The final installment of Playground of My Mind will appear next week.
Stay tuned for the next installment of Julia Jacquette’s memoir. Coming soon.
About fifteen years ago, while visiting my parents—who still live in the apartment I grew up in—I walked past the courtyard of their building. Looking in, I was suddenly struck by a sense of regret that I hadn’t in some way visually recorded the now-demolished playground—a mini-gem of 1960s Brutalism—that had once stood there.
That sense of regret for not having documented the playground led to an urge to somehow recreate it. In turn, it also prompted me to ask my father—an architect himself—about who had designed it (M. Paul Friedberg, it turned out). Research ensued, but turned up very few photographs of the playground, forcing me to make drawings from memory. This process later proved to be inexorably tied to what became the core narrative of Playgrounds of My Mind: how compelling architecture can prompt creative thinking in the minds of those who inhabit it.
My initial approach to making art about the Friedberg playground was to attempt to recreate it in three dimensions—in miniature—but I quickly shifted to a two dimensional approach, which took the form of a graphic memoir. I felt as if I could say more with a visual language.
As I began to work, the narrative immediately expanded. I not only included other “adventure” playgrounds built around the same time (the most obvious choice being the playground my father himself had designed with Jim Ryan and Ken Ross in Central Park), but also the playgrounds of Aldo van Eyck (in Amsterdam, where I live part of the year), which shared a strong affinity with the design and play philosophy of the playgrounds I’d grown up with in New York City. The more I learned, the more fascinating it became to me.
The story that emerged was one of how these New York City playgrounds influenced my own aesthetics and ideas about making art and design. A story about how any work of art and design can offer its viewers a structure they can use to create their own artwork.
Look for the second part of Julia Jacquette’s “Playground of my Mind” next week.
The idea for the adventure playground originated in postwar Europe and was championed by the English landscape designer Lady Marjory Allen, who vocally advocated for children and their right to play. New York’s latest adventure playground, on the Governors’ Island, celebrates tinkering and “playwork,” a concept pioneered in what was known in the early years of the adventure playground movement in Denmark as “junk playgrounds.” Adventure playgrounds are many things: precincts of invention (of the self and of playscapes), environments for imaginations to run gleefully amok, and, significantly, an education in managing risk, as highlighted in the documentary called The Land, about the Welsh adventure playground of the same name.
The Land (Teaser) from Play Free Movie on Vimeo.
Adults aren’t typically allowed to even enter adventure playgrounds (unless they are one of the employee facilitators). In Berkeley, California, which has a well-known, nearly forty-year-old adventure playground on its waterfront,the coordinators observe that many parents don’t know how to play.
Some playgrounds spring from the imagination of the designer or architect with the full intention of freedom (Julia Jacquette’s graphic memoir will explore this a little, her father was an architect who designed a well-loved playground in Central Park), but many playgrounds fall victim to architectural “control.”
Last year’s Extraordinary Playscapes exhibit at the Boston Society of Architects looked at how playspaces impacted young minds and examined some of the best international examples of playground design.
The anonymous play sculptures of our childhoods (designed by Jim Miller-Melburg) get a show of their own in Detroit.
Accessibility and inclusivity should be not just social expectations of the playground experience, but physical ones too. Designing or finding accessible playgrounds shouldn’t be a chore—or even a question—for families with special needs.
Niki de Saint Phalle’s Golem slide in Jerusalem was ahead of its time and now dearly loved, but there are plenty of other artist-designed (deliberate or not!) playgrounds around.
Check in next week for a new roundup of the latest play news and stories.
(Photo credit: Image of the Monster Slide, Kiryat HaYovel, Jerusalem by Brian Negan on Flickr.)
