Playgrounds Ain’t What They Used To Be
In the late 80s and early 90s many of us in the residential construction business were seeing some hard times. I personally moved away from new-home construction and became more involved in remodeling and remediation projects. One of the more interesting projects I took on was a backyard playground. This wasn’t your average connect-the-bolts play set, though. This was a monumental undertaking that at completion was 2 stories high and could be seen from the streets in Hemet several blocks away. That was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime project; there just isn’t much of a market for professional playground builders. It was fun though!
Over at collision detection, Clive Thompson covers the new generation of playground equipment. I have to agree with him about the fate of seesaws:
Seesaws were the best training in basic physics you could possibly imagine, because you could scoot up and down the seesaw to figure out where precisely you needed to sit to be able to counterbalance a lighter child. Or you could stack a bunch of smaller kids on one side and see how much bigger a kid you could lift in the air. You learned, in essence, Archimedes’ insight about lever dynamics: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”
15 January 2007 | Construction, Litigation | Comments
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