Playground fundraising is never easy. In the best of times, it can mean an endless round of bake sales, car washes, 5ks and benefit dinners. In the midst of our COVID pandemic, when these types of gatherings are risky or prohibited, fundraising may seem almost impossible. The good news is that not only is it… Read more »
Long before the coronavirus shut down parks and playgrounds, kids were hijacking streets and sidewalks and appropriating vacant lots to create their own play areas. They jumped rope, chalked hopscotch on sidewalks and turned any space large enough to build a cardboard fort into an impromptu battlefield. The nation even sung a paean to playing… Read more »
Note: This is the third in a series of articles about play and playgrounds for seniors. Links to the previous posts are at the end of this article. ∼∼∼∼∼ Happily, we in the elder demographic are not likely to be admonished for eating sand or walking backwards up the actual slide. Our maturity engenders a… Read more »
Note: This is the second of three articles about play and playgrounds for seniors. Links to the series are at the end of this article ∼∼∼∼∼ Our smile-less masked world is a sort of backdrop begging to be painted over with happy scenes. With trepidation we’ve burst forth from our collective Covid-chrysalis to not go… Read more »
Note: This is the first of three articles about play and playgrounds for seniors. Links to the series are at the end of this article. ∼∼∼∼∼ Our static moment of quarantine has been surprisingly elastic. Just as we acclimate and refine the art of stay-at-home lifestyle, society flirts with re-opening. Moving from isolation toward re-emergence… Read more »
There is a new thinking in water play design that has as much in common with the ubiquitous splash park as a neighborhood playground has with an adventure destination. We noted this trend several months ago in discussing the first season of the water play area at Knudsen Park in Holladay, Utah. The community there… Read more »
It was after the birth of her second daughter, developmentally disabled Ava, that Olenka Villarreal discovered how isolating a playground could be. The 34 playgrounds in Palo Alto, California where she lived were all ADA-complaint, but to Villarreal accessibility was not the same as usability. Her quest for a place where Ava and children of… Read more »
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 for Adidas and Red Bull… Read more »
We bid farewell to the past year with feelings of hope and accomplishment. As we set our sights on 2019, we take heart not only in the varied ways the tools and instruments of play, as defining elements of the public realm, are taking root beyond the playground, but also in the continued advance of… Read more »
Swampoodle Park, opened this fall at the corner of Third and L Streets in northeast Washington D.C., is, functionally speaking, two parks in one. Half dog park, half children’s play area, the 8,000-square-foot micropark designed by the architecture firm Lee & Associates and now under construction is the latest example of how the long thin… Read more »
When children learn to talk, they start by making sounds, then imitating those they hear. Richard Cooke, who has created a family of xylophone-like and percussive instruments for parks, believes playing simple instruments by ear may be a better way for children to begin to learn how to play music than trying to read music… Read more »
It was against the backdrop of the volatile interwar years in Europe that celebrated Danish landscape architect, Carl Theodor Sørensen first conceived of the idea of skrammellegepladsers or, “junk playgrounds”. Observing children playing in junkyards and construction sites, he was struck by the notion that, through a child’s eyes, almost any object could become beautiful… Read more »
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