How One Studio Ended Up Designing So Many of China's Playgrounds

Playgrounds are increasingly a selling point for malls and residential projects. So far, are they any good?

On a sunny weekday afternoon, shrieks and laughter drift out of the playground behind the Indigo mall. A father plays with his still-unsteady toddler in a small sandpit; the older children have already climbed, on their own, up "King's Mountain" deeper in the trees.

Circles and lines make up a bright orange canopy that throws shade across a slightly sunken square play area, where parents can rest and talk on the wooden benches ringing it. Another area, for children eight and up, is more thrilling: spinning wing swings, a spiral balance beam, a climbing frame shaped like a spider's web.

The rubber matting around the site is 8 centimeters thick, springier underfoot than the plastic track surfacing you usually find in parks.

The landscape team behind this playground is BAM (Ballistic Architecture Machine), a Beijing studio founded by three American landscape designers: Jake Walker, Dan Gass and Allison Dailey.

BAM, which marked its tenth anniversary last year, found after this project that it was carving out a place in China's playground market. More and more clients turned up with a rendering of the Indigo playground and said, "I want one like this."

Early this month BAM opened the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art's (UCCA) Urban Field Observation in China lecture series, where they described the playground boom they have watched take shape, and afterwards talked with QDaily about what a good playground should look like.

"Chinese residents use urban landscapes the way they play"

Much of BAM's understanding of Chinese cities comes from the fresh eye of an outsider.

As BAM reads it, landscape is everything outside a building — not only the physical space, but the fleeting activities that appear in it. A person sitting on a bench, a traffic jam, a beggar on the street: all of them are part of the landscape, and all of them define, at bottom, the face of a city.

Set against American habits, they believe Chinese people use landscape in a fundamentally different way.

In China, people like to leave the house and do things together in public space: dancing on the open ground outside a shopping mall, playing chess on stone stools by the roadside, writing calligraphy with a big brush dipped in water, spinning tops, flying kites.

"Chinese residents use urban landscapes the way they play," BAM concluded.

The gap between how urban space is designed and what residents actually need produces all kinds of misuse — children clambering about in places not meant for play, basketball courts taken over by aunties doing square dancing, stretches meant to be pedestrian greenways packed with parked cars.

This is also why BAM came to China. Much about the way public facilities are built into the landscape here is, they think, still unreasonable — which leaves plenty of room to work.

"The lack of key urban infrastructure in the public realm has turned that into a competitive market for residential and commercial real estate development."

"Lifestyle" and "integrated" have become standard prefixes in the marketing of more and more commercial districts, and developers have realized that with physical retail in decline, the wish to shop is no longer enough on its own to get people out of the house.

The playground has become the remedy — at least developers think so.

According to public figures cited by the China Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, the floor space given over to children's experience formats in shopping malls in China's tier-one and tier-two cities grew almost tenfold between 2012 and 2016, and was expected to reach 30% of total mall commercial floor space by 2018.

Children's play areas keep customers in a mall longer, and they answer the question of what a family does on a weekend.

In China's big cities, playgrounds are going up faster than ever. Measured against the urban population, though, there are still nowhere near enough. "At the current rate, I think it'll take another five to ten years before we can say the number of playgrounds is saturated. We're a long way off," Jake says.

The Indigo playground makes the point plainly: on weekends it is often packed, and four years after it opened, the wear and aging on its equipment are severe.

BAM finds this gratifying, and also reads it as a symptom of how few comparable playgrounds there are nearby.

The pattern holds across the large playgrounds built in recent years. Some can only be entered by reservation, such as the roughly 37.5-mu (2.5-hectare) Whale Valley children's park at Anji Peach Blossom Land. Others sit inside residential compounds or belong to private schools, and are not open to the public at all.

The critic Carson Chanson once put it this way: "Some of BAM's style looks a lot like the cartoons that used to run on Saturday mornings."

Bold, exaggerated color and cartoon elements make it hard not to link BAM's work with playgrounds, and that, at first, is what drew some playground clients to a studio whose roots are in landscape design.

It doesn't always work. Among the clients who came knocking, Jake recalls, were sites with no business holding a playground at all. One client hoped a playground would improve foot traffic; after surveying the site, the team found the bigger problem was the basic circulation plan.

From an add-on decoration to the most important, central part of some projects

Amusement equipment has been made in China since the 1950s.

According to research compiled by the China Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, China designed and built its first amusement ride, the "Electric Pony Ride," in 1951, and a "Little Train" in 1956. For nearly 30 years after that, the industry stalled.

In the early 1980s, at the start of Reform and Opening Up, China completed its first amusement park built entirely with domestically made equipment — Daqing Children's Park. Around the same time the government issued rules such as the Provisional Regulations on Amusement Ride Safety, and the equipment business entered a fast-growing phase.

For many city children born in the 1980s and 1990s, the playground of their childhood was a small assembled structure made of a few standard parts: slide, swings, seesaw. Many urban parks also had small pay-to-enter amusement grounds with powered rides — roller coasters, rocking chairs, pirate ships.

These interchangeable installations were the first wave of playground culture in China, and they borrowed heavily, in form and in technology, from the fixed "kit assembly" model used abroad in earlier decades.

