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Posts Tagged ‘Playgrounds’

12 City Slides Turning Urban Settings Into Playgrounds for Adults

13 Sep

[ By SA Rogers in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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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

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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

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‘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

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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

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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

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[ By SA Rogers in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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Magical Monsters & Kid-Size Castles: 12 Epically Imaginative Playgrounds

10 Aug

[ By SA Rogers in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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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

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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

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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
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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

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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

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[ By SA Rogers in Destinations & Sights & Travel. ]

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Brutalist Playgrounds: Sharp Surfaces + Unforgiving Drops

16 Jun

[ By Steph in Art & Installation & Sound. ]

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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“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.”

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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.”

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Private Playgrounds: 13 Amazingly Fun Houses

29 Apr

[ By Steph in Architecture & Houses & Residential. ]

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If you had your own pirate ship fort, multi-story slide, climbing wall or indoor skate park, would you ever want to leave your house? Some homeowners have turned their residences into private playgrounds and theme parks, incorporating fun elements to liven up home life for kids and adults alike.

Home Library with a Wooden Slide

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Bookshelves and a slide are built into a set of stairs in the Panorama House by architect Moon Hoon from South Korea, encouraging kids to spend a lot more time in this fun little space. And as if those three functions weren’t enough, the steps also offer a stadium-style home theater seating area. Says Hoon, “The multi-use stair and slide space brings much active energy to the house, not only children, but also grown ups love the slide staircase. An action filled playful house for all ages.”

Indoor Skate Park House

Private Playgrounds Skate Villa

An abandoned hunting lodge in the woods of Salzburg, Austria was remodeled into a skater’s dream, filled with ramps and curving surfaces to make it an indoor skate park and residence in one. Designed by professional skateboarder Philipp Schuster, Skate Villa retains its lodge character with antlers, rifles and rustic furniture.

Colorful Home with Spiral Stairs, Slides and Trap Doors

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Trap doors, slides, bridges and bright three-story spiral staircases make this ‘magical oasis’ by AB Rogers and DA Studio much more enjoyable for kids and adults alike than an average home. Not only does the house feature secret doors that can be thrown open to slide down to the next floor, it has a special oversized sofa designed specifically for jumping and bouncing.

Pirate-Themed Playground with Treehouse and Slides

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A floating pirate ship bedroom with a rope bridge, offering a magical place to sleep, is just the beginning in this fun-centric house by Kuhl Design. A hidden slide spirals three stories down to a basement with a climbing wall and video golf room.

Tokyo Three-Story Slide and Ball Pit

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Would you rather take the slide, or the stairs? This Tokyo house by Japanese studio Level Architects lets you choose at each of the three floors. Stairs wrap around one side and the slide wraps around another. Another fun feature is a small light-filled ball pit.

Amazing Indoor/Outdoor Home Climbing Wall

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Tired of taking the stairs? Climb from one floor to the next instead. The 3-Way House in Tokyo by Naf Architect & Design incorporates a modern climbing wall as a main visual component, placed in a glassed interior courtyard that can be seen from various rooms in the house.

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Private Playgrounds 13 Amazingly Fun Houses

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