Junkyard Playgrounds

U.S. playgrounds with their slick stretches of asphalt, colorful, convoluted slides and free-form sculptures for climbing, are among the world's safest, cleanest and most indestructible. But are they what children want? Of course not, says Lady Allen of Hurtwood, 68, a prominent British landscape architect and president of the World Organization for Early Childhood Education. After a month's survey of the East Coast's showpiece playgrounds, the no-nonsense dowager observed crisply that they are "an administrator's heaven and a child's hell." Said she: "It is time we decide whether our playgrounds are to be designed for adults, who love to be neat, or for children, who love to be dirty."

Even at Washington's John F. Kennedy Playground, which is considered one of the best in the U.S., Lady Allen faulted the elaborate array of model jet planes, trolleys, Coast Guard tugs and fire engines, none of which can be moved. "The successful playground," she argues, "is one in which children can move things around and make them obedient to their own wills."

Lady Allen's answer is the "adventure playground." Instead of flat asphalt, the lot ideally should have hills, grass and puddles. Its main features are: 1) a central pavilion where young children could keep out of the rain during the day and teen-agers could hold meetings at night, and 2) enough lumber, bricks, rope, pipes, hammers and nails to keep the kids busy. With a minimum of supervision, they would build tree houses, hideaways, swings--or just mud castles--and cook their own meals over an outdoor fire.

Lady Allen got the idea on a 1945 visit to Copenhagen, where a Danish landscape architect had created an immensely popular playground by stocking a lot with building materials. It looked like a junkyard. Back home, she organized committees to take over old bomb sites and equip them in the same way. The kids thought that they were the best thing since ice cream. There are now 28 adventure playgrounds in England, and dozens more in Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland.

Insurance-conscious U.S. architects object that boards, bricks and nails are dangerous playthings. On the contrary, says Lady Allen, accidents are less frequent in her playgrounds than in conventional asphalt lots, probably because immovable playthings "bore children and breed a sort of mass hysteria." Anyway, she adds, "it is better to risk a broken leg than a broken spirit. A leg can always mend. A spirit may not."

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