Sports also have a special life of their own, which cannot be duplicated. Throwing the ball around, shouting out, winning a crushing victory, losing a long drawn out match, getting a wild ball back on the net somehow, anyhow—these arc moments that cannot be captured by a job of work. They are entirely different; perhaps they cater especially to what E. Hart calls the psycho-emotional component of muscular activity. (“The Need for Physical Activity,” in S. Maltz, ed., Health Readings, Wm. Brown Book Company, Iowa, 1968, p. 240.) In any case, it is a kind of vitality that cannot be replaced.
There fore:
Scatter places for team and individual sports through every work community and neighborhood: tennis, squash,
THE POETRY OF THE LANGUAGE
Finally, a note of caution. This language, like English, can be a medium for prose, or a medium for poetry. The difference between prose and poetry is not that different languages are used, but that the same language is used, differently. In an ordinary English sentence, each word has one meaning, and the sentence too, has one simple meaning. In a poem, the meaning is far more dense. Each word carries several meanings 3 and the sentence as a whole carries an enormous density of interlocking meanings, which together illuminate the whole.
The same is true for pattern languages. It is possible to make buildings by stringing together patterns, in a rather loose way. A building made like this, is an assembly of patterns. It is not dense. It is not profound. But it is also possible to put patterns together in such a way that many many patterns overlap in the same physical space: the building is very dense; it has many meanings captured in a small space; and through this density, it becomes profound.
In a poem, this kind of density, creates illumination, by making identities between words, and meanings, whose identity we have not understood before. In “O Rose thou art sick,” the rose is identified with many
xli
table tennis, swimming, billiards, basketball, dancing, gymnasium . . . and make the action visible to passers-by, as an invitation to participate.
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Treat the sports places as a special class of recognizable simple buildings, which are open, easy to get into, with changing rooms and showers—building complex (95), bathing room (144); combine them with community swimming pools, where they exist —still water (71) ; keep them open to people passing—building THOROUGHFARE (iOl), OPENINC TO THE STREET ( I 6 5) , and provide places where people can stop and watch—seat spots (241), SITTING WALL (243) . . . .
366
73 ADVENTURE PLAYGROUND
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. . . inside the local neighborhood, even if there is common land where children can meet and play—common land (67), connected play (68) ; it is essential that there be at least one smaller part, which is differentiated, where the play is wilder, and where the children have access to all kinds of junk.
•J* tj*
A castle, made of cartons, rocks, and old branches, by a group of children for themselves, is worth a thousand perfectly detailed, exactly finished castles, made for them in a factory.
Play has many functions: it gives children a chance to be together, a chance to use their bodies, to build muscles, and to test new skills. But above all, play is a function of the imagination. A child’s play is his way of dealing with the issues of his growth, of relieving tensions and exploring the future. It reflects directly the problems and joys of his social reality. Children come to terms with the world, wrestle with their pictures of it, and reform these pictures constantly, through those adventures of imagination we call play.
Any kind of playground which disturbs, or reduces, the role of imagination and makes the child more passive, more the recipient of someone else’s imagination, may look nice, may be clean, may be safe, may be healthy—but it just cannot satisfy the fundamental need which play is all about. And, to put it bluntly, it is a waste of time and money. Huge abstract sculptured play-lands are just as bad as asphalt playgrounds and jungle gyms. They are not just sterile; they are useless. The functions they perform have nothing to do with the child’s most basic needs.
This need for adventurous and imaginative play is taken care of handily in small towns and in the countryside, where children have access to raw materials, space, and a somewhat comprehensible environment. In cities, however, it has become a pressing concern. The world of private toys and asphalt playgrounds does not provide the proper settings for this kind of play.
The basic work on this problem has come from Lady Allen of
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Hurtwood. In a series of projects and publications over the past twenty years, Lady Allen has developed the concept of the adventure playground for cities, and we refer the reader, above all, to her work. (See, for example, her book, Planning for Play> Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968.) We believe that her work is so substantial, that, by itself, it establishes the essential pattern for neighborhood playgrounds.
Colin Ward has also written an excellent review, “Adventure Playgrounds: A Parable of Anarchy,” Anarchy 7, September 1961. Here is a description of the Grimsby playground, from that review:
At the end of each summer the children saw up their shacks and shanties into firewood which they deliver in fantastic quantities to old age pensioners. When they begin building in the spring, “it’s just a hole in the ground—and they crawl into it.” Gradually the holes give way to two-storey huts. Similarly with the notices above their dens. It begins with nailing up “Keep Out” signs. After this come more personal names like “Bughold Cave” and “Dead Man’s Cave,” but by the end of the summer they have communal names like “Hospital” or “Estate Agent.” There is an everchanging range of activities due entirely to the imagination and enterprise of the children themselves. . . .
Therefore:
Set up a playground for the children in each neighborhood. Not a highly finished playground, with asphalt and
swings, but a place with raw materials of all kinds—nets, boxes, barrels, trees, ropes, simple tools, frames, grass, and water—where children can create and re-create playgrounds of their own.
Make sure that the adventure playground is in the sun— sunny place (161) ; make hard surfaces for bikes and carts and toy trucks and trolleys, and soft surfaces for mud and building
things-BIKE PATHS AND RACKS (56), GARDEN GROWING WILD
(172), CHILD CAVES (203); and make the boundary substantial with a GARDEN WALL ( I 73) or SITTING WALL (243) . . . .
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. . . even when there is public land and private land for individual buildings—common land (67), your own home (79), there is no guarantee that animals can flourish there. This pattern helps to form green streets (51) and common land (67) by giving them the qualities they need to sustain animal life.