Adventure Playgrounds
Unprescribed urban spaces in New York City
Yale School of Architecture
Studio Dragana Zoric
A collaboration with Cristina Anastase
New York, NY
2019
Adventure Playgrounds, developed in Denmark in the 1940s, are unprogrammed environments where children are encouraged to play freely and interact with all sorts of materials and objects at their own will, engaging their imagination. Similarly, New Yorkers utilize the city in their own idiosyncratic ways – mailboxes as memo boards, light posts as bike racks, sidewalks as living spaces, tires as planting beds. From these studies of playgrounds and behaviors arose a series of fully unprescribed and unprogrammed urban spaces for people to inhabit and interact with freely.
Each of the nine individual playgrounds follows a formal system in its pattern, manipulation of surfaces, textures and incorporation of natural elements. A variation of spatial typologies, scales and experiences is introduced - from playground to playground and within them. Sparking social interaction, curiosity, and new ways of interacting with the city.
Within a defined area in the Upper East Side, we identified “dead zones” or vacant public or private land, surface parking, flat one-story rooftops, and blind facades as Adventure Playground locations. The goals of this project are to equally distribute green areas within the neighborhood and reconnect it to the East River, disconnected today by the FDR freeway which runs along it.
The project began with a photographic study of the unusual ways in which New Yorkers utilize the city. The photographs were then cut up and composed into a collage, launching the project’s formal exploration. Studies of specific moments and patterns within the collage generated each individual Adventure Playground.
