PLAYSCAPES

Location: Stamford, Connecticut
Type: Early Education and Community Center with Landscape; Ground Up
Status: Schematic Study, ongoing
Size: 16,000 SF
Team: Miroslava Brooks, Daniel Markiewicz, Calvin Yang, Kyle Troyer, Marjorie Tello Wong

The project envisions a new hybrid of exterior and interior playgrounds and an early education and community center located in Stamford, Connecticut along the recently naturalized Mill River waterfront. How can the playground reclaim its function as a creative laboratory for learning about and experiencing our physical world? And how can play open up novel ways of thinking about ecology, community and public space? Inspired by Aldo van Eyck’s and Isamu Noguchi’s playgrounds, which had an added value of public art, this project conceives of a flexible and scaleless playscape, offering a meaningful urban place for children and adults alike.  

The empty site requires a negotiation between two different urban edges and typologies: west side of the site is bounded by the ‘soft’ riverfront landscape with small-scale residential buildings beyond, while the ‘hard’ urban street edge frames the east side with adjacent large-scale office structures and surface parking.  A clear and bold architectural gesture – a line – establishes a new street frontage facing the office buildings on its urban side. The long linear form with pitched-roof profile is punctured by four rotated rectilinear volumes which subdivide the building into smaller chunks and orient the entries and passageways.

Materially stitching the groundscape together, four large rectangular decks run through the building, connecting the street to the exterior playgrounds, while the brightly-painted retaining walls delineate different zones of activities, playfully weaving through various plantings and surface materials. The southern portion of the building houses the early childhood center, while the northern end houses a community pool. The pitched roofs, typically associated with domestic architecture, provide a sense of familiarity and help control interior air temperatures during summer with the use of operable skylights along the ridgeline.  

Stay tuned for more!