Playground Design

I just read this fascinating article in the New York Times, about the “Imagination Playground in a Box“, in Brooklyn, designed by David Rockwell. I’d be interested to hear your feedback on it.

Here’s an excerpt:

It began as a six-foot-long robot named Simon. Then over the course of a few minutes, Kamai Pugh, 7, took Simon apart and transformed the array of blue blocks and foam noodles into a child’s vision of a miniature park with swing sets, a weighing scale, a balance beam, a swimming pool and finally, a lime-green airplane.

At the Imagination Playground in a Box, no fantasy seems too far-fetched. The colorful gear, which arrived at the Brownsville Recreation Center in Brooklyn last week and will remain there through Labor Day, is designed to unleash creativity by allowing children to invent their own activities.

Instead of plummeting down slides or dangling from the monkey bars, children on Saturday built polyethylene palaces from blocks shaped like triangles, clovers, rectangles and cylinders.

They became instant abstractionists, using sturdy brushes to mix heaps of wet sand with colored chalk on the cement. And the urban planners-in-training among them took turns toying with hoses and blocks to create water irrigation systems.