Word: allens
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even at Washington's John F. Kennedy Playground, which is considered one of the best in the U.S., Lady Allen faulted the elaborate array of model jet planes, trolleys, Coast Guard tugs and fire engines, none of which can be moved. "The successful playground," she argues, "is one in which children can move things around and make them obedient to their own wills...
...Lady Allen's answer is the "adventure playground." Instead of flat asphalt, the lot ideally should have hills, grass and puddles. Its main features are: 1) a central pavilion where young children could keep out of the rain during the day and teen-agers could hold meetings at night, and 2) enough lumber, bricks, rope, pipes, hammers and nails to keep the kids busy. With a minimum of supervision, they would build tree houses, hideaways, swings-or just mud castles-and cook their own meals over an outdoor fire...
...Lady Allen got the idea on a 1945 visit to Copenhagen, where a Danish landscape architect had created an immensely popular playground by stocking a lot with building materials. It looked like a junkyard. Back home, she organized committees to take over old bomb sites and equip them in the same way. The kids thought that they were the best thing since ice cream. There are now 28 adventure playgrounds in England, and dozens more in Sweden, Denmark and Switzerland...
Insurance-conscious U.S. architects object that boards, bricks and nails are dangerous playthings. On the contrary, says Lady Allen, accidents are less frequent in her playgrounds than in conventional asphalt lots, probably because immovable playthings "bore children and breed a sort of mass hysteria." Anyway, she adds, "it is better to risk a broken leg than a broken spirit. A leg can always mend. A spirit...
Comfortable Jargon. The Europeans can often talk tougher and act more decisively than the Americans abroad. Pleading for a boost in productivity at Ford Motor Co.'s British branch, Manchester-born Managing Director Allen Barke told 60,000 workers: "Britain's image abroad is lousy" - and they applauded his pep talk. Thanks to management training at their U.S. home offices and such business schools as Harvard and Stanford, the European executives can comfortably speak the jargon of U.S. business ("parameters," "public relations," "cost control"), but they switch on their local dialects to good advantage when dealing with customers...