In 1961, the International Play Association was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 1974, Arvid Bengtsson, the Swedish landscape architect and then president of the association, published The Child’s Right to Play, in which he campaigned for playgrounds to be close to where children live. While he was making his name as an angry young architect in the mid-fifties with the group Team Ten, his greatest intellectual sparring partners and colleagues were the radical British architects Peter and Alison Smithson. He was particularly proud of being awarded the Royal Gold Medal for Architecture by the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1990. He did not, however, build in this country. In 1946 the young family settled in Amsterdam where CIAM secretary Cor Van Eesteren, the city architect and planner of Amsterdam, whom Aldo had met in Zürich, engaged him as an architect and designer, to assist in the Urban Development section of the Public Works department (1946–51). We must understand that art and life are no longer separate domains. The idea that art is an illusion divorced from real life must therefore be abandoned. The word ‘Art’ means nothing to us. We demand that it be replaced by the construction of our environment according to creative laws derived from well-defined principles.” ( van Doesburg and van Eesteren, 1923; included in Baljeu, 1974, p. 147). Much that is wrong with modern architecture is due to its superficial closeness to the caricature of pure planes’

In each of the four main circulation spaces, the restaurant, winter garden, library and conference rooms, a star-shaped ceiling rises above the lower roof, each ascending towards a pyramidal shape peak Different and variable configuration of large skylights. The inside of the dynamic folding roof creates the most important element of different spaces, wood entrechapado smooth surfaces combined with other grooved, which impart a warm color to all rooms. From the end of the sixties he went on to apply his approach in the context of historical towns, first in his competition design for the Deventer town hall (1966, another prize-winning but unexecuted project), and then in the renovation projects for the Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt and Jordaan quarters (1970), and for the inner cities of Zwolle (1971–75) and Dordrecht (1975–81) – all of them urban housing projects which he developed and executed in association with Theo Bosch (1971–83). His most striking building of that period was the Hubertus House in Amsterdam, a home for single parents and their children (1978–81) which achieved a remarkable integration of a colourful functionalist language within an eclectic context. Ideas about play haven’t changed much since then,” says Nicola Butler, chair of Play England, who co-authored the charity’s Design for Play guidance in 2008 – and then discovered that Allen had written a pamphlet of the same name in 1962, outlining almost identical principles. “The more objects that children can actually manipulate themselves, the more enjoyment they will get out of a playground.” A child entering a playground perceives other children using the equipment and/or is introduced to it by the parents. Especially in the case of young children, parents guide their child to, for example, the slide, supports it while she climbs the ladder, and encourages her to slide down. By doing so, the parents demonstrate the child the function of the play element. Costall (2015) called such a function the “canonical affordance” of the object, to refer to its “single, definitive meaning” (p. 51; see also Costall, 2012) within a social practice. Indeed, when a child uses the slide in another way (e.g., by climbing up via the part that is meant to slide down), many parents correct their children that this is not how they should use the equipment—this is not “what the object was made for” (see also Kyttä, 2004, on “the field of constrained action”).In the 1960s and 1970s, the American psychologist James Gibson developed an ecological approach to psychology. This approach aimed to understand how animals, including human-beings, perceive and act in their environment. As Gibson (1979) started his landmark book The ecological approach to visual perception, Center for Human Movement Sciences, University Medical Center Groningen, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands We live in an era in which there are not many carefully constructed playgrounds. We don’t like what we see. Have we—city decision makers, architects, designers, parents, friends —forgotten to be critical? The floor is a continuous flat surface covered with dark gray carpeting, with stone pavers on the doorways towards the exterior. In the lining of the walls, both interior and exterior, also used large wooden panels with openings for vertical windows. Iroko wood was used in the exterior. The vocabulary of the playgrounds is based on geometric concrete sandpits, which appear like small archipelagos and groups of stepping stones, both massive and anchored in the ground, and lighter structures, arches, domes and frames made of tube steel resonating with archetypes of architecture. The arrangement of the elements in the playgrounds is always non-hierarchical and based on a careful compositional balance which is able to create tension and intensity between the objects while allowing a multiplicity of paths around the forms.

All sensations, when they take artistic form, become immersed in the sensation of light, and therefore can only be expressed with all the colours of the prism.The building is situated near the dunes of the coastal town of Noordwijk-aan-Zee and tulip fields, at Keplerlaan 1, 2201 AZ Noordwijk, near Leiden, Holland and gently spreads up and down the surroundings. Das Gebäude am südlichen Stadtrand von Amsterdam gelegen, IJsbaanpad 3B Bereich, Holland Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts wurde von H. P. Vorschlag der Süd-Plan beeinflusst Berlage für die Erweiterung der Stadt. Er war unter der Autobahn A10 und das Stadion der Olympischen Spiele 1928 auf dem flachen Land ohne benachbarte Gebäude. Unlike the abstraction of “dwelling” as a concept, the doorstep was a physical reality. It was an actual step, that children sat on, while a parent talked to a neighbour. It could be a fort or a mountain. It was a bridge, too, between home and the street, between family and something bigger. It was the launch pad to the outside world. His designs seem somehow underwhelming compared with his vivid, lucid and poetic writing, which even 30 to 60 years later is still strikingly relevant. While some of the early texts have a preachy side, with all the desperation and hope for salvation connected to sermons, many of his later lectures and articles are more polemical, sharp and witty.

Interestingly, and contrary to the above-mentioned studies on aesthetics, Sporrel et al. (unpublished) also observed that the children reported that they found the non-standardized configuration slightly more beautiful than the standardized one. This seems to suggest that the principles underlying the aesthetic judgments are different when children were to look at objects (as in most studies on aesthetics) than when they were to play on them. What is even more interesting, though, is that Sporrel et al. (unpublished) found no correlation between the children’s aesthetic judgments and their reported joy of play. Apparently, there is no relationship between how beautiful the child found a configuration and how much she enjoyed playing on it. This suggests that although designers might be concerned with the aesthetics of their play elements, the perceived aesthetic is not of overriding importance for the children who play on them. Concluding Remarks The metallic structures of the arches are painted in three different shades of orange, red, purple, blue, or green, reserving the yellow for the columns and beams more illuminated, around the outer edges and at the top of the higher spaces . The small domes form a grid that extends evenly throughout the building so that the general pattern can be read at each point. Along the axial lines of this grid, pillars, architraves and solid walls mark a series of well-anchored and enclosed spaces: the adjacent lounges and courtyards, the party room, the gymnasium and the central courtyard. Allen had been inspired by a trip to Denmark in 1945, where she saw the work of architect Carl Theodor Sørensen. His skrammellegepladsen, or junk playgrounds, were visions of creative chaos, made mostly by children themselves. She helped set up 17 trial junk playgrounds in the UK, equipped with makeshift treehouses, walkways, nets, ropes and rubber tyres. The very first, at Lollard Street in London’s Kennington, is still going strong.In the autumn of his life, Gibson developed an alternative theoretical framework, focusing on the animal, the environment, and their relationship at an ecological scale. A central tenet of Gibson’s ecological approach is that the environment we live in does not consist of matter in motion in space; rather it consists of possibilities for action. He coined these possibilities affordances, and defined them as follows.