adventure dollhouse
One of my favorite playgrounds is Adventure Playground in Berkeley. It’s so different from any other modern playground, that I’ve often wondered how it can exist, and it turns out the history is pretty wild. The first adventure playground was dreamt up by the Danish architect Carl Theodor Sorensen in 1931. He noticed that children were more fascinated by piles of scrap materials than the playgrounds that he had designed, and he proposed creating a "junk playground in which children could create and shape, dream and imagine a reality" that offered the play opportunities of rural areas to children in cities. In 1943, the first junk playground was built by a Workers Cooperative Housing Association in Emdrup, Denmark, during the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Historically, children played freely in the streets, but under Nazi occupation, parents' feared that "their children's play might be mistaken for acts of sabotage by soldiers". In order to create a safe space for children to engage in free play, they worked with Sorensen to transform a junkyard into a playground. The idea spread, and In post-war England WWII bomb sites were transformed into junk playgrounds.
The idea spread here, too. The Berkeley Adventure Playground was established in 1979, and it t still feels really radical. It’s a free park, run by the city of Berkeley, and the play structures are built by kids out of scrounged materials like tires, rope, fishing nets, old fire-hoses and scrap wood. There are bits of old playgrounds that have been re-purposed, pianos to play, and giant pipes that look like they came from a construction site. If kids want to build something, there are hammers and nails, drills and paint that the kids can use. There are a few adults on the lookout for unstable structures that they reinforce or dismantle, but otherwise the kids are free to build and play in their own way.
It’s hard to visit the Adventure Playground without wanting to bring some of that creative freedom back home with you. It’s also hard to give the same amount of creative freedom at home that they have at Adventure Playground, but over the years we’ve tried a few little experiments.
These are some of our building blocks at home, very much inspired by Adventure Playground. These blocks have been painted and embellished over the years, and used for countless constructions. We don’t hammer or glue them together, but being able to paint and write on them can help to deepen exploration.
This is a dollhouse that we’ve been working on together using Adventure Playground rules, meaning it’s okay to paint anything (even if it’s been painted before). That allows it to keep evolving, and it’s never “done”. So far we’ve tried liquid watercolors, kwik-sticks, posca acrylic markers and sharpies, plus some fancy sparkly gem stickers.
Adventure Dollhouse in progress
I know this isn’t the same as the Adventure Playground, but it does hint at the possibilities of toys made by children, and ones they can help to shape with their own ideas. I could imagine making a collaborative Adventure Dollhouse at a community center or a school, somewhere without the resources (or the permission) to create an Adventure Playground, but that wanted to give kids a taste of that wild creative freedom.
