Where was your absolutely favorite place to play as a kid? Chances are, it was a pillow fort, a tree house or anywhere but a traditional playground. Moreover, studies have now shown that when children’s play has an element of danger it is strangely more healthy than safe play.
What Are Adventure Playgrounds? In short, adventure playgrounds are places where children can create and modify their own environments, rather than relying on rigid equipment that only serves a limit set of programmed purposes: “In a sense, you and I have always played in ‘adventure playgrounds.’ We created a fort in the kitchen cabinets, jumped from couch to couch across oceans; we snuck out through a hole in the fence to a new world. We climbed trees and hid in bushes. We played in the mud and the rain. We chased each other, made secret worlds …”
So How Did Adventure Playgrounds Get Started? Believe it or not, modern adventure playgrounds began with wastelands of World War II. Designers then had the idea to institutionalize these spontaneous and accidental junk playgrounds. Initially the principle point was to encourage a more natural form of play, but increasingly the emphasis has been on sustainability and hands-on building, allowing children to create and ‘own’ their playgrounds.
What Are the Benefits of Adventure Playgrounds? Reasonable risk can be healthy, according to those who support the adventure playground movement: “The opportunity to be able to access a rich play environment, and assess and take risks, is paramount for the healthy development of all children, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially and creatively.”
We created spaces with whatever we could find around us. Some of us played in abandoned buildings, or barns, or vacant lots between buildings, used what we found and made up stories of our lives to be. Here you go, hammers, saws, nails, wood, tires, rope, cloth, whatever you can find. Make it your own.
If you are new to WebUrbanist, click here to sign up for the RSS feed and take a look through our archives and urban galleries. Also be sure visit our green twin the wonderful WebEcoist and and see architecture, interiors, fantastic furniture and more designs at Dornob or click here if you need to design a free flash website.
Great Related WebUrbanist Articles:
Rotating Architecture: 16 Spinning Builldings
Architects have always aimed towards building bigger, wider and higher. Now technology has made a fourth design dimension possible: movement.
5 Floating Cities and Ocean Utopias
Who hasn't imagined living on their very own floating paradise?
Olympic Villages And Venues Then And Now
A look back on critical Olympics venues and villages, historical Olympic architecture from around the world from games gone by in locations of historical significance.
55 Comments
November 27th, 2007 at 8:14 am
That is really cool, I wish people thought like this more often.
November 27th, 2007 at 1:38 pm
These places look quite dangerous.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
That would have been so fun. Who cares about all the shit they outlaw today (tag) hahaha, I don’t care what anyone says, break a little rules every now and then. Not saying it’s safe but still fun.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:56 pm
I don’t know if this is sad or just the coolest thing ever, God still loves us. Yaaaaaaa!!!!!!
November 27th, 2007 at 6:58 pm
its like a open source playground
November 27th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
I totally remember those from when I was a kid! Are they still around?
November 27th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
the adventure playground at the Berkeley marina was, and is to this day, my favorite place in the bay. if you found nails or trash, you could turn them in for tools like hammers, saws, paint, and paint brushes so you could build or rebuild whatever you fancied.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
the adventure playground at the Berkeley marina was, and is to this day, my favorite place in the bay. if you found nails or trash, you could turn them in for tools like hammers, saws, paint, and paint brushes so you could build or rebuild whatever you fancied.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Yeah… nothing compares to the St. Louis City Museum (www.citymuseum.org). It is ridiculously unbelievable…
November 27th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Yay for tetanus!
Although I do like the Pirate ship design…
November 27th, 2007 at 7:32 pm
I went back to my elementary school playground during high school. All the monkey bars and jungle gyms were gone! Totally removed!
I talked to a friend who went to another elementary school in the area and he said he noticed the ones at his old playground were gone too.
I’m betting some kid probably killed themselves on one or suffered serious brain injury and they had rich parents who yelled a lot and had them removed, not realized that there are a hundred other ways a kid can fall from trees and other play objects and suffer the same injuries.
We are so protective today. I loved climbing on those bars in those jungle gyms.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Great place to hang out.
I have seen simmilar type of playgrounds in Europe where this kind of places are fundedby local officials and sposors.
November 27th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
I actually had the experience in one of these as a kid in orange county California, in Huntington beach.. Gothard Park.. They had a place where you could build and a mud lake you could raft around in… ahhh, the good old days before the [censored] took over the planet.. So what if you got hurt, it’s your own dam fault!
November 27th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Wow.. I missed a lot when I was young.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:21 pm
Can I play?
November 27th, 2007 at 8:29 pm
I used to play in a playground like the one in the first pic. It was at the middle school I attended.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
Great stuff! Of course, imagination is just as powerful on regulation playground equipment.
When I was an elementary school kid in the late ’70s/early ’80s, my school had enormous playground equipment. For instance, the tallest slide was easily 10 (12?) feet tall (and all stainless steel!), as was the biggest swingset. I recall many recesses spent swinging as high as possible or climbing that slide and testing ways to go down faster (wintertime was fun)… on top of that, the playground surface was either asphalt or hard packed ground!
What I also recall is that injuries small or big were nearly non-existent. If someone did get hurt it was a lesson learned, not grounds for a lawsuit… ahhh, the good old days of being responsible for yourself and paying attention to what was going on around you.
November 27th, 2007 at 8:51 pm
you’re absolutely right, i never been to any of these places as a kid lol
November 27th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
If you think it’s dangerous, don’t go near it and keep your kids at home, safe, like that strange family across the street when I was growing up. The rest of us will play out there. It is very good for kids and grandkids, within reason, to encounter real life obstacles and have to make quasi-supervised decisions.
