This post is about play areas I constructed using eco-design for the APL school in Chennai as part of a design commision.
After a few months living in Kodaikanal, I was invited by the APL school to design play areas for their new campus. We had just finished planting our seeds and were waiting for them to grow. I was also running low on savings from the previous design project and so I thought I'd move back to Chennai for a few months to finish this project and earn enough money to pay the bills. I worked on three areas totally, an outdoor play area, and indoor play area and a sensory garden. I discussed my ideas with teachers of the school and arrived at a design brief through consensus. Unlike the previous project, the school would be supplying the materials, labour and supervisors for the project.
A lot of the material we used came from old discarded materials from previous construction projects. There was an entire warehouse stocked with metal, wood, and other unused materials. I visited the warehouse to pick out the materials that we could use for this project.
Discarded material we recycled into our design project.
The outdoor play area to be worked on is on the side of the building. It features many entrances that I wanted to interconnect through play structures.
The outdoor space to be worked on.
We'd discussed options of various interactive elements to connect these spaces such as monkey bars, rock climbing, walkways and slides. We decided to start with a square base platform for each of the areas that would be interconnected in different ways.
Welding our base platform.
Anchoring individual play structures.
Priming, and connecting base play structures.
Painting the outdoor play area.
Decorating and finishing the area.
This area is like a courtyard that opens out to the sky. I wanted to implement a space with different textures, sights, smells and experiences in the form of a sensory garden. The main component is a bamboo tunnel which the garden is built around.
Area to be worked on.
We started by cleaning the area, and anchoring metal poles to the ground that would serve as a base for the tunnel. After the poles were primed and painted we were ready to start weaving in the bamboo roof.
We got interesting textures and lighting by combining thatch and weaving coconut fiber rope.
We then proceeded to work on the flooring.
The idea behind this area was to create life sized board games for the children to play on. We recreated a ludo board using different materials as replacement for colours.
Unfortunately I didn't get to finish the project and this is where I got till. Even though the school was supplying the labour, the work force was often preoccupied with other work and often neglected my work. Everything you see in these pictures took around four months to finish due to constant delays. Without any sort of warning the school decided that they wanted to discontinue the project and cut me off, paying only half the money they owed me. It was still a substantial amount and I do have valuable work to add to my portfolio. It's sad that I didn't get to take this project to the level I wanted, but I'm happy with the results I got. I was still alternating between the city and Kodaikanal at this point and after the school's dismissal I went back to Kodaikanal to focus on our work there.
