What is an Imagination Playground?

The Imagination Playground at Burling Slip, Rockwell Group, and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation collaborated to create a new play space at Burling Slip in lower Manhattan. A unique child-centric downtown oasis, Imagination Playground combines sand, water, “loose parts” and play associates to encourage a constantly changing environment where children can play, dream, and build. Activity is mixed with creativity by providing diverse materials to promote unstructured “free play.” 

Imagination Playground in a BOX makes the principles of unstructured free play accessible to any community across the country. This semi-mobile kit features an array of loose parts adaptable to many different site conditions such as parks, childcare environments, and schools. 

Rockwell Group and KaBOOM!, the nation’s leading not-for-profit dedicated to bringing play back into the lives of children, partnered to implement a new generation of play spaces across the United States based on the concepts introduced with Imagination Playground at Burling Slip. KaBOOM! has built over 1,000 Imagination Playgrounds across the country over.

Imagination Playground

Imagination Playground is a sculptural environment designed for many types of activities with elements that children can manipulate. The raw materials of creativity and sensory exploration – such as sand and water – become the anchor for the playground replacing traditional fixed play equipment.

Loose Parts

Imagination Playground provides children with “loose parts,” a large array of movable objects so each visit is a new experience. Using play props – such as building blocks of various shapes and sizes, buckets, brooms, shovels, and found objects—kids can build something, tear it down, and start all over again. Carts, wagons, and wheelbarrows allow kids to load, unload, and move stuff—precisely the type of “work” children universally love to do. 

What is Rockwell Group’s relationship with the City of New York on this project?

Rockwell Group has worked with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation to develop the opportunity and design for Imagination Playground. Adrian Benepe, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, has been a strong advocate for Imagination Playground as “a new template for children’s play in the City.”

Why the Partnership with KaBOOM!?

KaBOOM! is the foremost national not-for-profit organization that has spent decades committed to bringing play back into the lives of children. From observing Rockwell Group’s progress on Imagination Playground at Burling Slip, KaBOOM! felt that our innovative perspective on play could significantly transform, enhance, and help their endeavors in the children’s play world. KaBOOM! already had a national presence and is the leader in playground development, and so the combined resources of Rockwell Group and KaBOOM! enabled the implementation and development of Imagination Playgrounds in a variety of communities all over the country.