Wait. Safety First, Safety First. It's a Liability issue. They could hurt themselves on [blank].

Bright colors and plastic slides are fun, but do they promote creativity? Photo Terence Ong / Wikimedia Commons

These phrases can be heard quite frequently in a design office, particularly when designing a play area for kids. Whether it's creating a soft ground surface, fencing in (or out) unsafe areas, or making sure the corners on that metal piece aren't too sharp, we're constantly looking at ways to create play areas that are safe for kids. But as a designer, it's easy to make safety your only priority, forgetting the things that make play areas so great in the first place: a sense of discovery.

Each one of us remembers experiencing that sensation of discovery as a kid: whether it was exploring in the woods behind our neighborhood, building forts and catching lizards, or playing that neighborhood-wide game of capture the flag, sneaking through alleyways and backyards to gain strategic advantage. These moments of "free play" seem harder to come by these days, don't they?

Man-made, structured playgrounds, often constructed out of brightly-colored metal or plastic pieces, can only offer so much in terms of real discovery and creativity. What they do offer is total control over the experience by the designer, smoothing edges, softening surfaces, and ultimately limiting liability. The place to play, as well as the type of play, is predetermined for the kids, cutting short the possibility of creative discovery.

Nature Play Areas, open-ended outdoor natural playgrounds, are an attempt to solve this growing conflict between liability and creativity.

Photo by Rod Wojtanik Learning Landscapes Design

“The playground of the future is beginning to take shape — and it looks a lot like the backyard of the past.

Designers of children’s play spaces are increasingly looking beyond slides, jungle gyms and other plastic-coated structures in their quest to create fun, safe, healthy environments. As a result, kids are running outside and discovering play areas dotted with old standbys: sand, water, boulders, hills and logs.”

— Jeffrey MacDonald, USA Today

These "old standbys" are increasing in demand among our clients, as well. Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center, in nearby Cedar Hill, Texas, is looking to Studio Outside to design a nature play area for large school groups of children. With constructive, creative play and education in mind, we're beginning to understand the nature of explorative play. As part of the design team, I feel torn in a couple different directions. As a landscape designer, I want to make something really super cool in the space - a winding sculptural tunnel or angled climbing wall - something that will grab attention and say "this place is designed really well." On the other hand is the kid in me. The kid that remembers how fun it was to be able to construct my own forts in the woods behind my house growing up, and how quickly time would fly when I was able to truly own the space in which I was playing.

If the anecdotal evidence from our collective remembered childhood isn't enough, there are some other resources on the matter. Joe Frost, a "leading expert on play and playgrounds" and Professor Emeritus at UT Austin, was interviewed in 2008 by the American Journal of Play. He has the following to say about the current state of American play:

“In general terms, limiting children’s outdoor play harms their cognitive, social, and language development. It limits their physical fitness, hurts their health, and reduces learning and the ability to cope with trauma. Research shows that when children engage in free, spontaneous play outdoors, they adapt more readily to their culture, to society, and to the world. They build fine and gross motor skills. They learn to negotiate and solve problems. They stretch their imagination. They become more flexible in their thinking, and they develop creative and aesthetic appreciation.”

And finally, Joe has a little advice for us:

“Architects, naturalists, manufacturers, self-build proponents, and others are capable of designing and constructing good and bad playgrounds. We just need to ensure that we build good ones—playgrounds that provide props, natural and built, that invite and accommodate various forms of play in restricted spaces. Fortunately, Americans are gradually realizing what children have always known, and what history has always shown, and what research has demonstrated throughout the past one hundred years—play and play environments matter.”

I agree, Joe.

Dogwood Canyon's Nature Play Area is progressing, and we're still surprising ourselves that providing a bundle of sticks and stones seems just as effective, if not more so, than building a play structure ourselves. It's a tricky balance between designed structure and indeterminate space. We continually have to transport ourselves back in time to discover what types of natural exploration and discovery perhaps even prompted us to become landscape architects in the first place.

Journal of Play - What’s Wrong with America’s Playgrounds and How to Fix Them [PDF]

USA Today - Natural Playgrounds are Growing into a National Trend

Design Principles for Nature Play Spaces

Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center

Lafitte's Cove Nature Preserve in Galveston, Texas. Image via drive-discover.com

Performing the work and duties of a landscape architect in coastal communities can be difficult for a number of reasons, chief among them being the possibility - or probability - of sea level rise coupled with infrequent but potentially devastating hurricane activity. In designing the new Sea Scout Base in Galveston, Texas, Studio Outside designers faced the challenge of selecting trees for the site that would be able to withstand not only hard, straight-line winds, but would be adapted to the sandy soils and salty air permeating the beachfront property.

The site plan called for canopy trees to be planted throughout the property to provide shade, screening from traffic from nearby roads, and to act as a buffer from high winds as well. The challenge was finding a tree that could take all the abuse that the Gulf of Mexico could throw at it, while still performing those essential duties. None of the standard options would work. Most inland canopy tree species were not salt-tolerant enough, and tended to break apart in high level winds.

Lafitte's Cove Neighborhood in Galveston, Texas

Turns out the solution was located right next door the whole time.

During a visit to the site, the team heard of a local grove of trees that had survived multiple hurricanes and decided to check it out. In Lafitte's Cove Nature Preserve, a small marshy plot of land in the middle of a neighborhood, the team found a dense copse of coastal live oaks, or sand live oaks, that had withstood the test of time. Quickly, they gathered over a thousand acorns underneath the thick canopy, intent on planting the eventual seedlings on the project site.

From Studio Outside's Paul Freeland:

“We collected over 1000 acorns from the trees and had them shipped to Rennerwood Tree Farm to have them custom grown. Two years of careful maintenance, watering and care produced 375 tree saplings 3-4’ tall. These will be planted throughout the site and create a forested perimeter to create an edge to the campus and in the future, screen the traffic of Interstate 45.

Because these trees are propagated from native live oaks that exist on the island, it’s our hope that they stand a better chance of survival over trees that might be from a different part of the country or grown without any exposure to the marine environment they will grow up in.”

375 of Galveston's most resilient tree children, grown at Rennerwood Tree Farm

After a little bit of research, I found that the statistics (pdf) seem to back up the anecdotal evidence of Galveston Island's most hardy tree species. After Hurricane Ivan destroyed much of the tree canopy around Florida's coast, it was the Sand Live Oak (along with the Live Oak) that fared the best, with 99 and 96 percent of the trees surviving the storm, respectively, while pine trees and the tulip poplar fall to the bottom of the list, attaining a less than 50% survival rate.

As designers, we often want to work with materials and methods that we are familiar with, regardless of the location of the project. We strive to be sensitive to the individual needs of the site, but we also carry with us inherent biases towards certain plant types, materials, or design rules depending on where we come from. Galveston's family trees show us that sometimes the answer is right under our noses, on the site itself.

The Sea Scouts, with their new resilient trees, will have a property populated by the most native tree species possible, right from their own backyard. It's what we as landscape architects strive for: to enhance the natural elements of a site, to bring its best qualities front and center. The Sea Scout Base in scheduled for completion in October of this year, and we hope to see those trees standing tall for decades to come.