What’s New
Making Music in Parks and Botanic Gardens
Music and nature have long been sympathetic partners. The tradition of music in gardens reaches back to the open-air rites and communal celebrations of indigenous groups worldwide, and continues today at parks, university campuses, public memorials, and botanic gardens. Here we look at several ways the experience of music in…
Recess is Making a Comeback: Now Required by Law in Five States
The unique swing options add a level of fun for every child! Twenty minutes is the amount of time it takes to eat breakfast or do a short exercise routine. It’s also the amount of time elementary school children in Florida, Rhode Island, Missouri, and New Jersey have for recess, at a minimum, as mandated by recent changes to state laws. The promise…
The Children’s School of Oak Park: Nature-Play on a Paved Courtyard and a Tiny Budget
The Children’s School of Oak Park, a progressive K-8 school outside Chicago, turned their parking lot into a nature play space on a nonprofit budget—a little over $1,000 all told. How did they do it? A grant from the Deep Roots Project was part of it. The volunteer-led Chicago community…
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…
Best Playgrounds and Playscapes of 2018
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…
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…
Come Feel the Brotherly Love and Win a Ping Pong Table at this Year’s ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO in Philadelphia
Philadelphia is a city known for its colonial history, intellectual heft, and industrial grit. The city’s widely spaced grid of roads, gardens, residences, and public squares, planned by Quaker William Penn in the fashion of a rural English town, frames a poignant historical backdrop for this year’s ASLA Annual Meeting…
Trampoline Parks: A Win for the Big City Birthday Party
If there are seasons of life, there are also months and weeks. So, if I’m now entering life’s early autumn, the more precise time I am currently living through might be termed the birthday party years. Just about once a month, my wife and I travel with my son and…
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…
Hill and Embankment Slides Mark a Golden Age for Playground Slides
The Evening Star, a newspaper published in Washington, D.C., places the first playground slide at least as far back as August 1903. That slide was a long wooden chute, the bottom about a foot off the ground and the top 12 feet high and accessible by a ladder. Several decades…
