Facilitating child’s play and learning indoors continues to be a hot and murky topic in the United States these days, but an innovative, indoor playground, located in Brooklyn, New York, offers a hint of what waits on the other side, should the city’s sustained recovery from the pandemic continues to be kept under control.
Designed by the New York and Rome-based architecture practice Architensions, and completed just before the Big Apple went into lockdown, the eye-catching playspace brings together elevated design references with an understanding of children’s psychology and socialising, which reflects its proprietor’s background in childcare and yoga.
The stylish indoor environment was designed to facilitate creative, collective play for small groups of children. While its framework of wooden grids and embedded geometric shapes might seem abstract, Architensions actually looked to several aspects of the natural world in creating an interior landscape that would enhance a child’s experience.
‘We wanted to create a space to promote equality for every child using the space, so we imagined a forest as that outdoor environment where playability is not standardized but can always change,’ explains the studio’s co-principal Alessandro Orsini. ‘We translated it through a series of Euclidian shapes, each acting as part of the setting to help the users' cognitive development.’
Nick Roseboro, Architensions’ fellow co-principal, adds, ‘We did not look necessarily into the conventional playground, but our reference was more related to the social aspect of play. We started to look into Aldo Van Eyck’s playgrounds in Amsterdam built after the Second World War as a series of urban rooms, but also Isamu Noguchi’s ‘Contoured Playground’ playscapes with their distinctive elements that allow the visitors to physically interact with art.’
The playground’s series of structures each creates a different sensory effect, whether it’s hiding inside a washi paper-covered form, resembling an igloo, and experiencing lighting that resembles the effect of falling snow, or climbing up into a 8-foot-tall green cylindrical ‘treehouse’ and peering out through a green mesh fabric that evokes leaves. A semicircular tunnel with geometric cut-out windows painted in bright hues rises up from the ground with shallow steps, while cloud-like forms made from slatted white foam are suspended from the ceiling above.
All materials have been chosen with the young visitors’ well-being in mind – plywood is sanded and clear stained, all painted used is non-VOC natural stain and the floor is covered in soft tan rubber, to cushion any falls. An opening date will be set in due course once social distancing measures can be effectively put into place.
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