Slides actually make a lot of practical sense in urban environments, potentially zooming over busy streets and transferring pedestrians from high ground to low ground faster than an escalator or set of stairs. That is, as long as people use them in an efficient manner and don’t clog them up. A mainstay on playgrounds around the world, slides can add a sense of fun to urban settings for adults, too. These examples of slides integrated into architecture, temporarily installed in city streets and doubling as public sculptures offer some exciting inspiration (take the hint, architects and city planners!)

Skyslide Los Angeles

Zoom from the 70th floor of Los Angeles’ U.S. Bank Tower to the 69th in a fully transparent, 45-foot-long glass slide with thrilling (or terrifying, depending on your feelings about heights) views of the city below. The Skyslide opened this year on the West Coast’s tallest building, and though the glass is only 1 1/4 inches thick, the slide is said to be earthquake- and hurricane-proof.

Giant Water Slide in Bristol by Luke Jerram

‘Park and Slide’ by UK-based artist Luke Jerram temporarily turned Bristol’s Park Street into a waterpark, drawing in 65,000 visitors to watch 360 lucky lottery winners ranging in age from 5 to 73 slide from one end of the street to the next. “This massive urban slide transforms the street and asked people to take a fresh look at the potential of their city and the possibilities for transformation,” says Jerram. “Imagine if there were permanent slides right across cities?”

Transfer Accelerator Slide for Commuters

Designed as part of the Overvecht train station’s redevelopment, the Transfer Accelerator slide in Utrecht makes leaving the train station a little bit faster, and a lot more fun. The slide was integrated into the stairs outside the station as part of a push to encourage more commuters to take the train instead of driving.

Cliveden House Slide

This four-lane stainless steel slide at Cliveden House in Buckinghamshire, former home to Waldorf and Nancy Astoria, distracts visitors from ongoing restoration work and offers an alternative way to get back to lawn level rather than the scaffolding-covered stairs. It’s not often that you see a theme-park-worthy slide attached to a regal old manor house – it’s too bad it’s not a permanent feature.

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12 City Slides Turning Urban Settings Into Playgrounds For Adults

This steel labyrinth looks like something left behind after the production of a dystopian film, its irregular grid of steel rising and falling onto the concrete surface outside Belgium’s C-mine art center. Designed by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh, the maze is an immersive experience in what the artist sees as architecture in its essential form: “a composition of walls that define spaces.” Made of 186 tons of metal, the installation features vertical surfaces towering over 49 feet in the air to properly disorient visitors.

Entering the maze, you pass through a series of geometric doorways cut into the steel, including a sphere, a cylinder and a cone. Depending on where you are in the maze, these cut-outs might offer a tiny glimpse of what’s on the other side of a wall, or open to reveal a succession of similar cut-outs passing all the way through the installation.

The steel, and how it is cut and arranged, offers a unique architectural visual that changes according to your perspective, shifting from abstract lines into distinct geometries and sometimes creating optical illusions that make you uncertain whether you’re looking at a two-dimensional or three-dimensional surface.

A nearby installation of antique mine shafts offers a different way to experience the maze: from above. You can pass through it as an active participant, and then view it as a whole, taking in its complexities from a more detached bird’s eye view.

Will the cities of tomorrow be filled with intelligent kinetic architecture that moves and transforms of its own accord, as if it has a life of its own? The designers of these 16 structures seem to think so, whether they’re making use of ancient pulley-powered systems or engineering remarkably responsive auto-adaptations to change the look of a structure, shield it from the sun, or make it seem like a living creature in a bid to foster deeper connections between humans and architecture.

Adaptable Snow Cone Lifeguard Station

Modeled on a pine cone, this lifeguard post by RAW Design, Ferris + Associates and Curio adapts to weather conditions on Toronto beaches. The white ‘petals’ can move to either offer shade during the hot summer months or to collect snow in the winter for extra insulation. The petals can also be retracted on one side and closed on the other to guard against heavy winds but still let sunshine in. It was fabricated in three weeks and then re-assembled on-site within 6 hours.

Penumbra Adaptive Window Shading System

The Penumbra system by Tyler Short is “designed to offer a kinetic and mechanical solution to a problem that would otherwise be nearly impossible to solve with static architectural components: providing shading across a building facade for both low evening sun and high afternoon sun conditions.” The various kinetic elements of the shade system can shift in different ways to deflect light as needed.

Moving Parts by Olson Kundig Architects

A home with a roof that opens vertically, an art gallery with a hoist-and-pulley facade and a ‘virtually indestructible’ cabin with operable steel panels are among the kinetic projects by Tom Kundig of the firm Olson Kundig. The architect says early exposure to mining, logging and farming industries led to a lifelong fascination with machinery, which he has integrated into all sorts of architectural projects. The idea is to move something large using very little energy, encouraging user participation in the transformation of the space in concert with geometry and physics.

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Architecture Thats Alive 16 Transforming Kinetic Buildings

Bold and interactive, the Coca-Cola Beatbox by London architects Pernilla & Asif will beckon visitors inside to play music and gaze out at the London 2012 Olympic Park. The eye-catching red-and-white pavilion can actually be played like a musical instrument by interacting with sounds imbedded into the architecture itself.

The design was inspired by Coca-Cola’s ‘Move the Beat’ campaign, which aims to interest teens in the Olympics through a combination of music and sports. Visitors to the pavilion will be able to create their own tunes by remixing sounds that were recorded from various Olympic sports by music producer Mark Ronson.

The Coca-Cola Beatbox will be covered in ETFE plastic pillows that are sensitive to touch and movement. Once visitors make their way up the spiraling staircase that runs through the pavilion, they’ll be rewarded with panoramic views.

“We have sought out some of the most innovative engineers in the UK to work with us to realise our vision – a ‘building with a beat’,” say the architects. “The Coca-Cola Beatbox will be a sensory experience that fuses design, music, sport and architecture. It will be something that people have never seen or heard before!”