Pushing swings. Slight architecture in action

Abstract

No dictionary of architecture includes in its list of significant words the term swing and maybe for similar reasons it is infrequent to find references to it in architecture libraries: only a few of those who have attended to it, in theory or in practice, have considered it an object and an issue within their proficiency, a subject of their discipline. In the approach that this essay presents, the swing is claimed as architecture: as elemental structure that doesn´t need walls nor roofs, nor other complex architectural components to establish a space, to define and qualify a place; as an eloquent symbolic building that satisfies very effectively the function it was designed for. In order to realise a study of the swing, this analysis appeals to some exemplary cases belonging, in addition to contemporary architecture, to painting and cinematography, omitting how much literature and photography have said about it, researching it in the work of Navarro Baldeweg and Prouvé, in Cranach´s work and in Renoir´s, in Fragonard´s and in Goya´s and as well in an essential movieby Kurosawa and another one by Antonioni.