The wildly successful Lawn on D Street is a temporary park that took no
tedious city planning. Should we let more urban design emerge
organically?
I love this idea that just kindof 'happened' when Boston found it had some open space, that was soon going to be developed. Some folks came up with the idea of an Adult Playground!
This spot isn't devoted to fitness buffs, or competitive types, or folks looking for a quiet bench to sit and read. It's for people that still like to play. And walk on real grass. And get a breathe of fresh and hopefully, share a laugh, a smile and some pleasant conversation.
Make sure your city Urban Planning Dept. sees this article, and gets to work finding the perfect spots to locate similar sites near you.
After posting, I opened my horoscope newsletter from Rob Brezney, and again, I'm in rhythm with the Universe! For the week of Oct.1 he had an entire excerpt from his book, and guess what the topic was? Yep! PLAY! So, click the link to read and get your 'scope for the upcoming week.http://live.ezezine.com/ezine/archives/756_2/756_2-2014.09.30.09.15.archive.txt
As a cherished friend used to say, Have Fun! Kendke
Wait Your Turn for the Swings at Boston's Adult Playground
The Atlantic/CityLab
Article & Photos By Anthony Flint
Sept. 17, 2014
Listen up, I know
you’re excited and the swings look so enticing, but you’ve got to wait
your turn. Never mind that you’re 28 years old.
Such is the scene at the adult playground,
Boston’s latest urban activity sensation in the Seaport District.
People are flocking to the three-acre site adjacent to the Boston
Convention and Exhibitors Center, with its set of 20 lighted oval
swings, bocce, ping pong, beanbag toss, Adirondack chairs, a sound
stage, and open-air bar.
And the most interesting feature from an urban design perspective? The wildly successful Lawn on D Street, a partnership of Sasaki and Utile with HR&A Advisors,
wasn’t planned years in advance. It wasn’t in the public-realm plan and
it was part of no master plan. It wasn’t a fixed park conjured by a
world-famous landscape architect, with built-in furniture and plinths
and carefully studied circulation corridors.
The
Lawn on D Street is all about the programming, and the programming—the
music, the chairs, the swings, the IPAs in cans—is plunked down on a
piece of grass. It’s not even permanent. The convention center, designed
by Rafeal Vinoly,
is set to expand there; it will soon be a construction site. The BCEC,
Sasaki and Utile figured, why not test out some concepts for what should
be the permanent park, further south on D Street towards residential
South Boston? The swings, like giant, glowing purple earrings, are a kind of interactive art installation, designed by Eric Howeler and Meejin Yoon of the Boston firm Howeler and Yoon Architecture.
I have no data to support this, but my sense is that they are the
setting of more shots on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram than anything
at least since the silvery bean at Chicago’s Millennium Park.
The popularity of the Lawn on D Street is just the kind home run all
designers hope for when they submit renderings showing happy humans
inhabiting designed space. What I find fascinating is how fast this
place became a smash success, and how utterly absent the concept was in
all the decades-long planning that has painstakingly gone on for this
part of town. The Seaport, previously known as
the South Boston Waterfront and also known as the Innovation District,
is a classic reclaimed industrial waterfront, transitioning from bona
fide maritime uses to condos, offices, research labs, museums, and, of
course, bars and restaurants. The city was totally focused on making
this new frontier a great place when I was at Boston City Hall for The Boston Globe in the late 1990s. There were hearings and plans and more plans.
Several economic cycles later, the roughly 1,000-acre area, across
the Fort Point Channel from downtown Boston, not much has turned out
exactly as planned. There was a lot of talk about walkability, but the
transportation engineers got there first; the I-90 extension to the Ted
Williams Tunnel, part of the Big Dig, ensured that the center of the
district is, above all, a highway interchange. One of the first tall
structures between Congress and Summer streets was a hulking ventilation
tower. The streets are wide arterials with lots of left-turn lanes.
The anticipated civic vitality has been hit or miss. The Moakley Federal Courthouse
(Pei Cobb) at the premiere site on Fan Pier—so named because the trains
carrying molasses used to fan out there—has been the site of great
theater, including the recent trial of mobster Whitey Bulger. But after
9/11, security concerns have effectively roped off public access. The Institute for Contemporary Art
(Diller Scofidio + Renfro) is compelling but still isolated in a sea of
parking lots, as is the otherwise lively communal space of District Hall,
next door to the Our Lady of the Voyage chapel. The designated green
spaces sprinkled throughout are beautifully landscaped, but sometimes
feel like a highway median, and are similarly occupied.
The successes in the Seaport seem to crop up quite outside of any
planning process. A case in point is the strip along Northern Avenue
known now as Liberty Wharf, which is just absolutely packed every night,
on a par with Newbury Street in Back Bay. There’s a great music tent
down the block, but this wasn’t really anticipated to be the center of
gravity for the Seaport. It just happened.
It’s important to note that what’s happening on the waterfront is
somewhere between traditional planning and the chair-bombings and
overnight parklets of guerilla urbanism. Jane Jacobs suggested that
urban life can’t be orchestrated from drafting tables, but planners need
not abandon pencil and paper entirely. The convention center team
wouldn’t have discovered the possibilities of the Lawn on D Street
without being immersed in the larger planning for the area.
But clearly, good planning and urban design these days needs to be
more nimble. The more adaptive, slightly on-the-fly approach is being
embraced in cities across the country, or should be. In Boston, the
surface of the Big Dig, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, is another test case;
there was extensive debate over what should go on top of the depressed
Central Artery. But today food trucks, a carousel, and murals have been
the smash hits.
I remember one hearing where someone actually suggested leaving a
parcel of the Greenway as tasteful gravel and moveable folding chairs,
as in New York's Bryant Park. Designers sometimes feel like they should
be doing more, as if champing at the bit. But it’s OK to let things
marinate and emerge more organically over time. In a patient search of
discovery and experimentation, some really cool things can happen on a
simple piece of land.
Rob Brezsny's Astrology Newsletter
October 1, 2014
"We are fully human only while playing,
and we playonly when we are
human in the truest sense of the word."
- Rudolf Steiner
+
"'Approfondement' is a French word that
means 'playing easily in the
deep.'" - Tom Robbins
+
"The ancient Greeks knew that learning comes
from playing," writes Roger von Oech in his
book *A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be
More Creative.* Their word for education,
*paideia,* he says, was close to their word for play, *paidia.*
+
Psychiatrist Stuart Brown has proposed this simple
definition: "Play is spontaneous behavior that has
no clear-cut goal and does not conform to a stereotypical
pattern. The purpose of play is simply play itself; it
appears to be pleasurable."
In a study of 26 convicted murderers, Brown discovered
that as children, most of them had suffered either
"from the absence of play or abnormal play like bullying,
sadism, extreme teasing, or cruelty to animals."
Brown's work led him to explore the biological roots of play.
"New and exciting studies of the brain, evolution, and animal
behavior," he wrote, suggest that play may be as important
to life -- for us and other animals -- as sleeping and dreaming."
- Stuart L. Brown, "Animals at Play," *National Geographic*
+
"How much courage is needed
to play forever,
as the ravines play,
as the river plays."
- Boris Pasternak, "Bacchanalia"
+
"Every meditation is experimental. One never knows
what is going to happen. Improvisation is essential . . .
Meditation is something to play with . . . There is
no 'wrong' way of doing the meditation, except not doing it!"
- Christopher Bamford, *Start Now!: A Book of Soul and Spiritual
Exercises*
+
Monitor the calm, gentle, sweet spirits in your life
for the possibility that they may act as agents
of deception or passivity. Be inspired by the creator
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