hi. ilikemacaroni

landscapeispersonal:

Darling Quarter, Darling Harbour Sydney by Aspect Studio’s.

I am always reticent about reviewing, or even visiting playgrounds if you have no experience with children or children of your own. Particularly with a camera. So the opportunity to spend a few hours with the designer and her kids with my feet in the water and just talking about LIFE while kids were going banana’s was great. Its an amazing project.

Play spaces seem arcane because they can work and still look very ugly - thus the child cult like ‘Nam (“You wouldn’t know, you weren’t there / You wouldn’t know, you don’t have one) but this project seems to balance that against strong formal control and irrefutable and engaging effects. It takes interaction to a new level with sluices, water screws, pumps, baffles, blocks, slopes, jets. I mean, I only discovered water play last year (of course i like going to the beach).

The water play area is such a clear focus that its easy to forget that there are other logic’s that were explained to me: cafe at the centre with sandpits for the youngest nearby; then radiating out in age from there, with a slide and climbing rope thing for the young teenagers. These water non water areas don’t integrate but there are strong reasons why they shouldn’t including sand and mulch in filters. But apart from that the discrepancy seems strong with one amazing and the other just ok. There was some discussion about the cafe and its shade strictures and i didn’t even notice the ugly cafe for the shade structure form which gives some vertical articulation to the otherwise ground focused space. Its folded form seemed good to me though the leaf reference, when i was told about it did dampen it a little. But it wasn’t the first thing I thought when I saw it.

As a client you would have to be happy with this project - its hard to imagine a more intensely used space anywhere. Now they just have to make sure they maintain it properly so it can handle the LOVE.

I wish Vallejo had nice architecture to look at