Playscape

Landscape architects and designers are increasingly using the term to express areas of cities that encourage interaction and enjoyment for all ages.

[1] The term was probably first used in the mid-twentieth century, possibly first attributable to the National Institute for Architectural Education in 1957,[2] and associated in the 1960s with the New York-based Playground Corporation of America.

[3][4] It is mentioned by Joe Frost in his 1992 book, Play and Playscapes, referring to attempts to replace or add on to the rubberized surface, metal and plastic of traditional playgrounds.

Playscapes may also offer a wide range of open-ended play options that allow people to be creative and use their imagination including sand or earth to sculpt and blocks or other materials to build with.

Landscape architects and designers are increasingly using the term to refer to areas of cities that encourage interaction and enjoyment for all ages.

[6] In a Spring 1960 article in Landscape Architecture (now Landscape Architecture Magazine), Eckbo used the term playscape to refer to a play landscape his firm Eckbo, Dean Austin Landscape Architects designed for the Longwood urban renewal project in Cleveland, Ohio:“The central play park became a playscape: a bowl of contoured grassy mounds and hollows, bordered with sheltering specimen trees, and incorporating a little grove of steel poplars, a family of concrete turtles, a fantastic village, contoured sand pit, saddle slide, jumping platform, and the terraced tile wading pool developed around William McVey’s abstract sculpture…” [7]The term was associated in the 1960s with the New York-based Playground Corporation of America.

[8][9] It is mentioned by Joe Frost in his 1992 book, Play and Playscapes, referring to attempts to replace or add on to the rubberized surface, metal and plastic of traditional playgrounds.

The most frequent injury to children on playgrounds is a fracture of the upper limb resulting from falls from climbing apparatuses.

[citation needed] Playscapes offer a wide range of benefits such as increasing physical activity, fine and gross motor skills & cognitive development.

[16] Since 2006 Landscape Architects Adam White and Andrée Davies have pioneered the playscape approach to play space design in the UK.

In 2007 and they were reported as ‘ahead of the game’ in their profession by the Sunday Telegraph, and in June 2009 they were profiled in The Times for their recently completed Lyric Theatre Roof Terrace Garden in Hammersmith, London.

[21] Play components may include earth shapes (sculptures), environmental art, indigenous vegetation (trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers, lichens, mosses), boulders or other rock structures, dirt and sand, natural fences (stone, willow, wooden), textured pathways, and natural water features.