“To walk the streets as if in a movie…where the city is the hero.”
That was the goal of the design for the giant Lazona Kawasaki Plaza shopping mall by Japanese landscape firm Earthscape. It includes a dedicated playground with origami-like folds, whose tricky surfaces are an *appropriate*, design-driven use for full-on safety surfacing. And yet they didn’t neglect the sand…the tilted sliding surface (the one without footholds) ends in a sandpit. But I especially like that Earthscape filled the entire area with more subtle play features: color furniture in child-scaled steps, walkways gridded with rainbow-light panels, and lyrical dove planters. To make a space truly child-friendly, it must be woven with play beyond the playground itself.
[all images via Earthscape except the second image, which is by Susan Solomon, who also includes it in The Science of Play
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