It was also on a bomb site in 1947 that Aldo Van Eyck built his first playground in Amsterdam. On Bertelmanplein he introduced a sandpit, posts of different heights pitched in the pavement and scattered in the plaza, and jumping stones that were first put in the sandpit but later disposed in the surrounding area by Van Eyck himself. The success was such that parents sent letters to the municipality asking for more of these in town. Play as a programmatic component in planning, took advantage of leftover, in-between spaces that destruction laid bare and were lying expectant. Children’s play became present in public space; more than 700 playgrounds scattered in the city, were designed over 30 years by Aldo Van Eyck. Working in these liminal places, Van Eyck recovered the element of the street as the first public space children appropriated. The street has always been their first extramuros beyond the house, where they felt free to wander and mix with adult life. The indefinite limits of the playgrounds in between buildings and the abstract geometric forms composing the elements of play, engaged children’s imagination but also were absorbed by cityscape almost as if the playgrough was urban furniture found on the street. Once again, we are dealing with the idea of found objects along the way, scrap in the street that can be played out in multiple ways by children. All this reappears in the importance of the street for children during the war in Sarajevo; it was their way to school, but also an adventurous itinerary. Its elements played a major role in their narratives; the shade of the towering residential building, the corner that was safe, the place that was denied by the snipers, the play against these rules. In the words of Leila Berg: ‘Our street is full of drama. We lived in it. It was our territory. Every stage of our growth was marked on it, our wonderment, our terror, our triumphs, our deprivations, our compensations, our hate and our love.’ 2 In post-war architecture of the Athens’ Charter, elements of circulation or transport, such as the street, were reinterpreted. The street was especially revisited by architects such as the Smithsons who wrote about their Golden Lane housing: ‘the street is an extension of the house; in it children learn for the first time of the world outside the family; it is a microcosmic world in which the street games change with the seasons and the hours are reflected in the cycle of street.’ 3 After WWII in Yugoslavia there was an urgent need for housing. Early large scale social housing estates constituted neighbourhoods on their own, where communal facilities
After WWII, reconstruction was not only concerned with the rebuilding of edifices but with the laying down of the foundations of a new society. Children led by example: bombsites scattered across Europe became their informal playgrounds with the basic elements they needed: scrap, loose topography, no grass to care about and no keepers to reprimand them, opening the way to an unprecedented venue: a space made exclusively for the purpose of play. Emdrup, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, 1943 under Nazi occupation: parents had asked for a children’s play space in which activities would not appear suspicious to German soldiers. Dan Fink, an architect with the Emdrupvænge housing estate, commissioned a playground from the landscape architect Carl Theodor Sørensen in collaboration with the educator Hans Dragehjelm, the inventor of the sandbox, and the pedagogue John Bertelsen. Sørensen was inspired by the simplicity of children ‘messing around’ in bombsites with objets trouvés . He proposed a space to foster a similar action, putting at the disposal of children elements to be manipulated, touched and transformed. This was a transgression of the idea (in place from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century) that associated play with a natural and healthy environment. Sørensen designed an artificial, contaminated nature, where children like those in rural areas, have at their disposal scrap elements of play, but this time associated with urban life. The director of the playground, John Bertelsen, called it a junk playground , inspiring the landscape architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood in the recovery of London bombsites after the Blitz. It was an opportunity to recycle spaces left free in the re-building process, not for construction, but as free space for kids whose numbers were growing and had no place to play. Junk was not a well-received label for these places so Lady Allen of Hurtwood re-named them adventurous playgrounds . Leila Berg, in her book Look at the Children, 1 gives a description of the effect these playgrounds had on adults: ‘I once passed an adventure playground where five or six boys of twelve or so were climbing some high ramshackle construction, so high that it was very visible above the fence – a mistake to be paid for, as all adventure playground workers know – when a man stopped, horrified. He could scarcely believe his eyes. A policeman on the corner was leaning on the bonnet of a car, making notes. The man walked swiftly up, ‘Officer!’ he said. ‘Look!’ The man waved his umbrella; he was incoherent ’Look!’ ‘Look at what?’ said the policeman with deliberate weight. ‘Those boys! Look! They’re climbing!’ ‘They’re allowed to, sir’ said the policeman. ‘It’s their playground.’ ‘But…!’ ‘If you don’t mind sir, I’m busy here.’ ‘But – they’re climbing!’ ‘I know, sir. There is nothing I can do, sir.’ ‘But – they’re climbing! It’s fantastic! Disgraceful! Appalling!’
1 Berg, Leila. Look at kids . Penguin Books, 1972. p 68 2 Ibid. p 44
3 Resta, Giusepe & Dicuonzo, Fabiana. “Playgrounds as meeting places: Post-war experimentations and contemporary perspectives on the design of in-between areas in residential complexes”. Cidades, Comunidades e Territórios , no. 47, 2023. Open Edition Journals, https://journals.openedition.org/cidades/7771
on site review 44 : play
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Darine Choueiri
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