“I am a sculptor. I have been making play sculptures since 1958. I do not design down to children. I make the best sculptures I can to help design an environment for imaginative play. Good sculpture is as essential to a child’s development as good music and good literature. “
Last year when I featured a vintage DNA climber sitting lonely in an abandoned park in my hometown, Mike (who runs the nice Tommie the Turtle Facebook page), let me know it was the design of Jim Miller-Melberg, who also designed one of the concrete turtle varieties so popular in the midcentury.
What I called the ‘DNA’ climber, Miller-Melberg called the ‘Tree Form’, and it was one of many play sculptures he designed from the time of his first commission in 1958 for an elementary school. Inspired by the abstract play sculptures being installed in Scandinavia but faced with a small budget he decided to mold rather than sculpt; hiring a company that usually made steel molds for septic systems to fabricate the form for a two part assembly with holes for climbing in and through that could be modularly arranged to form either an enclosure or a curving wall.
Jim’s interest in molding and in modularity continued with his ‘Castle’ design, which could be stacked and aligned in at least six configurations, and was featured in the indoor playscapes he created for the Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. Alongside it was his ‘Moonhouse’–one of his most ebullient works–also fabricated in two parts for ‘double’ or ‘single’ installations. The Moonhouse was one of Jim’s personal favorites, and was particularly popular in Japan; he once received a letter from there addressed simply to “Mr. Moonhouse”.
Most of us probably have seen one of Miller-Melberg’s ‘saddle slides’, so popular in suburban malls of a certain vintage, or his uniquely graceful basketball goal, or his spouting porpoises–for splash pads before they were called splash pads–without knowing who designed them. Jim Miller-Melberg’s works are familiar to us, but his name has been less heralded than it should be in the history of American play design. I’m pleased to help change that.
In researching this post, I was happy to discover that there is a Castle still intact in my home state of Oklahoma! I’ll be visiting it soon. If you have Miller-Melberg play sculptures near you, please add them to our google map of Playgrounds Worth Preserving, and watch over them to ensure their survival for the next midcentury of kids.
[Images from Jim Miller-Melberg's own site, plus a lovely set uploaded to pinterest by Brent Jurjjens which includes vintage catalog pages. Miller-Melberg's animal sculptures (including the turtle!) and his graceful basketball goal are still available from Wasau Tile. Alas, the Castle and Moonhouse are out of production.]
The post The Playgrounds of Jim Miller-Melberg, 1950s – 1980s appeared first on Playscapes.