Publication / Enrico Miglietta with Liselotte Vroman, “The Practice of Play. On the Profane Gesture and the Architecture of Use”, in Engramma 232 (March 2026)

Abstract / ENG

This essay approaches Play as a situated practice that unsettles the separations through which architecture organises use, distance, and behaviour. Rather than opposing order, play operates from within architectural regimes of prescription, making visible how space is stabilised through margins, thresholds, and devices that regulate proximity, movement, and access. In doing so, play exposes how these regimes may be quietly loosened, rendered permeable without being overturned. Emerging from the distinct yet converging practices of the two authors of this essay—one grounded in the minute negotiations of architectural detailing, the other in movement and embodied spatial exploration—the text itself unfolds as a profanatory practice. Writing is treated not as a neutral commentary but as an operative field, where thinking and making remain intertwined, and where concepts are tested through spatial, bodily, and procedural displacement.

Through close readings of architectural situations, set in resonance with artistic and performative practices, the essay traces how profanation arises when bodies inhabit the margins of use: lingering where circulation prescribes speed, touching what is meant to remain at a distance, or repeating gestures without fulfilling their expected ends. Architecture is thus approached as a field of offerings—thresholds, surfaces, and spatial devices whose separation sustains distance, yet remains open to reinterpretation through play. To profane, in this sense, is not to negate architectural order but to suspend its necessity, expanding the affordances of familiar spatial arrangements. The Practice of Play reveals architecture as a precise yet open system, capable of sustaining common use without fixing meaning in advance, and of offering space anew through minor, repeatable gestures of inhabitation.