Designer Spotlight
Pipelines: A Colorful Art Installation About Conservation
The Dynamic Duo The right partner can often be hard to find…professionally speaking. When searching for the right collaborator there are many options, but there are few who share the same vision, sensibilities, values and approach. When it does happen, it can be like capturing lightning in a bottle….
A Place for Play, Artistic Expression and Community in Savannah
DCIM100MEDIADJI_0099.JPG Community-Led Change The term “creative placemaking” might not be part of most people’s everyday vocabulary, but for Erin Wessling, it is an essential component of her work. Erin serves as the founder and creative director of W Projects in Savannah, GA., a full-service marketing agency that also specializes and…
Montreal’s Parc St. Joseph Inspires Play for All Ages
default Valérie Bouré, a landscape architect for the city of Montreal and part of the three-person team behind the design of Parc St. Joseph, is riding high from two recent awards. The space (which features Goric’s dynamic playground equipment) has been recognized for its accessible, inclusive design and also won an…
Our Crazy Maze Winners Had Fun
Crazy Maze – Fun for all ages! Pat Stout went to the 2021 ASLA conference to earn CE credits and discover new and innovative products he might include in a project someday. He didn’t expect to also be going home with a Goric Crazy Maze. Not, he joked, with his time playing our virtual maze game. It…
Risky Play and the Study That Fueled a Movement
Meghan Talarowski “I hate taking my kids to the playground.” That’s not something you expect to hear from a person who researches and designs playgrounds for a living. Yet there was Meghan Talarowski on a TEDx stage, flashing a picture of one of those cheerfully colored, boxed-in, plasticized kiddie slides as she…
Designer Spotlight: Teri Hendy on the Safety Standards that Transformed U.S. Playgrounds
Peruse the entry for Teri Hendy in the Play and Playground Encyclopedia and try not to be impressed. The Cincinnati-based design and safety consultant has advised the playground industry for almost 30 years and chaired or assisted ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) International subcommittees behind some of the…
Leadership Profile: Stephanie Perler Garst, executive director of the US Play Coalition, on raising the value of play
For many of us, the opportunity to play—to improvise and imagine, to do something for its sheer enjoyment rather than any practical purpose— may come as the exceptional moment in the day. But Stephanie Perler Garst, executive director of the US Play Coalition, would like to see play become “more…
Going Deep with G Cody QJ Goldberg, Founder of Harper’s Playground
G Cody QJ Goldberg has had an interesting career, to say the least. The child of bonafide San Francisco hippies, he earned a BFA in film and television studies at New York University, spent a year playing drums with a band of gypsies in Mexico, and worked on branding campaigns…
Designer Profile: Architecture Duo Coryn Kempster and Julia Jamrozik Partner with Goric to Reimagine the Playground
Former Herzog & de Meuron architects Coryn Kempster and Julia Jamrozik started a multidisciplinary architecture practice in 2015 with the aim of bringing together their varied interests in visual arts, public education, and architecture.The duo’s work cuts a wide cloth, from temporary installations to permanent architectural projects, from oral histories…
Playground in the Picturesque: The Revival of Frederick Law Olmsted’s Linear Park in Atlanta
Where to begin talking about Frederick Law Olmsted? The life and achievements of the Renaissance man revered as the “father” of landscape architecture are almost impossible to summarize succinctly. But a synopsis of the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers Project, a partially published collection of twelve volumes of journals and professional…
Designer Profile: School Zone Institute’s Anne Taylor on Learning by Design
Around the start of the new millennium, Anne Taylor, Ph.D., the 85-year-old president of School Zone Institute (501-c-3), gave the keynote speech at a conference called Better Schools For a New Century, hosted in San Francisco by the America Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Committee on Architecture for Education. Then the…
Access is Not Inclusion: The Battlecry of the Play Brigade
A little more than four years ago, when Dawn Oates took her youngest daughter, Harper, to a neighborhood playground in Boston to play with her older twin siblings, she found herself deeply dispirited. For Harper, an eager two-year old born with a debilitating spinal cord injury at birth, there was…
