NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK (USA)
Client: Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
Date: 2022
Status: Completed
Program: A spontaneous playground and interactive urban experience for children and families
Scope: Concept design, Implementation
Is it utopian to turn the city into a field of experimentation and play? Is it possible to reimagine forgotten spaces throughout the city as playful collective experiences? Can we reimagine the city as a playground?
Public space is the meeting point where communities blend and mingle and where interaction, exchange and communication take place. A healthy public space is the celebration of diversity and a paradigm of democracy, enabling all sorts of expressions, uses and cultural manifestations. Public space becomes a medium, a tool, an enabler, where everybody should feel included and with the possibility of personalizing, manipulating and reclaiming it.
Public space must be reclaimed by those who make the most unprejudiced and free use of it: children. By looking through children’s eyes, we will be able to rediscover the city and transform it from a structural, and not merely aesthetic, point of view.
Idea Soup creates possibilities for communicating and sharing ideas individually and collectively. It is, at the same time, the platform to dream about the future and potential scenarios that can then be shared, discussed and debated. The Lincoln Center open space has been transformed into a spontaneous playground through the use of interactive letters with which children and their families are able to experiment and create messages, sharing their personal thoughts and ideas with the world.
Idea Soup is not an installation, but an experience. A way of connecting to those around you and beyond. An interactive activity that engages you physically and mentally. A framework for children to express themselves and share their thoughts, dreams and expectations about the future.
All photos by Kylie Corwin.
