Spielraumnetze *01
Everyone knows them - the red climbing structures that are omnipresent in playgrounds and fascinate children and adults alike! Their construction is amazingly simple: a net suspended from a central tubular steel mast and braced to the ground with reinforced edge ropes in concrete anchor blocks. The so-called ‘Seilzirkus’ is finished. Simple and brilliant at the same time.
The architect Konrad Otto Roland Lehmann, alias Conrad Roland, won the ‘Sonderpreis Bundespreis Gute Form’1 in 1971 with this space net and revolutionised the playground landscape in over 50 countries. Formerly found exclusively in adventure playgrounds, the net landscapes with multi-masts, suspension bridges and seating areas are now almost standard - and anyone who has anything to do with children has certainly been part of this experiment themselves.
f you read the architect's 1971 self-published explanation of his invention, the climbing nets were far more than just a piece of play equipment: they were experimental and training fields to prepare children for life in flexible, three-dimensional suspended city structures - a ‘natural and crucially important preliminary stage for a future socialist world of living, working, recreation and play’2. Roland wanted people to be able to live and act ‘no longer as passive victims of repressive and exploitative housing associations and private profit builders, no longer as prisoners in concrete silos, but as “homo ludens et movens” [...], free, mobile and open to all possibilities of human existence and communication’.
The architect, who was born in Munich in 1934 and died in Hawaii in 2020, was a student and colleague of Frei Otto3 and shared his fascination for filigree rope and net structures. His dream: suspended cities that respond flexibly to the needs of their inhabitants and defy rigid social and architectural constraints. He spoke of ‘constructions of possibility’ that would constantly adapt and create space for a changeable, vibrant society. The climbing constructions that he marketed from 1973 with his company Spielbau Conrad Roland and later under the label Corocord Spielbau GmbH are still a legacy of this vision today. In one of his passionate appeals, Roland wrote:
‘This marvellous freedom to follow only their desire when playing should finally allow children to become demanding and feared builders for playground ‘designers’. All the artistic playground architects should be locked up in their play prisons for a day and fed cake from the sandpit. And then take them to a psychoanalyst so that they might remember their childhood after all - probably in vain, because many so-called children's playgrounds look as if their creators and builders were born with a hat and a drawing frame.’4
Even though Roland was never able to realise his bold mega-structures and they remained ‘castles in the air’5, his designs for the future found their way into reality when scaled up to a child's scale. The didactic claim of wanting to teach a new way of living through a child's architectural experience of space was revolutionary. After the sale of his company in the 1980s and his emigration, the successor company Corocord Raumnetz GmbH (now KOMPAN) took over production and adapted the play equipment to new requirements. It remains to be seen whether this development still corresponds to Roland's original philosophy. But one thing is certain: children all over the world still have fun with the climbing nets today.
