Exploring Enriching Environments
Sometimes it’s nice to add a little play into a normally quiet, serene space like the home.
Whether you’re a superhero or still reliving your childhood, an indoor slide is obviously the best way to get from one floor to the other in your home. Here are some houses that turn slides into amazing works of art — and stairway replacements.
more via These Insane Houses Have Indoor Slides.
Yippee! I loved the old Exploratorium, and it sounds like I’ll love the new one!
The new home, with all of those characteristics (and a 200-seat cabaret), is opening on Wednesday, and while it doesn’t deserve unalloyed acclaim, the achievement is remarkable. Under its executive director, Dennis Bartels, the Exploratorium has preserved and expanded what it was when the physicist Frank Oppenheimer created it. It remains the most important science museum to have opened since the mid-20th century because of the nature of its exhibits, its wide-ranging influence and its sophisticated teacher training program.
Yet the new Exploratorium remains eccentrically original. Technology is scarce. There are few video screens. There are fewer computers. There are circuits but no evident circuit boards. Woodworking and metalworking take place on the museum floor. There are more than 600 exhibits, but the emphasis remains on the laws of physics and motion, elementary principles of perception, and elegantly designed machines that conceal nothing.
You can still play with pendulums that were designed for the museum’s original opening. You can spin disks atop a whirling wheel; you can try to get a bicycle’s pedals to move using a sequence of buttons; you can gaze at the physicality of inverted reflections created by a finely polished parabolic mirror; you can position toy robots to create spinning animations.
more via The New Exploratorium Opens in San Francisco – NYTimes.com.
via The New Exploratorium Opens in San Francisco – NYTimes.com.
Happy Friday everyone. Be sure to go out and play today. 🙂
Super cool!
For Turkish artist Mehmet Ali Uysal’s space is paramount, hence the title of this body of work, ‘Space Matters’. Always concerned with how to reshape the space around him, in his art he has achieved this exploration seamlessly. A giant clothespin pinching the landscape, Uysal takes the place of the work as the cause for creating the work. In the end, the gallery space becomes part of the art work, its’ material, form and content. The context becomes the content.Built for the Festival of the Five Seasons in Chaudfontaine Park, on the outskirts of Liege, Belgium generated a bit of attention across the web. It was made for the Festival of the Five Seasons.
This blog post is from two years ago but still relevant…
In the interior courtyard of Ottawa’s City Hall there is a place where the door is always open. The Living Room is a multiple piece static sculpture by the design duo at Urban Keios .
This is art as playground, an open invitation for children to make believe and scamper about slightly oversize chairs with out of kilter door and window frames defining the space. It looks like a set prepped for the shooting of a claymation adventure where we’re just waiting for the action to begin. There in the near distance is a TV permanently piping in the imagination station.
Although The Living Room is not designed as a playground per se, what kids could resist stopping off momentarily for a touch of make believe, of playing house, of filling the blue sky space with movement and laughter?
Somebody’s having fun. The grass is worn away down to hard…
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What a beautiful collection of photos capturing people playing around the world. Happy Friday, go play! 🙂
Recycle, reuse, replay!
Plastic bottles, car parts, shipping containers, steel drums, and tires.
No, we’re not describing a junkyard — we’re describing a potential playground. Recycled playground structures combine ingenuity, whimsy, and thrift to create spaces that are friendly to our kids and our planet alike.From Brazil to Norway to Uganda, these playgrounds are true gems, even if they’re made from junk; more via Playgrounds made from junk | KaBOOM!.
Inhabitat is on a role with their environmental enrichment stories!
OakOak’s street art is created to amuse and inspire – this self-described “fun-loving” artist plays with urban elements to make people laugh. He finds broken infrastructure, crumbling buildings and cracks and gives them a facelift with the simple addition of a character in play. Everything from simple stick figures to smiley faces, animals, objects and superheroes can be seen gracing OakOak’s hometown of St. Etienne, France, where they turn the less than perfect facades into something playful and fun.
Snow-bunnies aren’t the only animals excited about snow; check out this great collection of photos of animals playing in the snow:
See the whole collection, including some adorable snow pouncing.
This is amazing!
The endangered Southern Resident Killer Whales visited Vashon and Maury Islands on December 3, 2012, searching for salmon. As they passed Point Robinson, they burst into playful antics that have to be seen to be believed: cartwheels, breaches, tail slaps, spyhops, and beautiful synchronized swimming in their tightly knit family groups.
Mental Flowers 