The playground makers

Playgrounds often feel more like an exercise in local council box-ticking than they do an alive, responsive piece of urban architecture. Yet as parents, we spend more time at playgrounds than almost anywhere else. We can see their manifest importance to both our children and our community. Shouldn’t we give them a little more consideration?

Some of our best playgrounds come from workshops we hold with kids in the community. They give us all these amazing, crazy ideas and then we shape it into a unified structure

For Danish playground designers Monstrum, the answer to that question is a declarative yes. “Traditional playgrounds might give you value for money,” says Ole Nielsen, Monstrum’s creative director and co-founder. “But they always feel so detached from the place where they exist. We want to shape