Children’s Spaces

Abstract

Time is a luxury for a designer: only rarely does an architect have the time to become deeply involved with the users of a building. Yet, it is only by becoming immersed within a place (which takes time) that it is possible to create what we call “configurations of possibilities.”

We used every kind of space, every different environment available to us. The railing-bound area under the front porch, in which you could stand, though you had to stoop to get through the doorway, was the jail. We played in the bushes, too. Behind them, under them, we had names for each place. There were always “forts”. Fort This and Fort That. We dug six-inch deep moats around a couple of them and tried to keep them filled with water, to the despair of my father to whose lot it fell to pay the monthly bill. We wore the grass clean off the backyard, which we used for a baseball diamond and miscellaneous scrimmaging, allstar games, etc. It took years to grow back.

We played games in the apple tree behind the garage. In fact we each “owned” a tree, divided up by common consent, and had a “fort” beneath it. There was almost always a place you could go, depending on how you felt, depending on what you felt like doing. We used the grounds and every cranny of the house, including closets and the spaces under the stairs, thoroughly.

When I was nineteen, and a visionary would-be poet in the grand tradition of Rimbaud and John Keats, I announced boldly one night to a group of friends, while we stood in the middle of a street under the thrashing trees, that a place was not simply where two roads meet, but a configuration of possibilities

—Dennis Dooley, the ARC group, 1972