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Kids Rule!

When a team of teenagers meets a crew of kids, the boundaries are blurred

Territory Urban Design Team and our clients went head to head in playground games this fall. Using play as a warm-up exercise was an excellent way for our team to walk, or should we say “run” in the shoes of the K-8th graders representing Albany Park Community Center’s after school programs. All’s fair when the game is Johnny, Musical Chairs, or whatever our third game was called, which ended with this epic client v. designer slapdown:

Albany Park Community Center, located at 5101 N Kimball Avenue, is hoping to replace their front fence with something more inviting. After three warm up games (ahem, tie-breaker went to Territory), and three idea generating sessions, the design team developed solutions based on what we had learned from the clients. We re-imagined their fence – seen at left in the photo below – as “a place where a kid can be a kid.”

 

Territory is proposing a new kind of fence for APCC, a three-dimensional, interactive space that accommodates the exuberant play of primary school age kids, and resonates with the community on the other side. This spring, the team will create full size fence prototypes for our clients to test. We hope our prototypes become the APCC fence of the future.

Looking forward, Territory will include what we have learned with APCC into our latest studio investigation: “Seeing Kimball as a Youth Corridor – Foster to Montrose.”