In the early '80s, I spent many sweltering Saturday afternoons with the Hamburgler. To play on this McDonald's playscape, you had to climb a rickety ladder through a long, narrow steel cylinder. The steel-cage maw was perilously hot and confining, completely unlike the safety-first constructions of today. I have nothing but fond memories.
But there's something to be said for the new era of playground equipment. Tim Nash, who designs for Portland-based Koch Landscape Architecture, spoke to Babble about the state of the modern American playground. He also shared a trade secret: in spite of all the thought and money and child-psychology that goes into the design of modern slides, swings and bouncy wooden bridges, kids use playground equipment however they damn well please. — Will Doig
Playgrounds today look so different than the ones I played on when I was young. What's been the major change in playground design and theory in the past two decades?
Typically, it used to be the single unit that was shoved out onto some bark chips, or for that matter just onto asphalt. Now, for many reasons, you won't see that. The way a lot of playgrounds are set up now is driven by safety protocol. Also, I think you see more consistency between playgrounds today because there are companies out there who just have the components in their catalogues, and everything just sort of goes together.
Safety protocols have also changed the nature of playgrounds.
It's the main driving force. It's also the most challenging aspect because there are so many guidelines in every direction, particular the CPSC [U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency] guidelines, which sets the standards for things like fall heights, for the space around each piece of equipment, even for how bolts and screws are covered. That kind of stuff ends up being the really challenging part of making things work, because you can sit there in the agency and think up a lot of crazy ideas to make playgrounds safer and safer, but trying to actually integrate them and make them work is challenging.
Who can be held liable if a kid gets hurt on a playground?
Put it this way: it's not the designers, as long as the installation was done correctly per the guidelines. Essentially, the company that builds the piece of equipment is taking the liability for it. You won't find many designers who want to actually design the individual pieces of equipment for the simple fact that they don't want the liability. This is why the stuff is extraordinarily expensive.
How much might one piece of equipment cost?
A decent-sized piece of play equipment, like something upright that you can climb on? That stuff gets up in the thirty- or forty-thousand dollar range. The larger component pieces, the ones that are just enormous, can cost well over seventy-five, eighty, a hundred grand.
For all the new guidelines that the agency has set forth, do you feel that playgrounds truly are a lot safer than they used to be?
I mean, kids are crazy. They make up stuff you can't plan for. And so I think those guidelines work well in that they provide a background, and on some level they call to your attention the need to look into littler things that one might overlook in terms of design, such as openings. There are minimum and maximum openings, so that a kid can't get his head caught. But things like the maximum fall heights, that's all relative. If a younger child is climbing on something he shouldn't climb on and goes too high and falls eight feet, it's not a good thing. But an older child, in the five-to-twelve range, may have the ability to take that fall a bit better.
Five-to-twelve seems like a huge age range. A five year old and a twelve year old are completely different kids.
Yeah, there's this huge coordination difference there. There's a two-to-five range and there's five-to-twelve. Typically, older than twelve and it winds up being not so much a play area as a social environment. In theory, you're not supposed to have a piece of play equipment for a smaller child next to a piece for an older child. But the likelihood of kids actually only using one. Little kids love to follow the older kids. So what it really comes down to is parental supervision.
Should urban playgrounds be built to mimic natural environments?
You know, there's always the debate about the kid who grew up in a rural environment and plays out in the river with a stick, versus the kid who grew up in an urban environment where play space is dictated. I'm not sure putting something that mimics nature and is completely naturalistic into an urban environment is the way to go. There are lots of ways you can build play equipment that, instead of saying to kids, "You should play on it this way," allows them to play on it the way they want to. You need to be clear about, "This is an area that means play," but that area doesn't need to specifically say, "You have to climb up here to get over to there to slide down that slide to climb back up to use the swing."
When you were a kid, what kind of playground equipment were you attracted to?
Honestly, I was more into the sandbox type stuff and building things. And the swings. I liked to see how far I could get thrown off the swing and stuff like that. I've had one broken bone my whole life and it was from the swings.
And yet, somehow you survived without the ultra-safe modern playground.
You know, you look at a company like Kompan, and they have a totally different product line that they sell in Europe than the one that sells here. Most places in the world have caps on liability. It's tough, because you can understand how if your kid gets hurt and he's paralyzed for life, you'd want to go and sue everybody. And true, you don't want that ever to happen. I mean, I don't even like going to the playgrounds I design because you look up and see a kid climbing up this tall thing and you're thinking to yourself, "Oh my God."
The park we worked on down in Wilsonville, there are two climbing walls that we built, and on opening day I was there for like fifteen minutes and two sixteen year olds climbed to the top of the wall and were doing back-flips off it. You can never really prepare for the stuff kids are going to end up doing. You just have to create some sort of safety around it and hope they use their brains, which isn't always going to happen. But hopefully, if he does fall, he gets his bell rung and thinks, maybe that wasn't such a smart idea.
photo courtesy Joel Benjamin