Play's the thing
Swingsets and slides? So yesterday. Creative new structures set young imaginations free.
On other city blocks, children play in towering villages of plastic, networks of tunnels and cubes that glow red and yellow and green. At other playgrounds, even the youngest visitors know what is expected of them. They climb up, they walk across, they slide down. And again. And again.
But on this pile of dirt along barren streets where the South End disappears into the Expressway, silver arms of galvanized steel arch and dip and twist. Here, there are no slides or swings. If you glanced over as you drove by, you might think you were gazing at a modern sculpture, something concocted by a tortured artist and his blowtorch.
This is the Dorado, a plaything for school-age children that its manufacturer argues will create a "physically, socially and emotionally valuable experience." Children must learn how to spin around on the asymmetrical bars. City officials hope they will climb and experiment and pretend.
Boston's newest playground, at the corner of Union Park and Albany streets, is not quite finished, so no one yet knows what the children will think. City park officials departed from their standard playground equipment and bought the Dorado - as well as the equally futuristic Asterope and the Spica - from a European company because South End neighbors wanted something more sculptured, less bright than the plastic and painted-metal contraptions at Peters Park, a few blocks away.
Contemporary playgrounds sprouting up in the urban core often bear little resemblance to their ancestors. Brookline's Monmouth Park playground, remodeled a few years ago, also has no swings or seesaws or monkey bars. Instead, its triangular steel frame supports a weaving web, a web nest, and a clatterbridge. The playground, designed by Joanne J. Hiromura of Acton, pays homage to the old firehouse, now serving as an arts center, next door. Hiromura rescued a fire hydrant, hoses, instrument panels and steering wheels from the town's salvage yard. She designed bi-level tables, one side geared for toddlers, the other for adults.
"I think playgrounds should be places that everybody likes to go, not just kids," said Hiromura. "They should be places that bring communities together. I would like to see them beautiful places, sculptural places that have something to say about the place, the community, the people."
Hiromura is part of a backlash against the monolithic, modular playgrounds that permeate America, bland monuments to safety and accessibility. Some scholars and others who study playgrounds argue that a national fear of lawsuits has transformed such spaces into repositories for prosaic structures devoid of imagination, unchallenging for children - and dreary wastelands for adults.
"The biggest problem is that they are really too safe," said Susan G. Solomon, an architectural historian who delivered a caustic indictment of playgrounds in her 2005 book, "American Playgrounds: Revitalizing Community Space." "They have been so emptied of possibility for even minimal risk that kids don't learn to be responsible. Certainly, you don't want them to be hurt badly. But a scraped knee, you can learn something from that."
Critics like Solomon argue that playgrounds are too similar, the same structures rising blocks apart in the same city, as well as blistering in the heat of Fort Myers, Fla., and hibernating beneath snow in Duluth, Minn. Some detractors call it the
And, critics say, these playgrounds do little to exercise the mind or encourage children to work together. "There's little interaction between kids," Solomon says. "There's no room for fantasy."
In her research, Solomon said, she found that the plastic playspaces weren't cheaper than those designed individually by architects. Playgrounds are pricey - even the smallest ones, designed for younger children, can easily cost $50,000 to $75,000. But local parks and recreation officials are afraid to forsake the large playground equipment companies and their promises of safety, she said.
Park officials argue that concerns about safety are not trivial. Standards recommending that the ground beneath play structures be constructed of forgiving materials, such as mulch or spongy poured rubber, have reduced serious playground injuries, they say. Boston tends to buy playground equipment from large manufacturers partly because they are experts on safety.
"They are people who sit on boards that review and certify changing standards," said Ken Crasko, chief landscape architect for the city's Parks & Recreation Department. Crasko also said that choosing the larger manufacturers doesn't mean settling for unchallenging equipment. The weekend the new playground at the South End's Peters Park opened, he said, kids swarmed the new equipment. "I didn't see a bored face on any of them," he said.
And since the Americans With Disabilities Act was enacted in 1990, communities have to consider whether their playgrounds are accessible to disabled children, Crasko said. In a new Mattapan park that may open later this year, city officials plan to install a large glider that can hold two wheelchairs as well as children on benches.
Crasko said he encourages the playground manufacturers that he works with to be creative and come up with designs that challenge children. The Mattapan park will also include a curved wall with handholds and footholds, similar to a climbing wall, designed to build agility. The sections of the wall can be rearranged, he said, to create a new course.
In Boston, city parks and recreation officials decide which playgrounds to renovate based on the state of the equipment and what they're hearing from neighborhoods. Playground designers work with residents as they make recommendations about the kind of equipment and the layout of the space.
Hiromura says that playgrounds should be community institutions, rather than segregated parks for children. Her two-level tables appear at many of her playgrounds, designed so grown-ups don't have to shoe-horn themselves into child-sized seats. And playgrounds, she argues, should be unique.
"There was a big period where you saw all those modular structures," said Hiromura, who has designed play areas around the country, including one at the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, Ark. "You weren't seeing a lot of custom design or imagination."
At the Franklin Street Park in Cambridge, a pocket park near Central Square, neighbors wanted an urban greenery that would appeal to adults and children. Beside the benches and tables for grown-ups, Hiromura designed a stainless steel dome, surrounded by artificial turf for children to climb. At a nearby park on Lopez Street, a small lot squeezed between triple-deckers, Hiromura built a playhouse for children. She designed the playground to resemble elements of a house, complete with mail slot beside an arched front door and bronzed slippers beside a large, plastic easy chair. She created a giant wooden toy box and bouncing dog bench in the "backyard."
At the Maple Avenue Playground near Inman Square, she designed a play castle to look as though it were built with giant blocks. She and her production partner created the structure from Corian, a synthetic material more commonly used on kitchen countertops. It was, Hiromura says, ideal for the playground - Corian is durable and doesn't absorb heat, so it stays cool on hot days. Her firm negotiated with DuPont, the material's creators, to get the amount needed at half price.
At Monmouth Park, beside the Brookline Arts Center, children can weave together old red and gray fire hoses. They can converge in the web nest, a nook whose floor was designed from nylon strapping material. They can straddle a hose, dipping and rising from a fire hydrant, and pretend they are fighting fires. Hiromura is less academic about her goals than some other critics of modern American playgrounds.
"I just hope," she said, "that it sparks their imagination"
Kathleen Burge can be reached at kburge@globe.com
