A history of play equipment design (by theme and by designer)
"Spielplätze sind relevante Orte in der Stadt. Diese Erkenntnis hat in der Zeit zwischen 1945 bis ca. 1970 ein kleine Zahl von Architekten, Landschaftsarchitekten und Künstlern zu neuen Spielkonzepten inspiriert. Die Seite architekturfuerkinder dokumentiert diese Pioniere und ihre Spielplätze und Spielgeräte, weil ihr Ideenreichtum, Zivilcourage, geistige Freiheit und Frechheit faszinieren."
(Gabriela Burkhalter)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Imagination of Playgrounds
"The following images begin with make-do playgrounds (as in the photographs by Helen Levitt, Henri Cartier-Bresson and others), but are followed by some unique and creative playground structures, some of which are mid-century modernist designs. As these images attest, playground equipment can be as simple as a tractor tire or mimic the amorphic abstraction of Jean Arp. So whether you are a landscape architect, a designer or just an inventive kid, all that really matters boils down to one simple question: do children like to play on it?"
(John Foster, 14 April 2013)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Landfill Harmonic: creating music from recycled materials
"Landfill Harmonic tells the story of 'Los Reciclados' - 'The Recycled Orchestra' - a youth orchestra in Cateura, Paraguay, whose instruments are made out of the very trash that the town is built on.
WHEN FAVIO CHAVEZ AND LUIS SZARAN came to Cateura to start a music school, they realized that they had more students than instruments. Thanks to the resourcefulness of Cola, a Cateurian garbage picker, an orchestra came together, now featuring violins, cellos, and other instruments artfully put together from trash. Los Reciclados de Cateura, now an independent orchestra, recently performed in Brazil and Colombia under Chavez's direction."
(Nina Mashurova, 12 December 2012, Matador)
Trailer for "Landfill Harmonic". The project is being created by Alejandra Nash (Founder and Executive Producer), Juliana Penaranda-Loftus (Producer), Rodolfo Madero (Executive Producer), Jorge Maldonado (Co-producer), Graham
Townsley (Director) Jennifer Redfearn (Consulting producer), Tim Fabrizio and Neil Barrett (Directors of Photography) and Monica Barrios (Production Consultant).
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Sense of adventure: what happened to playgrounds that give children space?
Aldo "Van Eyck believed playgrounds should challenge a child's imagination without jarring the adult's aesthetic sensibilities. His abstract, elementary forms - often manufactured out of metal tubes like modernist furniture - were meant to belong in a well-mannered streetscape. During the same period in Britain, however, we were developing a tradition of playground design that was almost diametrically opposed. The first 'junk' playgrounds emerged amid the rubble of the Blitz, and the results were far less polite. Consisting of makeshift structures cobbled together out of roof beams and detritus, they were often designed with the assistance of the children themselves. That essential character survives today in descendants such as Glamis Adventure Playground in Shadwell, east London, a riot of skew-whiff woodwork and clashing colours, and an odd hybrid of post-war austerity and postmodern assemblage.
The junk playground model was created by the Danish architect Carl Theodor Sorensen, who believed playgrounds should reflect the imagination of the child not the architect. In 1943, having observed the creative way children play in construction sites, he developed the prototype junk playground on the Emdrup housing estate in Copenhagen.
The concept was brought to Britain by Lady Allen of Hurtwood, who tested it out on the site of a bombed church in Camberwell and then built dozens of what she called 'adventure playgrounds' - the term 'junk' tended to turn local mothers into nimbys. Not only did Allen feel that ordinary playgrounds were sterile places ('it is little wonder that [children] prefer the dumps of rough wood and piles of bricks and rubbish of the bombed sites'), but she believed in the healing effects of exposing children to the urban scars of warfare. At the same time, having them take part in the post-war reconstruction effort was deemed a good way of shaping model citizens.
Essentially, all playgrounds are designed to do the same thing: to help children develop their abilities, use up excess energy and keep them off the streets. But the ideology of the adventure playground is interesting for several reasons. First, there's the notion of not restricting children to the repetitive motions of the slide or swing, because the sooner you reach the technical limits of the equipment, the sooner you have to stretch those limits - hence all those swings you see coiled around the crossbar. The adventure playground was designed to liberate the wild thing within and, by exposing children to risk, teach them personal responsibility (all forms of play are underpinned by some form of didactism, so it's worth reminding ourselves that this is also simply more fun). Just as crucially, it was intrinsic to the concept that children be involved in designing the playgrounds, dreaming up weird structures and adapting them later by tacking on extra elements. This participatory dimension, managed by volunteer play leaders, is key to the development of their creativity.
It's curious how much the ethos of the adventure playground chimes with the language of a new era of design today: a 'participatory' process, recycled materials, an adaptive product. It doesn't sound like the 1940s. But equally valuable is the zone of exception that the adventure playground represents in the city, one of improvisation and informality that, pace Van Eyck, does not blend in to a polite streetscape.
Today, there are few true adventure playgrounds left, but occasionally another is built that follows all the essential tenets, such as the Kilburn Grange Park playground in north London, designed last year by Erect Architecture and based on the ideas of local kids. Increasingly, though, 'adventure playgrounds' are produced by specialist manufacturers and merely designed to look rustic. You can't adapt them, or at least anyone who tried would be carted off. These are the products of a health and safety culture that watered down adventure playgrounds in the 1980s and 90s. There was a minor revival a few years ago, when the Labour government invested £230m in new play spaces across England, but the coalition government freed that budget up for other uses, so it was short-lived. And now, with the cuts, several adventure playgrounds, including the giant ones in Battersea and Kilburn, face losing the play workers that make such playgrounds what they are.
It's worth remembering just how cheap and yet how luxurious these spaces are. We should let kids loose on this new breed of sanitised playground, to inject a little of the old spirit in them. I hear the builder behind Kilburn Grange Park salvaged the formwork from Zaha Hadid's Olympic diving towers - that could come in handy."
(Justin McGuirk, Tuesday 3 July 2012 15.40 BST, The Guardian)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Origamibiro: Quad Time
"Origamibiro is a collaboration between myself and musicians, performers and producers Tom Hill and Andy Tytherleigh. Tom and I have a long history of collaboration through av_dv [Jim Boxall/Jon Gillie], Wauvenfold [Noel Murphy/Tom Hill] and Penfold Plum [Tom Hill]. After creating the first Origamibiro album 'Cracked Mirrors and Stopped Clocks', Tom wanted to find unorthodox ways to produce intimate live music based on generated loops without the audience barrier of laptop screens. Tom's music had a high level of emotional intensity that I felt a real affinity with and wanted to replicate through my visuals. I also wanted to further explore our live setup and find ways to show what we are doing and how we are doing it, as we are doing it. Early on in this process we enlisted the multi instrumentalist skills of Andy Tytherleigh. Andy immediately multiplied layers of melody and atmosphere in the set to create a wider and more beautiful sound."
(Jim Boxall)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
