Playground

Playground

Above are some scanned pages from a book called A Pattern Language about towns, buildings and construction. It was written by Christopher Alexander with Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel (what names!) and published by New York's Oxford University Press in 1977 and is the second book in a triptych (A Timeless Building serves as "volume 1" and The Oregon Experiment as "3") about how to best construct towns to reflect the needs of the people. The second in the series presents the language needed to do this building of buildings, and it is remarkable. The heavy 1,100 page book is filled with more than 250 identified "Patterns" that are then explained using the "language" of buildings/architecture/people's needs.

"Adventure Playground" is an example of one of the many "patterns" identified and its description is nothing short of poetry. Please click on each image and allow yourself to be linked with the larger images, the text should be legible in the larger versions. Above all: note the diagram, that wonderful, beautiful, magical diagram at the end of the definition,

In fact, a portion of the introduction is devoted to the poetry of the language and while reading it one gets a sneaking suspicion that this could all be used in such a way as to make stories! I would eventually love to take the outline for making a pattern (also described in the introduction) and apply it to fictional motifs, the building blocks of a story, and eventually link them all up in such a way as to construct something of a town, with adventure playgrounds and quiet-backs and half-hidden gardens and alcoves all my own. "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." So we can make buildings of prose (more loose) and poetry (more dense) and it all depends on how many patterns we cram into one space.

And what of this space, this Adventure Playground? "A castle, made of cartons, rocks, and old branches, by a group of children for themselves, is worth a thousand perfectly detailed, finished castles, made for them in a factory." Yes, it is the building by the individuals that is important and creates the deeper sense of ownership (and the happiness derived from that particular brand of ownership.) The children who make their castles from their surroundings are able to impress themselves on their creation and are attached to it in an infinitely more meaningful way. The same is true for anything, really, but playgrounds for kids are where this sense is born and raised - it is their first fledgling opportunities to define themselves, construct themselves much in the same way they are defining and constructing their castles.

As an adult I had the pleasure of constructing my own Adventure Playground with my two best friends. Our parents' homes form a small triangle with each side equivalent to about 1 or 2 city blocks, so that we could walk to either of the three places in a matter of minutes. There is a creek, a slow but water-filled and natural creek (a rarity for the part of town we lived in) that splits through the triangle of our homes and we decided that since we had all been dragged back to these old haunted places for some holiday or another, we might revert back to childhood a bit more in order to embrace the nostalgia of the setting. Neal had the idea to build a fort in the creek, so that instead of walking to Cheryl's Mom's, his Mom's or my Mom's, we could have our own house outside, in "the woods" as they were called (despite their close proximity to both a high school and a shopping mall) and he got to work collecting boxes. I imagine this is a feeling known by every child who has ever taken on the duty of constucting such structures, be they out of sheets and throw pillows in the carpetted livingroom or the common "tree house" in the back yard, except that we, lucky us, had the priveledge of some maturity on our side as well as the need to dive backwards into the past (the desire for immaturity is often a side effect of growing up, as illustrated elsewhere and every where.) We spent several days going from appliance store to appliance store filling his broken Volvo with refrigerator and oven boxes until we had enough. The floor plan was delightfully simple: Main Room, Hallway, Sitting Room. Cheryl showed up after it got dark, then came Neal with his car full of cardboard, and we got to work in the side yard of my mother's home.

"A child's play is his way of dealing with issues of his grown, of relieving tensions and exploring the future. It reflects directly the problems of joys and his social reality." Huh. We, as adults, playing children as though we were actors, might not really fit into this schematic - however if my math serves me right, Cheryl and I had only just turned 18 and could still have been considered kids at the time of the fort's construction. We were both facing the future, college, the abyss of aloneness, while Neal had already dipped his feet in that cold water. I imagine that is why it was all his idea - being a year or so older than us both, he had seen a year or so more of life than we had, and had at least a year or so more experience than both of us had and that put us in a position to trust him when he said: "Let's act like kids instead of grown ups. Let's build a fort in the creek." Yes, a two-pronged goal: building a childlike experience while building a castle out of discarded boxes. We worked for a long time in the side yard, getting the angles right, deciding whether to line the ground that would become the floor with garbage bags so as to keep ourselves a bit more clean (skipped) or perhaps add a door to this room or that (skipped) or whether or not we should brace the outsides of the structure with 2x4s (skipped) and so on. Once deciding on the basic shape of the boxes, we folded them and started piling them up to be carried to the creek.

While we never built it again (we got as far as hoisting all of the cardboard up and over the high fence that protects the creek from the high schoolers looking for a place to skip class and smoke pot, and we even got as far as bringing all the cardboard down the creek into a nice little banked cove, and we even assembled a building or two) we captured what needed to be captured.