The Playground is a space which aims to create an environment conducive to revitalising and reinvigorating the elderly and retired community in Beith. The main strategy is the creation of a youthful architecture that provides sensory and social stimulation to both children and the elderly alike, and to allow the activated activities – i.e. the interaction between child and elderly – in the site to spill out and revitalise this particular area. Beith houses a community with a strong pre-existing social sense of unity and harmony, but is flawed in its physical fabric which is an inevitable fragmentation of community space caused by the bypass road and the existing zoning of building typologies (suburb – town centre). Its current condition is a general lack of continuous safe space for leisure and community building.
Out of a respect for the existing trees of the site and the opportunity of reintroducing an environment where children can safely and freely explore in a more ‘natural’ way – climbing, swinging, sliding, hiding, balancing, etc. – the form is three square bands wrapping around the trees, allowing voids puncturing through the floor plates accommodating the trees to introduce light and ventilation into the very centre of the blocks. These ‘tree-wells’ are complemented by the irregularly placed piloti that raise the blocks above the slope/topography of the site, allowing children to explore and play beneath in this half-artificial, half-natural treescape.
The living spaces upstairs wrap around the tree-wells as they poke through various interior spaces. In more public and community-focused spaces such as living spaces, kitchens and activity areas, these spaces allow the residents to interact with and supervise children as they play beneath; in the more private bedroom spaces, these provide a pleasant presence of nature and natural light – a pastoral feeling that is, perhaps, being denied elsewhere by the fragmented nature of the town.
