The collaboration between landscape architect and master artist is the storyline of this video. In this Behind the Design story at Bellevue’s Inspiration Playground, we’re celebrating the artistry and master craftsmanship happening in an eclectic back alley of Denver’s National Western Complex neighborhood. Here, in the emerging Rhino Art District, tucked among historic buildings, restaurants, studios, railyards, storage yards and stockyards, is the workshop of Chevo Studios. Master stone artist and maestro of art that lives beautifully in its surroundings, Andy Dufford and his team are skillfully carving, cutting, grinding, hammering and fabricating massive boulders of sandstone and granite, soon-to-become the Water Play Table and Canyon Waterfall Boulders at Inspiration Playground.
At Inspiration Playground, We’ve Got Stories to Tell!
From Gestural Concepts to Easter Eggs, special features at Inspiration Playground have many Behind the Design stories to tell, and we’re gonna tell them all!
A Plethora of Special Features
There’s no shortage of fun design features for this extra-special inclusive playground. Inspiration Playground’s custom features have a life in the making with a conceptual process spanning five phases of implementation and creation:
- First comes the idea.
- Second comes the client’s approval.
- Third comes the final design and detailing.
- Fourth comes fabrication.
- Fifth comes installation.
- Finally comes play time!
Inspired Collaborators
Some of the Behind the Design (BTD) stories revolve around the seriously talented team for the sculptural climbing features. These collaborations are reinventing outdated playgrounds and shaping them into dynamic, interactive and fantastical playworlds. The two firms of Design Concepts and ID Sculpture have worked together for years, changing the face of traditional playgrounds.
At Inspiration Playground in Bellevue, Washington, this teaming is creating a playground full of life, both real and sculptural. With ID Sculpture’s collaborative brilliance in craftsmanship, artistic imagination, and cutting edge technologies, they’re using innovation and imagination in new ways.
Upcoming Chapters
Currently under construction, Inspiration Playground is a story worth sharing. We’re documenting and telling how things take shape on paper, and literally, on site. Stay tuned . . . more BTD stories to come about Inspiration Playground’s special features:
Step-by-Step Process: From Gestural Concepts to Easter Eggs
- A Design Process From No. 2 Pencil to Haptic Sculpting
- Art in Stone
- It’s in the Details: Art, Craftsmanship, Design Fidelity, Textural Nuances and More
- Big Grand Themes
- Technologies Make Features Reasonable Realities
- Creativity Across Many Mediums
- The Making of a Wisdom Tre
Flying spots, spiraling lollipops and polka dotted plants
There’s some seriously fun etching happening on the construction site for Inspiration Playground at Bellevue’s Downtown Park. Flying spots, spiraling lollipops, and polka dots are some of the small fun artistic details soon to be found embedded in the concrete to enhance seats and walls.
Along the arching “Tactile Walk” is a patterned colored concrete path interspersed with bands of colorful tumbled glass in red, blue, yellow and green, sections inset with pebbles and cobbles, and areas with impressions of leaves. Curved seat walls are super-special design features constructed in concrete with sandblasted etchings and colored with Lithichrome stone paints.
The Wisdom Tree Plaza and Rockin’ Music Plaza have seat walls with donor’s inscriptions. Surrounding the inscriptions are fun whimsical flower, insect and grass images. Ladybugs, flying dragonflies and butterflies with trailing flight dots, green grasses and leaves, polka dotted mushrooms, red spiraling lollipop flowers, yellow daisies, violet tulips are etched in concrete and colored with stone paints.
On-site testing on sample walls looked at varying textures and finishes to determine the perfect level and intensity of texture and depth.
The Evolution of Outdoor Education for Schoolchildren
Recently published in Educational Facility Planner, the professional journal of the Association for Learning Environments, “The Evolution of Outdoor Education for Schoolchildren”, by Carol Henry, reflects on the evolution of outdoor education in schoolyards.
While thoroughly embraced by private schools like the Montessori and Waldorf models, the notion of using the schoolyard for outdoor education has been sluggish in adopting by public schools. Although the idea may be accepted, for many school districts the curriculum, maintenance, and funding necessary to support it have been slow to fully develop.
