ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how Eduardo Paolozzi’s discussion with Philip Oakes reveals a tension or contradiction that lies at the centre of Paolozzi’s playground sculptures. While Paolozzi’s own sculpture, printmaking and playground models were formulated through a studio environment that provided an ever growing and changing collection of variables and loose parts, his finalised playgrounds were almost entirely “static”. The 1973 Terence Conran commission, discussed by Paolozzi in his interview with Oakes, brought together a collection of six aluminium sculptures to create a play space at Habitat’s Wallingford store. However, the possibilities for play afforded by the sculptures limited children’s interaction to objects they could “clamber over.” The chapter shows how Paolozzi’s aluminium sculptures of the 1960s and 1970s provide the material connections with van Eyck’s playground structures. Both architect and artist used a catalogue of aluminium components that could be endlessly recombined.
