UPDATE- Our Build-It! Discs are now available for purchase + building fantastic things! Go to: www.beabuildinghero.com Are you as excited about our discs and building activities as we are? The response to and interest in our building disks has been simply amazing. The Today Show Parenting Blog, Kaboom!, on-air builds with children at a television [...]
June 20, 2011
A travesty? Wheelchair and crutch bound children everywhere, and lawsuits galore? An unappealing jumble of bent nails and ill cut wood? A blight on the neighborhood? Certainly not. Balderdash. No way. Quite the contrary. The Kolle 37 bauspielplatz in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin is a wonderland. A place of imagination and exploration that [...]
March 24, 2011
Originally, I had hoped to write a little bit each day about the design and intention behind each intuitive building exercise, and the many structures that you I’m sure you have now seen. In short, the resulting structures, although gorgeous, are not about form. Behind each structure is an exercise that is designed to test [...]
March 22, 2011
I particularly relish giving people, especially youth, ridiculously hard challenges that directly engage them in finding and solving some of the most pressing design problems in their everyday lives. Whether they are redesigning and rebuilding their own physically and emotionally decrepit K-12 schools; making high and low tech sensors to gather the environmental data, and [...]
A Week Of Building Experiments And Adventures Interested in helping test the limits of learning, design and collaboration while making gorgeous structures in a fantastic space? Starting this Sunday I will be leading six days of fantastic building experiments at the National Building Museum and I would love for you, and your friends to come [...]
December 9, 2010
Truscale Blocks with 1 distinct piece, 1948 Artificial stone Elland Company, England [1695] Let’s get one thing straight, despite the manufacturer’s claims that their Truscale Blocks are amusing, interesting, attractive and absolutely bubbling over with unlimited possibilities for building, they are not. For many reasons, Truscale Blocks are truly remarkable but aesthetically and functionally, they [...]
December 8, 2010
Learning From Snowstorms: Originally published on www.core77.com on 13 May 2010. ‘When it snows, children take over the city: they sleigh, throw snowballs, make snowmen and are more visible than ever. But what a city needs for its children has to be more durable than snow.’ It is hard not to adore this quote by [...]
November 22, 2010
Holy cow. We couldn’t be more pleased to learn that we won the DIY division of the Playable International Playground Design Competition. Apparently the judges really liked our entry even though it is much more of a how-to for developing a youth-led culture of civic ‘doing’; public space testing, exploration and innovation; and playground building [...]
November 16, 2010
Ride a moustache while you wait for your tacos? Okay there are few things more joyfully absurd than this see-saw, err moustache and its accompanying over sized spectacles. In fact, when our friend Lauren mentioned that she had ridden a moustache see-saw while waiting for her tacos at the ever tasty El Chilito in Austin, [...]
November 4, 2010
Sure, it’s a lot of plastic and packing tape can be remarkably expensive but really, how can you not stand in drooling awe when presented with For Use‘s gorgeous packing tape structure/playground? Why the fawning? Well on the most basic level, as previously stated, it’s gorgeous. However we also find it compelling because it is [...]
September 28, 2010
Admittedly, as you may know, I have mixed feelings about playgrounds that are created because we have not designed our streets or public spaces to be inclusive of different age groups and uses. That being said, it is hard not to be charmed and to a degree impressed by the bicycle park in Berlin’s Gorlitzer [...]
July 22, 2010
Project: Landscape Prosthetics Location: Chicago Project Director: Alex Gilliam Year: Summer 2010 Honestly, this super short project (one afternoon) was simply intended to be a device for quickly engaging my brand new crop of teen apprentices, forcing them to collaborate, bond and quickly feel empowered to change the world around them. Given that I have [...]
June 3, 2010
You may or may not have noticed but our society has developed some pretty definite ideas where things such as play, exercise, industry or even work should happen. For a variety of reasons, over time we’ve built up infrastructures that reinforce where, when and how these things should happen. This has manifested itself in the [...]
May 5, 2010
‘When it snows, children take over the city: they sleigh, throw snowballs, make snowmen and are more visible than ever. But what a city needs for its children has to be more durable than snow.’ -Aldo Van Eyck A few months ago I wrote about my visit last summer to the rather amazing Kolle 37 [...]
April 19, 2010
The see-saw is probably one of the most vilified pieces of equipment you will find on a playground. When I started writing this piece, my intention was to show some of the many examples I found last summer, while on a fellowship in Germany, of how designers have tried to make the see-saw safer. Anecdotally, [...]
February 21, 2010
Install recumbent bicycle benches at CAP Metro Bus stops? Outdoor stair climbers on Congress Ave.? In-ground trampolines on Guadalupe? Criss-crossing balance beams on 2nd Street? Concrete ping pong tables at intersections throughout town? Climbing boulders on East 5th Street? Let’s face it, many of you would consider me quite out of my mind if I [...]
January 31, 2010
Many of you may have heard of or seen the jaw dropping French sport, parkours (here). If you saw one of the more recent James Bond films, Casino Royale, then you’re in. All of that amazing, almost too-ridiculous-to-be-possible but true leaping, bounding and clamoring that occurred in the opening scene was parkours. And believe it [...]
December 3, 2009
You may or may not have noticed, through articles by Public Workshop (here) or via a steady rise in media attention, but playgrounds for the elderly are on the rise. This innovation started in Asia, particularly China, Japan and Singapore but thereafter spread to Spain, Germany and England. Some countries such as Germany are taking [...]
June 27, 2011
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