Excerpt: Meland Children’s Playground, an interior design project by SLT Design, challenges traditional norms by avoiding a literal representation of nature. Instead, it draws on the essence and distinctive features of nature through artistic abstraction, creating a space that captivates children’s interest. This approach fosters their imagination of the natural world, nurturing their inherent creativity and imaginative potential.
Project Description
[Text as submitted by architect] “For the limitation of knowledge, imagination is far more important than knowledge by itself since it summarizes everything in the world, and promotes progress.” In the real world of ubiquitous settings and scenarios, the reality is slowly pricking with children’s fantastic imagination and creativity, and to protect every child’s cleverness and freedom in the natural forest, is the natural attribute that Meland adventure playground endowed with given by SLT.
Without defining the figurative form of nature, SLT decides to break dogmatism. By starting from the feeling, extracting the distinct features in the memory of nature in an artistic abstraction, guiding and inspiring children in a way that attracts their deep interest, developing their imagination of the natural world, and taking care of children’s innate creative talent and imagination.
Inside the park, there is a wonderful journey of nature. The entire storyline, which is about climbing across three mountains and terrains, runs through every corner of the space. Three natural theme concepts: berry field – wind-eroded desert – deep-sea mystery. Different concepts of regional attributes and features are combined with recreation facilities of various age levels to draw a vivid and three-dimensional map of nature. Zooming in and out of the shape of plants, transcending the scale changes of physical reality, and the abstract art of the natural world with secret passages that allow people crawling or walking, sliding or jumping. The entire design opens up the door of curiosity in children’s hearts.
The mysterious cave leads to the unknown world, where the beginning of the fantasy journey slowly opens the curtain. The mysterious sense of fantasy film is created at the entrance, the giant and exaggerated cave shape, the intricate and real inner world, and the brilliant contrast of gradual blue and orange attracts the children and parents to stop and take a look. By deconstructing the structure of the original cave and abstract geometric form, the front desk, entrance, footpath, storage area and video game area are naturally differentiated.
Another entrance to the cave leads to the vast starry sky game area, where the flickering starlight is in sharp contrast to the bright entrance. The spaceship observatory created by the designer under the background of the stars breaks the segregation of two isolated spaces, allowing the children to enter the observatory and have interesting spatial interaction with the children in the game area. This kind of interactive scene between different theme spaces runs through the whole park.
Passing through the entrance cave and entering the inner part of the park, the first thing you will see is the central hub – the waterfall, which serves as the traffic artery of the whole space and connects the three themed play areas. “Magical natural creatures” standing on both sides of the waterfall serve as street lamps throughout the park, as well as signposts and the function of differentiated pedestrian flow. What makes children inadvertently have a sense of nature and life, is the programmable light bulb design, as well as the flickering light rhythm simulating the breathing rate of nature, combined with artistic plant modeling.
From the right of the central waterfall, following the vine path of the berry fields and stepping through the layers of the cloud hills, the children arrive in the magical city, a mechanical factory driven by giant gears that move the city. The blurry boundary between nature and the city makes children forget time and space in paradise and immerse themselves in the wonderful world.
Down the fantasyland slide, on the other side of the central waterfall is a wind-eroded desert area. Abstract-style cactus, the park’s unique dunes, and various forms of desert plants gathered together to build a desert landscape. A series of soft steps at the edge of the dunes as well as the stage in the wilderness, provide a place for parents and children on the journey to enjoy and rest.
Walking along the edge of the desert, heading into the depths of the park, and looking up, kids will suddenly find themself in the blue ocean, the deep-sea space with over 11-meter height brings the most immersive ocean wonders to them. The entrance is located in the hidden corner of the ocean castle, connecting the active nodes of the entire ocean sphere pool with the undersea passage created by the elevation of the ground. Funny sea creatures, endless deep-sea staircases and upside-down blue air bubbles give the children a different ocean story.
Bright and low-saturated colour ratio, on the basis of protecting the development of children’s light sense, reduces visual fatigue brought by long-term contact and improves the stability of the emotional state of children and parents in immersive space. VI door identification system designed with space concept is distinctively and appropriately blending into the environment.
The molding edge and activity space are fully soft packaged for safety, so as to eliminate the possibility of accidents during children’s playing. All the props in the space are customized and designed by SLT. By selecting superior-quality materials and exquisite technology, high-quality products, SLT are able to meet the request of man-machine engineering with multiple adjustment tests, trying to maximize the distinctive personality of props. The goal is to achieve a perfect balance between the practical aspect of the product and the creative side of design, in order to make the Meland adventure playground a unique charm.
In the traditional children’s space, parents tend to ignore the surrounding facilities and only focus on the icy picture of interaction with the mobile phone. The abstract artistic atmosphere and immersive experience space subvert parents’ conventional understanding so that the interest of parent-child interaction and exploration arises naturally. From the perspective of spatial design, the park strives to activate the interaction between children and nature, between children and art, and to stimulate children’s curiosity and desire to explore nature, as well as the infinite potential of artistic imagination.
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