While sluggish in some areas of public education, especially with middle- and high school-level programs, in others outdoor learning environments are making great strides impacting children across the country. In Colorado, Denver Public Schools has provided support and funding to implement its innovative Learning Landscape Schoolyards in each of its 98 elementary schools. Other programs around the nation include the Boston Schoolyard Initiative as well as New York City's and Trust for Public Land’s Schoolyard to Playground Initiative. Like these, many have made breakthroughs in elementary school-level outdoor learning opportunities and reconnecting schools with their communities.
Increasingly, entities such as the lottery-funded Great Outdoors Colorado (GOCO) and The Colorado Health Foundation are stepping in to provide sources of funding for outdoor learning initiatives. Between 2013 and 2016, GOCO offered School Play Yard Initiative Grant that “creates safer, more active play areas and environments for outdoor learning at schools.”
Championing Outdoor Learning Since the 1980s
Design Concepts has long been a champion of expanding the boundaries of learning opportunities in the schoolyard.
The 1980s
In the 1980s, we saved one of the last sections of undisturbed native prairie for a Jefferson County, Colorado, elementary school outdoor learning area and created native learning areas to transition between the mountainous forest and a new elementary school in Nederland, Colorado.
The 1990s
In the ‘90s, we turned a potentially sterile detention area for a large middle school into a biodiverse outdoor learning lab with thriving wetland plants and plentiful wildlife. In 1990 in Boulder, we designed the transformation of an elementary school’s concrete drainage swale into a thriving wetland, observation deck, boardwalk, and outdoor classroom. This wetland area survived the massive Colorado floods in 2013, while the surrounding areas were devastated. The floods were described as 1,000-year rain and a 100-year flood, occurring over 8 stormy days, causing devastation from the eastern side of the continental divide to the Colorado/Kansas border.
Today
Since then, we have worked on over two-dozen Learning Landscapes, complete with outdoor classrooms, gardens, artwork, colorful gateways and shade shelters, tracks, and environmental learning areas for Denver Public Schools. Student learning pieces include such diverse elements as weather stations with a remote readout for students to track the weather, themed elements which include facts such as insect and animal lifecycles etched in boulders and pavement, poems which describe the places and things one would see travelling along a nearby stream and floating all the way out to the sea, or the fanciful graphics with shapes and colors that students can study and count. We have also helped other school districts to expand their abilities to extend learning into the schoolyard.
Two Innovative Outdoor Learning Environments
Design Concepts is fortunate to be working on two of the most exciting outdoor learning environments for high schools in Colorado and Wyoming, fully integrating the schoolyard into the schools’ curriculum. See full story on these projects at:
· Former CAPS/Roosevelt High School, now known as Pathways Innovation Center in Casper, Wyoming
· Warren Tech Option School Career and Technical Center in Lakewood, Colorado
We are currently working on two exciting high school projects (see full story on these projects here), to fully integrate the schoolyard into the schools’ curriculum at:
· Former CAPS/Roosevelt High School, now known as Pathways Innovation Center in Casper, Wyoming
· Warren Tech Option School Career and Technical Center in Lakewood, Colorado
See the Association for Learning Environment journal for the full article
Underway at Carmody: A New Universal Accessible Playground
Art, music, physical activity, sensory stimulation, connection to nature and just good old-fashioned outdoor play are the key design ingredients for the new playground at Carmody’s Park and Recreation Center complex in Lakewood, Colorado.
It’s an all-inclusive playground with “Play Principles” focused on design for those with physical limitations and development disabilities. Accessible, developmentally progressive, therapeutic and kinetically engaging play features are central themes for this play place.
Every piece of play considers all-inclusive abilities from the music pod, sand play diggers and fossil discoveries, a basketball court with painted games, sensory play center, hill climbers, and adventure rocks and more. Play structures like the lily pad stepper, split log beam, dynamic surfer and cozy dome are sure to create wonder and awe, and even bring out the kid in all of us.
This will be a magical place.
