strategy to loosen up his mind: "I like painting, I like painting big." Painting large abstract canvases has in his case been described as a kind of therapeutic trick, but it can potentially have a much more direct influence on the process of architectonic creation. Swiss curator Markus Brüderlin critically commented that “architecture wants to become sculpture and sculpture wants to become architecture” and earmarks the 1950s as the decade when architecture woke up to the influence of the plastic arts. He quotes Carola Giedion-Welcker who felt that a ‘plastic age’ was dawning in 1954 (“ein ‘plastisches Zeitalter’ im Anzug sei“). PlastiCity borrows Joseph Beuys’ notion of plasticity as a universal term which according to Beuys might be applied to thought processes and speech. We have reintroduced the term for the arena of urban planning.

PlastiCity is also a multi-user computer game based on the architectonic visions and controversial suggestions of British architect Will Alsop.
The game was conceived and built by Steve Manthorp and Mathias Fuchs.