Conditional generosity

Drozynski, Charles

Abstract

In a situation where the stakes on offer are high, it is rarely the case that the act of giving will prove to be purely selfless. The act of donation is tainted with an assumption that the recipient will utilise the gift in a way that would be approved by the donor. This paper presents a situation where a relatively new type of engagement with the public was generously granted permission to erect a park for unveiling and developing its qualities by participating in civil life at the cost of normalization. The type of novel engagement with the civic presented herein is parkour or free-running; a form of art that is based on the notion of transgressing defined boundaries offering a new perspective on acting-out citizenry and defining public space.
Most recently the free-runners’ community erected a parkour-facility in Gerlev in Slagelse Denmark. This paper analyses how this articulation of generosity or care can be seen as a diagnosis of the debates on parkour as embedded in architecture and by that its inclusion into the normativity of the civic. This paper presents the developing architectural language which was deployed on-site as one which is approaching parkour in a novel way, and one which asks the free-runners to conform to the designers’ intent.
This paper is based on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in particular Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia published first in 1972.

• Online Publication Date: Sep 28, 2022
• Publication Date: Sep 28, 2022
• Deposit Date: Sep 14, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 29, 2024
• Publisher: Routledge
• Book Title: Generosity and Architecture
• ISBN: 9781032078519, 9781032078540
• Keywords: Generosity, Architecture
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/9982270
• Publisher URL: https://www.routledge.com/Generosity-and-Architecture/McVicar-Kite-Drozynski/p/book/9781032078540
• Contract Date: Sep 1, 2017