Deborah E. Ryan
Assistant Professor of Architecture/Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte
12712 Wetherburn Lane
Charlotte, North Carolina 28262
U.S.A.
REPLAY is an outdoor play and learning environment located at Plaza Road Preschool, a federally funded Chapter One preschool for at risk four year old children, in Charlotte North Carolina. It was conceived of, designed and built through a grassroots strategy of creating an environmental and social constituency which operated below the watchful gaze of the administrative bureaucracy at least until the point that the success of the project publicly required their support.
REPLAY was initially conceived as a setting for environmental education. It was based in the understanding that children learn through experience. REPLAY, like all landscapes, provides a setting or at the least, a background in which experiences occur. Consequently, it has the potential to affect learning through play by initiating experience in the environment. However, while REPLAY is viewed by the teachers at the school as a resource for learning about nature, its message is not neutral and certainly not innocent. As a landscape architect practicing within an era characterized by environmental degradation, I believe that it is not enought to simply illustrate nature's existence. Rather, my intent with this project was to convey a clear and consistent message relative to nature's social ethics. REPLAY contained a moral appropriate to its context...that all things and all people have equal and intrinsic worth.
REPLAY was a vehicle for exploring the interpretation and expression of feminism in the landscape as put forth by feminist art critics Lucy Lippard and Gisele Ecker through the utilization of a collaborative process with a nonpatriarchal client and audience. Further, the design expression was intended to incorporate many of the same ideas found in contemporary feminist art theory from the use of temporal form and devalued or discarded materials to a search for connectiveness between disciplines, race, sex, class and cultural experience.
For instance, REPLAY was made primarily from materials that were reclaimed or rerouted from the scrap yards of local construction companies. In doing so, the intent was to communicate an environmental ethic of reuse and recycling within the feminist context of revalueing that which had traditionally been devalued or undervalued by the patriarchal culture.
REPLAY exists today because of the patriarchy's benign neglect and the consequent aesthetic niche it formed. This paper suggests that such constraints provide the best opportunities for an investigation of the relationship between feminist ideas and the making of environmentally appropriate landscapes through a case study of the design and making of REPLAY.
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