Playgrounds are competing for kids’ time and losing. Nearly 25 per cent of children ages 9 through 13 have no free time for physical activity, and a child is six times as likely to play a videogame as to ride a bike. The playgrounds of tomorrow must offer something that even the most enticing virtual offerings cannot: real spaces that look at least as amazing as anything virtual. Architects and design firms are remaking the playground by taking virtualisation head on. These spaces are comp
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Monstrocity
Climbable tubes made of wrought-iron netting wrap around two aircraft fuselages, a fire engine, a castle turret, three tram cars and a seven metre tall cupola in this adjunct to the St. Louis City Museum. Iron “slinkies” narrow and spill out onto a three-storey slide. Designed by Bob Cassilly.
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Great Green Wave
To create an undulating climbing space that meanders through the trees, designers erected two green steel pipes with a net strung between. In some sections, traversing the structure can involve swinging from ropes with rotating plates.
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Mobius Climbers
A Möbius strip-like climbing wall made of a textured anodised aluminum sheet, studded with polyester resin (fake rock) handholds, forms a challenging landscape to explore. Therapists use the climbers to help children overcome sensory-processing disorders.
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Wall-Holla
What happens to a jungle gym when it’s compressed? It turns into a maze, a fortress, a rock-climbing wall or a soccer goal. Sixty children can comfortably fit in and on Wall-holla, a structure 5 metres tall and 15 metres long.
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Jungle In There
Wall-Holla's exceptionally efficient design compresses a colourful 3D climbing ribbon between two mesh walls, creating a unique experiential environment that, due to its compact size, can fit into even the most limited playground site.
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Geometry Playground
In this travelling geometry exhibit and playspace, children roam through walls of torqued cubes, parabolic curves and wavy mirrors; play with stacked forms and glowing building blocks; and climb gyroids and a stellated rhombic dodecahedron. They might even learn some math as they do.
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Shaping The Mind
In 2010, the Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco debuted its travelling playground, an innovative concept with an innovative goal: to introduce children to the complexities of geometric shapes by letting them physically explore them.
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Neos
NEOS introduces videogame elements - blinking lights, buttons, beepers and timers - into outdoor playgrounds. Players run, jump, and work together to chase down light as it bounces from panel to panel throughout the rubberised metal structure. The light-tag games are aerobically intense and last just a minute at most.
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Snug Kit
Nine objects - mounds, bumps, walls, waves, noodles - form a playground-in-a-box. Children can spin the bumps, fit the waves together to form a slide, and use the walls (which are semicircular) to build tunnels or, flipped, as seesaws.
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Flower See-Saws
The London-based brother and sister team behind Snug & Outdoor describe themselves as a “team of artists” who aim to augment schoolyards and public land by reclaiming underused spaces.
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Bermuda Triangle
A crashed plane, the belly of a whale and topsy-turvy houses conjure entire worlds. In these wood and metal spaces, playing becomes a form of storytelling: mounting rescue missions, balancing on wings, and trying not to fall into the sea (or sandbox, as it may be).