Playing Field explores the invisible heritage of our immediate environment. Parc Hentsch, which faces HEAD’s Campus, was once the heart of a popular facility of primary importance for the city of Geneva: the Charmilles Stadium. For the 2022 European Heritage Days, students designed a scenography related to this memory, consisting of nine temporary pavilions conceived collectively. The project reflects on the monumental stadium, the cute and the ephemeral, on the festive and its more down-to-earth construction, and on how our built environment can celebrate plurality and ethereal memories.

The design is carried out in two phases: a) by approaching the site through a collective survey and speculative master plans; b) by studying the different activities that take place in a stadium. A collection of shared references helps in this endeavour and enables to question these activities and put them into perspective. The third and final phase of the semester focuses on building, detailing and refining the shared ideas for specific pavilions to be built. By the end of the semester, the project takes over the “playing field”.

All phases include group work as well as individual work. Collaboration (both within groups and as a collective of more than 30 people) is an important theme, which, of course, strongly engages individual practices, attitudes and desires.