Spotlight July/August 2008 – N.Y. Architect, Kaboom Introduce New Playground Concept
As one of New York’s leading architects, David Rockwell is intimately familiar with some the city’s most well-known adult play spaces. He has designed restaurants, Broadway sets and celebrity homes, but it wasn’t until recently that he rediscovered play spaces for children.
After nearly four years of research and development, Rockwell’s plans for Imagi-nation Playground — a new play concept that focuses on flexibility, creativity and interaction — are coming to fruition.
A portable version of the concept, Imagination Playground in a Box, was unveiled in Brooklyn in July, bringing flexible tubes, movable building blocks, water and sand to a tough neighborhood in need of more play spaces.
The project precedes construction of a permanent playground at Burling Slip in lower Manhattan that is scheduled to open next year.
“The core idea that the playground project ties into is my deep belief and interest in being proactive as a designer,” Rockwell says. “In the last eight or nine years, I’ve realized that there is a chance to really affect the quality of the city, and the quality of how people live, by working in a private-public partnership with the city.”
Rockwell entered a partnership with Kaboom, a nonprofit organization dedicated to play spaces, seven months before the Brooklyn playground was unveiled. Kaboom financed installation and construction and will work with Rockwell to find a manufacturer and spread the idea to other locations.
Kaboom aims to eventually install 1,000 permanent and portable Imagination Playgrounds throughout the United States within the next five years.
Play Time
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Architect David Rockwell incorporated sand, water, loose parts and playground supervisors to encourage a constantly changing environment where children can build their own play spaces. Activity is mixed with creativity by providing a variety of materials to promote unstructured free play. Construction of the first playground is scheduled to begin this year and be completed in 2009. |
“I have a deep interest — a lifelong interest — in creativity, collaboration and play and the kinds of spaces that foster creativity,” Rockwell says.
Imagination Playground is anchored by four concepts: moveable play pieces, sand and water, multi-level landscape and a “play associate” that monitors the play area.
The playground’s movable pieces allow children to work independently or collaboratively to build their own unique play spaces. The pieces can be incorporated with sand and water at the playgrounds to enhance the play experience while allowing children to make the inevitable mess that occurs with those ingredients.
The permanent structure will feature a multi-level landscape to allow different environments to build and climb, Rockwell says.
The play associate is necessary to monitor the moveable parts and ensure proper configuration. However, Rockwell says installations at schools would require no additional staff since the play areas are already monitored. In fact, he says Imagination Playground could be best suited for facilities that feature traditional playgrounds.
“It was an opportunity to create a child-centric play environment that would fit beautifully next to more standard playgrounds, which are built largely to build gross motor skills,” Rockwell says. “Our focus is on building creative muscles and trying to find ways to put out the raw ingredients for kids’ creativity.”
Inspiration
Rockwell’s foray into playground design was led by dramatic events in his life — the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the birth of his two young children.
About a week after the Sept. 11 attacks, Rockwell donated his services to help renovate a school that was accommodating displaced students from lower Manhattan. After the renovation was completed with a team of about 40 architects and designers, he had an epiphany: “As creative people, the way we can make a difference in the world is by actually contributing and jumping in.”
Soon after, city officials who wanted to create a viewing platform at Ground Zero approached Rockwell. He agreed to the project and launched a foundation that raised enough money for construction within 100 days.
Rockwell planned to continue his civic endeavors, but met a roadblock on his next Sept. 11-related project — a proposed art center that was planned as a cultural response to the terrorist attacks.
“It was just so hard and impossible to get anyone to agree on anything,” Rockwell says. “In a moment of utter frustration, I said to someone I was working with, ‘I should have just applied our creativity and built a playground.’”
The idea took hold after he started to take a closer look at play spaces as he watched his two children interact with their environment at neighborhood parks.
“This interest in play was accelerated when I had two kids, who are now six and eight, and I started to watch them play,” Rockwell says. “I realized that the way they play is they create their own reality. They are deeply creative little beings.”
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His children unknowingly provided further insight after he bought an art table for them and they were more interested in playing with the foam pellets and the box that it was packaged in.
“They wanted to create their own reality from pieces they assembled,” Rockwell says.
History
As Rockwell researched playground spaces, he found ideas at post-WWII playgrounds.
“There is an amazing history of playgrounds around the world and in New York, particularly the European playgrounds post-WWII, where kids assembled pieces from their immediate world,” he says.
However, that trend waned in the mid-’60s, according to Rockwell.
“Things got much more cautious in terms of playgrounds,” he says. “They seemed to become much more homogenized, like things you would order out of a catalog.”
As Rockwell attempts to reintroduce spontaneity and creativity at playgrounds, he says the creative and social play he experienced as a child helped shape him into the person he is today.
“I think at the end of the day, the creative playing and the social and fantasy playing helped develop my interest and instincts in how to play as a grown-up,” he says.