Their advantage was that they copied easily — a reasonably flat patch of open ground was all you needed to put one up — and to a large extent they entered the urban memory of a generation of Chinese.

But a good playground, in BAM's view, should be a more open and flexible space, one that adapts to what surrounds it, with a more varied design.

Indigo was the first playground project BAM formally took on, and they still count it among their best-known work.

"The Indigo playground 'redefined' how playgrounds are designed in China. A playground isn't just colored rubber flooring and a few pieces of equipment — BAM's has custom-built hills, a sandpit, a distinctive canopy, climbing ropes, slides and benches for parents, and it even takes into account how sunlight affects children and how shadow can be used in the design," says Guan Jingwen, a partner at BAM.

A year after the project was finished, an almost identical knockoff went up just 20 kilometers from the original.

Since then the same kind of commission has kept arriving — "every project includes at least one playground element."

"That project really opened up a new phase for us." The Indigo playground was completed in 2014; since then the studio has worked on four or five large playground projects. Jake thinks that is not only because the studio has become better known, but because Chinese investors have changed how they think.

DLC Design, headquartered in Shanghai, came to China back in 2004, and its principal, Dwight Law, reached the same conclusion when he and BAM discussed it.

DLC has designed a great many park landscapes, Lingnan Tiandi Park among them, and nearly every one came with a request for children's facilities. But in recent years, Dwight has noticed, the playground has gone from an add-on decoration to the most important, central part of some projects.

Jake puts part of this down to the rise of China's middle class: as expectations of material life have risen, people have realized that a playground, too, can be designed and made to order.

And compared with landscape design for commercial districts, clients hold looser ideas about what a playground "should" be, which leaves the team room for some free-ranging exploration in its designs.

In a mixed residential and commercial development in Buji, Shenzhen, the developer set aside a plot specifically for play equipment, and BAM designed a vertical structure for it: the Play Skyscraper.

Shaped like a rocket tower, the playground stands in one corner of the park, with two pink, gently sloping corridors reaching out from either side. The irregular raised play platforms break the limits of older equipment — children climb up and down them and explore the space their own way.

In Beijing's Daxing District, BAM helped plan a park space nearly a kilometer long. Among the dense planting they also designed a large number of play spaces and game areas, in many forms.

The colorful play areas were built to follow the lie of the land rather than filled in flat, and rope walkways link the hills, so people come into close contact with the landscape as they go. The park's benches were made wider and longer, so people can lie on them or walk along them. Children are not the only ones who find something to enjoy here; adults do too.

The boredom of having nothing to do is what builds children's curiosity and urge to explore

"Man is only truly human when he plays." In the lecture, BAM quoted the German educator Friedrich.

Before they founded the design studio, BAM's Jake and Dan were closer to a pair of installation artists.

As students they made a piece called "Fallen Oak." The material came from an oak that happened to come down on campus; workers had sawn it into sections to be trucked away the next day. That night the two of them rearranged the pile of logs into a large circle.

The next day, and for a good while after, the logs were not hauled off. They were kept, because people had started using the space the circle made — for classes, for conversation, for reading and sitting around.

That convinced them that interacting with public space and exploring it is part of human nature.

"When I talk with a lot of Chinese people, I get the feeling that most of them never had the experience, as children, of playing in a real playground — a really large, varied, complicated one," Jake says.

One of his own favorites as a child, he recalls, was a big natural sandpit with a rise of high ground beside it. Children would run up the high ground and jump down into the sand, over and over, and never get bored.

Living in the Bay Area, he also often played with his family in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, home to one of the earliest outdoor children's playgrounds built in the United States, an enormous area that merges into the woods around it.

From an American point of view, BAM thinks Chinese parents "value" their children more intensely. It shows in how closely they watch and steer a child's path and direction, and in their willingness to pour effort into providing the best education; American parents, by comparison, let go more.

But that "valuing" turns into after-school classes of every kind, and training in accomplishments like music, chess, calligraphy and painting. Parents often miss how much "purposeless play" matters to a child's growth.

It is exactly the boredom of having nothing to do that builds children's curiosity and their urge to explore.

"Admit it, we can never know what a child will find interesting," Jake says, laughing. Sometimes a playground that cost tens of millions of yuan is less appealing than a big cardboard box. So a playground should be an open question — not every piece of equipment needs one standard way to be used.

In the late 19th century the urban parks movement took hold in the United States, and playgrounds appeared in large numbers with municipal support and planning.

This answered a sudden surge in the urban population. The aim was to provide "civilized, wholesome play" that kept children off streets given over to vehicles, and to prevent juvenile crime and accidental injury.

After the 1980s, designers gradually began paying more attention to children's behavior and psychological needs, and playground design settled on making children a place for adventure that need not stick to any set form.

The new generation of playgrounds brought in riskier elements — sand tables, water pools, rope bridges — and encouraged children to rearrange and use the space as they imagined it, with chances to come into contact with nature.

A good playground, Jake adds, has to have some "danger" in it: a rope that wobbles, a steep climbing frame, a mysterious tunnel that leads who knows where.

"In your brain, when you're put in a situation where you might get hurt or slip, that rush of adrenaline — the tension and the fear — is exactly what makes it fun for us."

Cover image photographed by Amey Kandalgaonkar; all images in the article courtesy of BAM.