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Educational Playgrounds
Imagination Playground
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Imagination Playground
Designer Rockwell Group
Teaching Goal Design
The concept for the Imagination Playground, a unique collaboration with New York City’s Department of Parks and Recreation, came just after September 11, when architect and designer David Rockwell was looking for a way to help revitalize Lower Manhattan. The playground includes water, sand, and “loose parts”—abstract foam pieces—as well as a gaggle of found objects like blankets, traffic cones, and PVC pipe, which function as props. The materials facilitate unstructured child-directed free play in which kids work together to engineer their own playscapes. “In most cases kids would take pieces and try to create individual things,” says Rockwell. “But at some point, maybe 15 to 20 minutes later, they’d start to get curious about what would happen when they’d link their thing with someone else’s.”
The Imagination Playground in Manhattan won’t open until next year, but Imagination Playground in a BOX, a mobile version produced in cooperation with KaBOOM!, was recently deployed to recreational sites in all five New York City boroughs, and will soon be found across the country. After the shipping container–like boxes full of loose parts and found objects are opened, trained “play associates” monitor the fun until it’s time to pack them for the night.
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Rockwell Group’s Imagination Playground packed up
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