Design Brief: Design a site sensitive playground for a chosen space in Singapore, that challenges and questions current theories of play.
This project took place over 13 Weeks beginning January 2023.
Canning Climb is an intervention hewn into Singapore's Fort Canning Park, a heritage site containing 3 eras of history dating back to the 14th Century, as reflected in its botany, architecture, and topology.
Site Analysis
Fort Canning is also an intergenerational 'destination' hotspot.
However, we noticed there were falloffs in play space usage as we ascended the hill, due to both steep inclines and low shade cover throughout the afternoon.
However, we noticed there were falloffs in play space usage as we ascended the hill, due to both steep inclines and low shade cover throughout the afternoon.
Our final design takes a "pie slice" of land, that we identified as spanning the major cultural spaces of the park: 14th, 19th, and Modern Singapore.
The play structures are designed with a palette of local colors and textures, moving from the red bricks of Srivijaya, inverting into white colonial architecture at higher levels, as resolved through a witty inversion of materials and their semantics.
The structure also incorporates several heritage trees found along the path, worked into "play stations" that encouraged material play.
Our play concepts revolve around 2 pillars: Traversal and Imaginative play.
Traversal Play challenges Singapore's approach to the element of risk in play, by incorporating gradient difficulties in structures that increase with height.
Divided into 3 "sections", the obstacles are non-prescriptive in how they are navigated, while adhering to Europe's play structure safety guidelines (The BS EN 1176).
Imaginative Play leverages a combination of the evocative abstracted architecture, play hubs/stations, and natural material deposits to promote role playing and collaboration across multiple generations of kids (and adults!).
Like a game of snakes & ladders, different ways of scaling and sliding are mixed with different leaf catchment areas and natural material banks to allow kids to store, move, and manipulate the materials around them, promoting collaborative role play.
Appendix: Technical Diagrams
In the concept, we mentally divided the spaces into 3 'levels', with different difficulties and user groups in mind. The incline of the hill increased naturally as you went higher, and the structures follow this scheme as well.
LEVEL 1:
LEVEL 2:
LEVEL 3:
Concept Models / Preliminary Work Samples:
Thanks for reading!
