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By Barbara Knecht

Play therapy

Maneuvering through and using buildings is a primary focus for universal design, but the landscaped and urban environments are equally important. The Children’s Play Garden at the New York University Howard A. Rusk Institute for Rehabilitation Medicine in New York City provides the neighborhood kids, as well as the ones living at the hospital, with an incredible variety of activities crammed into a tiny urban space. Children living in a rehabilitation hospital may seem unlikely candidates for an adventure-filled playground. The purpose of the garden is to be a place that inspires kids with disabilities to engage in activities that challenge them physically.

 

Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris Boston-based Coco Raynes Associates proved that even one of the most complex building types, airports, can be designed to accommodate all visitors equally. A glass panel at the entrance (top and bottom) provides information in tactile, aural, and visual formats. Yellow “tac dots” (right) guide visitors inside the terminal. A bright yellow rail (far right) provides instructions in braille and photosensors to trigger audio information. Photography: © Coco Raynes Associates

Sonja Johansson (formerly of Johansson and Walcavage), a landscape architect in Lincoln, Massachusetts, created the play garden for the Rusk children. “Indoors, even in bright and cheerful therapy rooms, exercises are part of treatment,” explains Johansson. “By moving outdoors with grass and plants and the sky overhead, exercises that are ‘therapy’ when performed under direction within the hospital walls become ‘play,’ and the children will naturally do them again and again.” Nature-oriented and interactive design may be therapeutic, but it is also complicated and enticing. The neighborhood kids flock to the garden because it has features that appeal to all levels of abilities: textures that are hard to walk over, four ways to climb to the top of the slide, water to play in, stones to move around, three kinds of swings to choose from, window boxes to plant, a grassy hill to roll down, a playhouse with chinning bars, structures that make noise, others that shine and catch sunlight. The hospital greenhouse program spills over to the children’s garden by teaching them plant names and about growing plants and how to make and use compost. The variety keeps kids of all ages and abilities engaged. The universal appeal is obvious, and the benefit for all kids playing together and being challenged by the same environment is equally evident.

Universal design appears in many forms and any type of design situation, in small gestures and large ones. Academic-based institutes such as the Center for Universal Design at North Carolina State University (www.design.ncsu.edu/cud) and the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access (IDEA) at State University of New York at Buffalo (www.ap.buffalo.edu/IDEA) have been leaders and resources in universal design for a long time. Several municipalities have taken the lead to incorporate universal design into public and private design.