The New York Times had an article yesterday about David Rockwell (famous for designing indoor playgrounds for adults, like Nobu restaurant) and a current gig of his: [url=http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/10/nyregion/10play.html?ex=1326085200&en=1b5ba382c90c37c8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss:4f2d5]New York Tries to Think Outside the Sandbox[/url:4f2d5]. I came across the article via NY blogger Clive Thompson's blog, "collision detection." He covers the story in this entry, [url=http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2007/01/_i_love_this_ne.html:4f2d5]New York developing a next-generation playground[/url:4f2d5].
He writes:
Playground design is such a wickedly cool subgenre of architecture. One of the things that makes me sad as I visit New York's playgrounds with my one-year-old is noticing how many wildly fun things have vanished from the playgroundosphere over the last twenty years, removed by city officials nervous about lawsuits. I remember back in the late 70s, when the first wave of playground-revitalization hit Canada, and bland monkeybars-and-swings play areas were replaced with trippy, massive wooden constructions: Tree-fort-style houses on stilts, connected up by long platforms, bridges, and day-glo plastic tubes. A few blocks from my house there was something even crazier: A massive jumble of telephone-pole-like wooden pillars, all leaning at crazy angles together as if a giant had tried to cram them into the ground straight but they'd fallen all over one another. It was a total blast to clamber around it; you could go straight to the core and hide in the nooks created by the pillars (superb for distant-planet fantasy play, lemme tell you), or climb out to the edge of an individual pillar, which might jut out 10 feet in the air at a 60-degree angle. It was gloriously fun, infinitely creative -- and, of course, a total deathtrap. At some point, a Toronto lawyer clapped his eyes on this thing, envisioned a million-dollar lawsuit from some kid paralyzed during a play-session, and the thing, alas, was promptly razed to the ground.
I found one of the comments really interesting, namely that as you make the playground "safer," the kids naturally find a way to bring back danger, an insight based, as another reader noted, on "risk homeostasis." Well, whatever. Perhaps most damningly, however, was another reader's observation:
It's an interesting looking project, but one other important thing to note: this particular project also talks about how they'll have 'trained staff on hand' to show the children how to play. I wasn't aware that children had difficulty with this! It was stated in the article that the architect, Mr. Rockwell, has in the past developed many 'adult play areas' such as at resorts and the likes, and I might suggest that there is a world of difference between child and adult play. Indeed, I think that we could learn a thing or two from watching our children at play in unstructured environments.
I would also agree with a couple of the earlier posts. Here in Toronto, there was literally an overnight slash-and-burn of much of the cities' play structures a few years back, owing to perceived liability issues in the school system. It took some years to replace the structures, mostly with super-safe climbing systems that children immediately took to either ignoring or challenging in unorthodox and supremely dangerous ways.
Well, it's been a few years since my son's third concussion from playing -- the worst was probably the time he flew off a swing and landed forehead-first on a railroad tie (a kind of square log thing that people use to demarcate the mulched swing area from, say, a lawn area). But then he also fell head first from a shopping cart on to a cement floor -- I think I saw him bounce, actually. That's what comes of ignoring the child seat and straps in carts, but then kids just love to stand in the front of the cart, don't they?
Hmmm, risk homeostasis, eh?