Designer Spotlight
Designer Profile: Jennifer Brooke on Meaningful Accessibility
Jennifer Brooke was first attracted to landscape design as an undergraduate architecture student at the Parsons School of Design in New York. The founder and principal of Massachusetts-based Lemon Brooke, a firm she and husband Christian Lemon jointly direct, Brooke says the performative aspects of landscape design, akin to dance…
Designer Profile: Holly D. Ben Joseph
Holly D. Ben-Joseph, principal of the eponymous Concord, Massachusetts-based landscape design firm, shares a workspace in The Bradford Mill with a brain trust of artists, interior designers, and engineers. It’s a wellspring of creative energy and it keeps her open to new ideas. She founded the practice in January 2005…
Designer Profile: German manufacturer Spiel-Bau
After the re-unification of Germany in 1990, there was a great need of infra structure improvements in the eastern regions. The development of playgrounds and play environments for children was essential. Seizing this demand, Juergen Schilling and Joern Schaefer founded Spiel-Bau GmbH and were immediately successful with their innovative designs…
Designer Profile: Noa Haim and Collective Paper Aesthetics
The journey of Dutch designer Noa Haim into paper structure began in 2008 at the London Festival of Architecture, where she developed a participatory installation as part of her graduate work as an architecture student at the Berlage Institute. With the assistance of the FabLab Den Haag and volunteer teams…
Designer Profile: Native Hawaiian Angelica Rockquemore on the ASLA National Diversity Summit and Natural Learning Spaces
Angelica Rockquemore is a bit of a whiz kid. A landscape designer and planner at Honolulu-based HHF Planners, the Fulbright Fellow’s decorated education and professional career includes research and planning of Japanese gardens in Kyoto, design of outdoor play areas in Maori language immersion preschools, neighborhood concept development in Portland,…
Designer Profile: Nathan Elliott, Principal at the Office of James Burnett on Persistence in Playground Design
Nathan Elliott didn’t always follow his creative instincts. The principal with the Office of James Burnett in Solana Beach, California, says he went into computer science at Louisiana State University on the model of his brother, but “flubbed out” of the weeder courses. His girlfriend was enrolled in LSU’s landscape…
Twelve Years Later: Revisiting Susan Solomon’s Call to Revitalize American Playgrounds
The book American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space, by writer and architectural historian Susan Solomon, opens with a scathing—and forcibly blunt—indictment of modern American playgrounds, to wit: “Existing American playgrounds are a disaster.” The picture Solomon paints in the introduction of her 276-page historical review and contemporary playground study is familiar to…
Designer Profile – Aldo van Eyck: A Playground for Every Neighborhood
In 1947, when the structuralist architect Aldo van Eyck built his first playground in Amsterdam, Dutch cities were in a state of crisis. The city’s infrastructure lay ravaged by World War II, the birth rate was accelerating, and there was little available housing stock. At the time, most existing playgrounds…
Designer Profile: Lynn Wolff of Copley Wolff Design Group
Shortly before they co-founded Copley Wolff Design Group, Lynn Wolff asked John Copley to describe his childhood. They were both teaching at Boston Architecture College at the time, and had a standing Tuesday meeting to discuss their classes and projects. Ms. Wolff’s question wasn’t that unusual. The surprise came, mid-sentence,…
Designer Profile: Joe Frost, The Contemporary Father of Play Advocacy
As a child on a small farm in southwestern Arkansas, Joe Frost played with his friends in the foothills of the Ouachita Mountains. He played war and chase, built dams in the stream behind his grade school, and piled on his classmates in a game called “Dog Pile.” He devoured…
Designer Profile: Michelle Mathis, RLA, Learning Landscapes Design
Eight years ago, on a five-day cycling tour of Berlin, Michelle Mathis stumbled upon her first bonafide adventure playground. What she saw caught her off guard: along several hundred linear feet of boardwalk, children unaccompanied by parents were using hammers, hand saws, and pieces of scrap wood to build forts,…
Designer Profile: Joseph Lee, Father of the Playground Movement
“Do not be forever meddling, interfering, asking questions, showing them a better way. Give the constructive power of your children scope and elbow room – the temple that it builds is invisible to any eyes but theirs. If you blur and jostle their vision, it is lost.” —Joseph Lee, social…
