“Play and artwork have much more in frequent than we would suppose,” writes Emmy Watts, writer of a brand new guide highlighting greater than 80 brilliantly imaginative play areas world wide, a few of them designed by notable artists together with Niki de Saint Phalle and Yayoi Kusama. Too typically, playgrounds are orderly, enclosed areas with identikit slides, swings and climbing frames. In The Artwork of Play, Watts celebrates examples – rocks on wheels in Melbourne, a sprawling multi-level hammock in Zagreb, a 230ft sleeping Gulliver in Valencia – that break freed from the norm, encouraging adults in addition to youngsters to expertise the pleasures and advantages of play. In the long run, as Watts factors out, artwork and play “derive from the identical root – that of humanity’s countless creativity”.