November 27th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
I saw these in the “Up” Series - l(ook for 7-Up, 14-Up, 21-Up etc at Netflix), GREAT SERIES Follows 7 year olds all the way to 49 which was shot a year or two ago.
Always thought these “adventure Playgrounds were cool!
November 27th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
you MUST check this web site out. It has good pictures and videos, but not as good as the real thing. We were walking around St.Louis, and we saw this building, so decided to go in. I will NEVER forget it! It is made from some historic parts of the city (old giant bank safe doors, bottles…) and has an amazing atmosphere, especially with the soft tickings of a shoelace machine!
ENJOY!
http://www.citymuseum.org/home.asp
November 27th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
this is absurd and incredibly contrived. creating a space for kids to explore and take risks? turn off the tv. unplug the computer. put the ps3 and Wii in the trash. open the door and set your children free: make sure they are home by 6:30 for dinner. until then relax, knowing that they are taking risks, finding their own limitations, and building their own worlds.
November 27th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
These things are awesome! I wish we had these as a kid though I feel they are even more needed now. People need to stop their california mindsets that “if one kid gets hurt, we should make it so no kid ever gets hurt that way again.” This is a completely BS line of thinking which is why there are no more monkey bars and some schools have gotten rid of recess all together.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:00 am
Sweetness. I remember stealing off to make forts and play in old construction dump piles… this seems a LOT safer! :)
November 28th, 2007 at 5:51 am
We’ve become so carefull about our kids outside environment, in the process we’ve killed the kid inside.
November 28th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Nice playground :) , kinda reminds me of my childhood’s playgrounds.
In my childhood days , me and my friends used to enjoy playing in construction sites.This was back in early 90’s, when our neighbourhood was in fact a big giant construction site :).We played hide and seek on the roof of 10 stores high unfinished building.These unde construction buildings were our the primary source for PVC plastic tubes , which we used to make toy “guns” who fired paper conic projectiles (we called them cornet :).Armed with these “weapons” , plenty of notebooks (paper) , we engadged in daylong teamplay “battles”.
The place was so damn dangerous, anytime you could fall from high floors.But the real danger was in fact the site’s watchman, who would reaaaally kicked our ass so badly ,if we were caught stealing those pvc tubes :).
I used to injure myself a lot in my childhood, I was full of scars from playing, beating and so on :)
Nowadays, the neighbourhood is (damn)quiet, the kids don’t hangout too much outside.They spend their spare time online ,watching TV or in afterschools, because their parents are overprotecting them.Sad…
I wish i can spend one more day of my childhood
November 28th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Oh, this reminds me of that Sesame Street segment where a bunch of kids got to design and build their own playground, and it had a castle and some murals and…stuff. My memory of it is very vague, but I do distinctly recall being extremely jealous of those kids.
I wonder what an open source playground for adults might look like…?
November 30th, 2007 at 6:41 am
@sumdog: more likely some kid knocked a tooth out or got a mild concussion.
December 4th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Grew up in Munich, Germany.
There were several of those adventure playgrounds, one round the corner of my kindergarten. I certainly enjoyed playing there.
Would love to head over there right now…
December 7th, 2007 at 3:32 pm
Oh boy, did I love the “Bouwspeelplaats” (construction playground) in my city when I grew up. Once a membr, you could lent 1 tool, like a hammer or a saw or a paint brush, and build whatever you want. There was an area with huts, an area to play soldiers with sewer pipes, indoors, canteen wher you could get candy etc.
Now my kid is growing up, and I would be terrified of him going to a place like that…. But, I probably would let him go anyways. The memories are irreplacable.
December 15th, 2007 at 1:29 am
Amazing message.
I know you’ll like my website..
Bye
December 18th, 2007 at 5:37 am
nice place…
February 6th, 2008 at 9:26 am
finally, some pictures where I grew up
February 14th, 2008 at 11:46 am
There used to be one of these in Toronto years and years ago, it was an amazing place to go, and so much fun to build stuff. I would imagine that there is quite the liability issue though given way parents of today are such fear mongers….
April 4th, 2008 at 10:45 am
wow those are interesting playgrounds i wouldnt want my child to play on those wow?
May 2nd, 2008 at 12:51 pm
YEAH MY BROTHER AND FRIENDS MADE A FORT IN THE WOODS BEHIND OUR HOUSE AND I WILL SEND THE PIC AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
P.S. IT’S 2 STOORIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
May 18th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
we think that the playgrouns are mad as we would love to have that playground in our school! mad as
May 18th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
i live there… :D i’m soo poor. :(
June 16th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
don’t lay awake at night thinking about your worries keep looking thinking about your problems
July 9th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Hey, at the weekend as a kid i would be out the door asap on my bmx and wouldn’t be seen t’il i felt hungry! Great days.
Does anyone know the architect/designer for the first pic with the snake in?? I would love to replicate this.
July 19th, 2008 at 8:09 am
Give credit to the photographers!
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:49 am
these are the best palces ever i work at one during the summmer there great
May 30th, 2009 at 1:21 am
????… ?? ????? ???? ??????? ????????! ??? ??? ??? ???????…? ????????!
June 10th, 2009 at 1:26 am
?????????? ????????? ?????????? ?? ???????????? ???? ???? ????? ?? ???????
Trackbacks
What do you think? Leave a comment!