Hard play areas

摘要

The Brutalist Playground, at the RIBA's Architecture Gallery, draws attention to an almost-forgotten fragment of architectural history: the puzzling brick and concrete play spaces that were embedded in the landscape of post-war housing estates. With designs by architects such as Erno Goldfinger and the Smithsons, these surreal sculptural forms were works of art in their own right. They evoked crags, castles and rockfalls; one looked like a scary oven. These are mini-me masterpieces of post-war architecture; the babies of brutalism, by-products of an architectural imagination unburdened by the constraint of making houses.