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

It’s true that as we get older, we lose most of the rich imagination that had us drawing monsters and telling strange stories as kids, the world seeming less magical with each year that passes. But sometimes, we grown-ups still manage to cling to some of that creativity, allowing us to design and build stuff that’s just as cool through the eyes of adults as it is to kids. These epic playgrounds around the world are a tribute to that wonder, curiosity and adventurous spirit, whether they’re exclusively for little ones or open for us to enjoy, too.

The City Museum Outdoor Playground, St. Louis, Missouri

Mesh tunnels arch into the sky, airplanes are elevated on bright blue steel beams, and other metal parts criss-cross each other across a large open courtyard at what was once the 10-story International Shoe company in St. Louis. The 600,000-square-foot City Museum, designed by artist Bob Cassilly in 1997 and has been continually updated and improved by a group of 20 artists known as the Cassilly Crew since his death in 2011. Those two repurposed planes are just the beginning of a chaotic arrangement of play equipment including slides, caves, tunnels, ball pits, a rooftop Ferris wheel and a school bus that juts out from a ledge. It’s delightfully weird, and there’s nothing else quite like it in the world.

The Crooked Houses by Monstrum, Denmark

There’s a lot more to this weird little collection of crooked houses than meets the eye, as the design is actually inspired by local slaughterhouses. According to Monstrum, a creative firm building playgrounds all over the world, the area was once home to dairies and slaughterhouses before it became urbanized, and their design reflects that history. Use climbing grips to scale the sides of the houses, or attempt to balance on beams leading from one window to the next.

Crocheted Alligator Playground by Olek, Sao Paulo

This gigantic alligator-shaped playground in Brazil was already cool enough before crochet-bombing artist Olek brought her signature colorful encasing to give it a new look in 2012. It took the artist several weeks to cover the alligator in Brazilian ribbons and acrylic yarn. The internet is so enamored with Olek’s embellishment that it’s hard to find a photo of what the playground usually looks like.

Woods of Net at the Hakone Open Air Museum, Japan

Another artist integrates woven fibers to playgrounds in a different way, making her hand-knitted creations interactive elements for kids to play on. “Woods of Net” at the Hakone Open Air Museum in Japan is a beautiful example of Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam’s work, and took her an entire year to finish. The playground features trampoline-like knitted nets with pendulous growths on the underside functioning as swings.

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Magical Monsters Kid Size Castles 12 Epically Imaginative Playgrounds

Climb a ladder, swing on a hammock-like seat and run your hands along various wooden surfaces on this strange polyphonic playground, and your movements will create a unique song. Studio PSK teamed up with beatboxer Reeps One to create this multi-sensory play experience for this year’s London Design Festival, encouraging people to interact with an unusual physical fusion of music, design and technology.

Designer Patrick Stevenson-Keating d Reeps record a bunch of different sound banks of samples, which were then loaded onto the program Ableton Live and mapped to trigger points on the playground. A product called ‘Electric Paint,’ which sends signals to the computer, is screen-printed onto paper tiles and covered in protective acrylic, acting as giant keys on a keyboard.

The wooden playground frame is like one big musical instrument in this sense, setting off cascades of sound as participants clamber up the steps or take a trip down the slide. In addition to the conductive paint on the wooden elements, the team integrated copper tape into the slide and conductive thread in the swings.

“We were always very clear from the start that we wanted ‘play’ to be an important part of the project,” the designer tells Bare Conductive. “…Often we communicate quite complex ideas or narratives, but by employing a playful strategy to do so, we can engage with the audience in more meaningful ways. This was certainly the hope for the Polyphonic Playground.”

The phrase ‘brutalist playground’ kind of sounds like a joke, emphasizing the great potential for injury that would seem inherent to a sharp, harsh play structure where kids are encouraged to roughhouse. But the very same rawness, heavy materials and stark shapes seen in the architecture that was built in this style after World War II was extended to quite a few playgrounds. Today, there are all sorts of laws about kids’ safety that would nix these designs before they were ever built, but as we all know, the ’70s were a different time.

The actual Brutalist playgrounds were demolished long ago, but a new installation at RIBA in collaboration with artist Simon Terrill and architecture firm Assemble brings them back in the form of full-scale replicas. Housed within the RIBA headquarters in London, these recreations look just like the real thing.

Being that they’re inside a museum – and meant for kids to actually play on – the replicas were made not of the original concrete, but of foam. The installation “encourages visitors to look at the materiality and visual language of now lost Brutalist landscapes in new ways through an immersive and conceptual landscape.”

“Although the value of brutalist residential buildings today is much debated, this exhibition shifts the focus to the equally important playgrounds found at the feet of these structures, offering a renewed understanding and critique of the architects’ original designs and intentions.”

The installation will be in place through August 2015, and the photographs of the originals are just as fun to look at. Like all Brutalist structures, they’re not exactly inviting. Says Terrill of the Churchill Gardens playground in Pimlico, London (pictured top in 1978,) “Before these postwar playgrounds were built, children would have been playing in the bomb sites left after the war. It’s possible the architects were referencing that in their design.”

Children in Copenhagen have a little extra whimsy and fun added to their playground experience with the Mirror House, a pavilion and learning space used by kindergarten glasses. The gabled ends and doors of the structure are covered in warped funhouse mirrors.

Designed by Danish architects MLRP, the building is otherwise a minimalist black volume of the sort not often seen in projects designed for children. The exterior is clad in charred timber, and the doors feature convex and concave mirrors.

The steel ends of the buildings not only reflect the trees and the sky, seeming to enlarge this open natural space in the middle of a large city, but the rippling makes them fun to look at. Hopefully, the kids won’t be too traumatized by birds that are unfortunate enough to fly into the mirrored surfaces.

The architects say, “At night the shutters are closed making the building anonymous. During the day the building opens up, attracting the children who enjoy seeing themselves transformed in all directions. With simple means it has succeeded to transform an existing, sad and anonymous building to a unique and respectful installation in the newly renovated park.”