Stickhouses and Oak Leaves, Environment Designs

The Beaver lodge post reminded me of this smaller scale version by Environment Designs of Milford, CT.

Also nice is their oakleaf group seating:

Tsarevitch Slide, Tsarskoye Selo, c. 1910

The nursery slide of the young Tsar Alexei, at Alexander Palace in Tsarkoye Selo, a summer residence of the Romanovs and the family's last real shelter from the revolutionary storms that would consume them.

The Bolsheviks renamed the city Detskoye Selo (Children's Village) in 1918, but I don't think they made any new playgrounds for the children they presumed to honor.

Snow slide, somewhere in Alaska

[source]

Winter is closing in on the midwest...only the third official 'blizzard' warning in state history and stern warnings against travel on the news.  Fortunately, I am already home for Christmas...and I hope you are, too.  Have a merry one!

Loop Bench, Jeppe Hein , 2009

Nice combination of bench, balance beam and slide...an installation at this year's Art Basel.  What happens to these after the fair is over?  I wish they could be sent to a deserving playground...

found at designcrave

UPDATE:  I wrote to Mr. Hein, asking him about the future of the Loop Bench.  It has been purchased for a public sculpture park in Germany (Camp Reinsehlen / Lüneburger Heide).  Not a playground specifically, but at least acessible!

Beaver Lodge, Shore Country Day School, Beverly, Mass, Mark Ragonese, 2009

For a school whose mascot is the beaver, a beaver lodge, by artist Mark Ragonese as the focal point of an 'inspiration garden'  designed by Julie Moir Messervy.

WOS 8, NL Architects, Utrecht, Netherlands, 2009

WOS 8 is a utility building.  Isolated and unstaffed, such installations are often the target of vandalism.  So NL architects decided to wrap the entire building in a durable polyurethane skin and make the facade a playground, "a public square wrapped around a box."

"WOS 8 aims to become part of the youth culture that usually is the biggest threat for this kind of building....Since, believe it or not, climbing is becoming a national sport in the Netherlands, a series of climbing grips are inserted under the polyurethane skin. Applied in Braille, they spell a text: the Blind Facade. A so-called Doorscope (a large 'peephole' lens) is placed the wrong way around in the main door. Normally used to see who's delivering pizza, now revealing the entire interior on a little screen...standard issue, but still amazingly beautiful road reflectors are plugged into the east facade and are sprayed over. Some pop through the skin and spell the name of the building: WOS 8."

Plus, the large through-holes of the WOS 8 design act as spouts and cisterns for water play in the wet climate, and create nesting boxes for birds and cavities for bats. Wow.  Such thought devoted to a usually forgotten and ugly part of the built landscape, and to productive engagement with the youth who might otherwise deface it.  And it uses a lens, which always makes me happy!

read more at archittetura

Thanks to Nick Simpson, embarking on playground designs at Newcastle University in the UK, for the submission!

Let's Play by the Gearhearts

Another nice book for Christmas giving--play related though not specifically playground related--is Let's Play, a historic book being published by the Book Club of California, nearly 100 years after its initial authorship.  Originally assembled in 1929 by Pasadena artists, teachers, and sisters Frances, May, and Edna Gearhart, the book of their original linoleum cuts and descriptive verses was never produced, until now, in a limited edition of 1000 copies.  Available for purchase at the Book Club of California.

Playground Books for Christmas

The books recommended in the sidebar (including the one on Aldo Van Eyck, which was a key inspiration for this blog) are all volumes I've read and loved and found to be helpful in thinking about playgrounds.  I'd recommend more if I had more leisure reading time...perhaps in the New Year!  But vintage playground books are the best--here are some of my favorites:

Handcrafted playgrounds: Designs you can build yourself

Build Your Own Playground

Children's Play Spaces

Home Playgrounds: The Harrowsmith Guide to Building Backyard Play Structures

The 1970s were something of a high-water mark in playground innovation...lots of new ideas were percolating and actually getting built in a time before threat-of-lawsuits became a primary design consideration.  Books from the era are full of interesting playground contraptions being built by men with mustaches and tested by kids with puffy hair and polyester trousers.

If you have a favorite playground book (vintage or otherwise), please add to the list!

Playhouse Inspiration

Inspiration for both modern and traditional playhouses:

The 'puzzle house' by Sou Fujimoto Architects, via coolboom.

'Follie' by Huting and de Hoop

and a delightfully theatrical not-by-the-hair-of-my-chinny-chin-chin straw house by Ludwig Designs (apologies, but I can't seem to find the link to their website anymore).

Buffalo Public School 90 Learning Courtyard, Joy Kuebler

The BPS 90 courtyard is featured in the inaugural newsletter of the American Society for Landscape Architecture's recently established "Professional Practice Network devoted to Children’s Outdoor Environments" (such an unwieldy title, but join anyway if you're an ASLA member!).

It features a curriculum-based approach, which should warm the hearts of administrators everywhere, with gathering spaces specifically designed for science, math, music, art, and geography/geology, all connected within a varying topography by a circuit walk.

A 6 inch deep, 8 inch wide water channel flows down a gentle slope through the landscape, traversed by bridges where it intersects the circuit walk and providing watery opportunities for playing Pooh sticks, damming the stream, racing rubber ducks. 

Natural elements of logs, mounds and boulders are interspersed with concrete areas that allow for hard surface activities like jumping rope, riding tricycles and bouncing balls.  I especially like the way the plant materials are keyed to the curriculum elements:  the "music" area is planted with varieties that make sound in the wind, attract singing insects and birds or which can be used to make instruments, and the "art" space has plants whose petals or berries can be used to make dyes or inks.

