Playground
improvements
swings are out
. by Jacquin Sanders ,
The old-fashioned playground, it seems, is
outmoded.
That may come as a surprise to adults who recall
the pleasurable dizziness of a ride on the
-merry-go-round , the delight of a swift, bottomside
descent on a slide or the soaring-swooping exultation
that could be found on a playground swing.
But a new generation of playground designers-if
not necessarily playground children consider the old
equipment stultifying and unconducive. to the
development of youngsters.
"We want to get away from the fortress-like effect
of old-fashioned parks," says Walter Kocian, a San
Francisco playground architect. "All that plain metal
equipment offers no chance for creative, adventurous
play.
'Take the swings, for instance. Children use them ,
for a while and then get bored. There's nothing you
can do with a swing except swing. So they invent
something else turn it into a battering ram or hoist a
park bench between three swings, making a bench
swing which is very dangerous. That's what happens
with the standard equipment. The kids try to do
something different with it and get into trouble."
The men and women who are creating the
playgrounds and miniparks in cities these days are
working to produce areas of "creative possibility."
Their idea is that every piece of playground
equipment should have many uses and, indeed,
should be a take-off point for the child's imagination.
The new playgrounds, thus, look nothing like the
old. Chicago's mammoth Adventure Playland has a
building lot filled with giant Lincoln logs, a rocket
ship 32 feet high and a climbable observation tower
four stories high.
In New York City, a neighborhood association
rented an empty lot, supplied it with $350 worth of
lumber, hammers, nails and shovels, and then called
in the kids. The result a jerry-built new town with a
dozen or so shacks of all sorts and sizes. Another new
playground in New York's Central Park features
hanging tires that swoop and swirl, a maze of tunnels
for exploring and a multi-level tree house.
Richmond, Calif., now has a sort of swamp park
with a pool programmed to flood at predictable
intervals and with mud the main play ingredient.
"The parents aren't too pleased," says architect Tom
Brown, "but kids love mud and it's good for them to
have a chance to play in it."
All across the country, playground designers have
discovered the boundless fun possibilities of climbing
nets and "pretend" ships. Sunnyvale, Calif., has a
Huck Finn riverboat. The Chinatown section of
Oakland has a Chinese junk more than 50 feet long.
Both ships come complete with docks, swinging
bridges and cargo nets for climbing.
But even this kind, of equipment seems antiquated
to some designers. A boat, after all, is as unalterably
boatlike as a swing is swinglike. The new concept is to
put down free-form contraptions and let the kids do
the shaping themselves.
In San Francisco, one new playground consists of
four dozen posts in the ground. "We'll drill some
holes in them, attach a couple of pipes and ropes,
provide planks and nails and then step back and
watch," says the architect. The kids can nail on the
planks and make whatever they want. When they get
tired of it, they can rip them down.
But what about all those bare nails and all those
free-swinging hammers? And in the other new parks,
what about the child who falls from the cargo net or
the observation tower?
Safety is, of course, a factor in the design of every
park but many of the new designers think it can be
overstressed. They note that old-fashioned swings and
slides produce their share of broken legs and arms,
and the more sedate types of equipment, like
teeter-totters, are ignored by all but the very young.
"Besides, kids learn from danger it's a part of
growing up," says a West Coast playground designer.
The main emphasis nowadays is educational. The
old idea that a playground was mainly for
entertainment and perhaps for
time-consumption has been abandoned.
"If a playground works properly," says San
Francisco architect David Gates, "it will meet all the
motor coordination needs climbing, sliding,
swinging, pushing, crawling and all the abstract
intellectual needs, as well. The forms will be a castle
to one child, a rocket ship to another. It will be a
child's sanctuary, a place where he can explore and
grow."
It will also be considerably easier on the parent
who accompanies his child than the traditional
playground. "Those outings to the park can be hard
work," says one father. "First I've got to push the kid
on the swing, then climb up the slide with him, then
push him around on that merry-go-round till I'm as
dizzy as he is."
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Generally, parents are segregated in new parks.
confined to benches at a reasonable distance where
they can observe but where their presence-and
interference is minimal.
Even so, the adult influence in playgrounds is still
too pervasive for most of the modern thinkers in the
field. City planner Mayer Spivack, director of the
Environmental Analysis and Design unit of the
Harvard Medical School, has done a variety of studies
on child "play space" and he concludes that even the
newer playgrounds are designed with adult aesthetics
in mind.
"This can completely miss the needs of children,"
he says. "Children see things more pragmatically.
They don't need anything beautiful. What they need
is something they can move, mold, manipulate, lots
of tiny things that can be put first one place then
another-not only large things they can j;limb on."
Nevertheless, the ferment in playground design has
brought some striding new conceptions. One of these
is the "stack sacks" of 30-year-old Jay Beckwith, a
playground architect who prefers to be called a
"playground sculptor."
Beckwith's stack sacks are cotton bags filled with
dry cement. The children stack them any way they
like, then douse them with water. The bags harden
into new, child-created forms which look like nothing
ever seen in anybody's old city park.
"Anyone can make something look neat, but it
takes genius to make something look messy," says
Beckwith, who also used old tires and metal poles
which he welds on the site-to the vast amusement of
the assembled children.
But even this sort of playground is too structured
for Beckwith.
"A house that is never quite finished is the, grooviest
possible playground," he says. "Everything else is so
slicked up in this world, a playground should be
different. It should somehow say to a child, 'Come
build on me-come change me.' "
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