PLAYWORKS: ERIN BYRNE

What is play?

Play can be described as the method by which children investigate their environment and realise their physical and cognitive limitations. Its definition can be ambiguous and varied but its benefits are invaluable.

What is a playscape?

In the everyday spaces of our towns and cities, we increasingly exclude and marginalise the young. Factors such as the rise in use of motorised vehicles, increased parental anxiety and less tolerance for children and young people, has caused the cityscape to become increasingly adult-centric.


Although typically a 'playground' acts as a junction point or a rendez vous for children to communicate and congregate, a playground has been traditionally seen as a separate specialised zone for playing, isolated from the public realm.

My notion of the ‘playscape’ is woven into the urban fabric, providing a stimulating but not proscriptive architecture that is

"‘Methectic rather than mimetic’, that is, more "helping out the action’ rather than a proscription of its likely character."

(Nils Norman, An Architecture of Play: A Survey of London's Adventure Playgrounds)

I propose that a ‘playscape’ is an interstitial landscape that actuates, facilitates and encourages play, galvanising children to explore the capabilities of their bodies and environment. Furthermore, empowering them by providing them with their own architectures, either in built form allowing ‘space to play’ or infrastructure that provides ‘time for play’.

Defining the Architect's role in play

A playscape is a difficult to ‘design’ as play is quite unpredictable, as it involves a response to one’s context which often involves the subversion of the original function of an object, e.g. building a ‘house of cards’ or climbing on a garden wall.

A designer can only hope to provide props and stimulants, which order in order to create a ‘playscape’ must be animated by play, i.e. a playground where children do not play cannot be described as a playscape.

Perhaps a playscape is better understood as a temporal network or constellation of relationships - an interaction between people, objects and spaces, as part of a larger context of community and geography.