The "math" classroom uses unit-cell pavings to show ratios and proportions and includes raised planters for counting seeds and measuring growth, and the "science" area has large mounds of earth that can be used for velocity measurements, and a wider water channel for experimentation.

Images from Joy Kuebler's website. 

A Brief History of the Sandbox

What we now know as a 'sandbox' was previously called a 'sand table' or 'sand garden', and it seems to have originated with a suggestion to Friedrich Froebel, founder of the kindergarten movement.  His former student and devoted friend, Hermann ten. von Arnswald wrote to him on May 13, 1847:

Dear Fatherly Friend : Yesterday I was engaged in studying your Sunday paper when an idea struck me which I feel prompted to communicate to you. I thought, might not a plane of sand be made a useful and entertaining game? By a plane of sand I mean a low, shallow box of wood filled with pure sand. It would be a kindergarten in miniature. The children might play in it with their cubes and building blocks. I think it would give the child particular pleasure to have the forms and figures and sticks laid out in the sand before his eyes. Sand is a material adaptable to any use. A few drops of water mixed with it would enable the child to form mountains and valleys in it, and so on.

Froebel quickly took up the suggestion for his kindergartens.

"The little child," he noted, "employs itself for a long time merely by pouring water or sand from one vessel into another alternately," and "for building and forming with sand and earth, which precedes clay work, opportunities should be afforded even to the child of one year."  ..."Even the baby then may safely be set in the sand pile, and can play with the rest at digging, and moulding and burrowing, and pouring the grains in and out of the tin vessels."

Most commonly, the sand table took the form of  "a water-tight box about five by three feet, and at least a foot deep, is set on short stout legs with rollers and filled with sand to within two inches of the top. The box is sometimes lined with zinc, as it is often necessary to pour enough water into the sand to represent a lake, or the boundless ocean, but it can be so strongly made as to need no lining, or may have a double bottom. It may be five feet square instead of oblong, or it may be somewhat smaller than the size mentioned, but it must be large enough for a dozen children to gather around, as it is used only for group work, and must be low enough to be convenient for little people. The sand is always kept quite damp, as it lends itself to moulding much more readily in this condition, and the particles are thus prevented from rising into the air in the form of dust."

The above information comes from Nora Archibald Smith's 1896 The Republic of Childhood  which devotes a whole chapter to 'sand work', and proposes larger sand installations:

"If the authorities should order a sand heap put in every back yard of our cities, being especially careful not to neglect the tiny inclosures around which the very poor hive together, there would be less vagabondage and less youthful ruffianism. The child must needs be busy, and lacking legitimate means of occupation he will seek out those that are unlawful.

In Germany...one of the beautiful acts of the Empress Frederick...was to set apart certain portions of all public parks for play-grounds, with sand hills upon them, for the little children. Any one who has frequented the parks of the larger German cities knows what an attractive picture the children make in their busy, happy play of digging and packing and building in the easily moulded soil.

The Pestalozzi-Froebel Haus in Berlin, of which Frau Schrader is the leading spirit, is provided with a most beautiful sand garden shaded by trees, over which all visiting kindergartners rhapsodize. This is no petty box of sand such as we in America think ourselves fortunate in possessing, but a " truly " garden, as the children say, where there are glorious heaps of sand in which they can dig with their little shovels, and which they can carry about and load and unload in their toy carts..into this garden of Eden we can usher the little ones, and, provided with iron spoons, toy shovels, one or two old pails and pans and some muffin rings and scallop-tins for cake-baking, they will amuse themselves quietly and happily for hours."

Smith also expounds on the use of the sand table to teach construction and gardening as well as geography, history and literature by setting up map outlines, historical events, and literary tableaus in the sand.   Full text is available at both the gutenberg project and google books.

Boston Playgrounds?

Just flagging up that I'll be in Boston next week...science-y stuff during the day but hoping for a couple of playground visits, so if you have a suggestion, let me know!

Stickworks Playhouses by Patrick Dougherty

Willow artist Patrick Dougherty has a new catalogue of his extraordinary and playful creations, available on his website. I was going to put this on my Christmas list, but I just couldn't wait...

(The Morton Arboretum blogged the construction of the "Summer Palace" , above, providing insight into how these structures are formed.)

Monstrum Playgrounds

(Love the height of that entry! Most playground steps are so low that kids will try to take them two at a time to make their own challenge, which is actually less safe.)

In the playscapes of Danish firm Monstrum (translation: monster), boats tilt at crazy angles, wrecked planes lie broken in half, playhouses provide escape from gigantic spiders, and hidden portals lead to the belly of a whale. These are playgrounds that don't shrink from challenging children either physically or mentally.

There is a sense of thrill and danger that most modern playgrounds lack, provided not so much through physical challenges--though the off-kilter angles do create unique play experiences--as through the playground's imaginative story. The strong forms manage to escape the 'cuteness' that can plague story-based playgrounds, and their use of wood is exemplary. Great work.

Many more photos on their website...it was hard for me to choose. [Thanks Ole!]

Parque Gulliver, Valencia Spain, 1990

Gulliver's body morphs into slides, ramps, stairs and caves, scaled so that visitors are the size of the Lilliputians. A joint project by architect Rafael Rivera, artist Manolo Martin and the designer Sento.

Submitted by bianca, who is embarking on her own playground designs in Spain. [Thanks and good luck, bianca!]