five fields
From a distance, the Five Fields playground doesn’t look like much. A few sheets of wood planted in a forest glade, noticeable mainly for how out of place it looks among the surrounding greenery. It’s only when you look closer that you begin to notice the details: the impeccably placed sprays of colour, the child-sized portals and pathways that pepper the structure like rabbit holes, the tower and accompanying flying fox, the stairway to nowhere. With its ambiguous shapes and closed-off spaces, it doesn’t look like anything you’d usually call a playground, but for husband-and-wife team Brandon Clifford and Johanna Lobdell, that was entirely the point.
“From the very beginning, the idea was that we would experiment with a completely new idea of what a playground could be,” Clifford tells me. “The goal was not to dictate anything, but rather to
