The Brutalist Playground: Kunsthall Oslo

The Brutalist Playground by the London-based collective Assemble and the artist Simon Terrill, is a life-sized soft reconstruction of lost concrete play areas from London housing estates – Churchill Gardens in Pimlico (1962); the Brownfield in Poplar (1963) and the Brunel in Paddington (1974) – that are now deemed unsafe and no longer in use. For Kunsthall Oslo the exhibition has been expanded to include a reconstruction of The Elephant, a concrete play-sculpture made in 1968 by the Norwegian artist Nils Aas, and sited in Oppsal on the outskirts of Oslo. An accompanying film, projected across three walls of the gallery, shows the original playgrounds in the context of the history of post-war social housing. The exhibition is both a landscape for children to climb and explore, and a reflection on architecture and society. What part of our cities should belong to children? What are the responsibilities of planners and architects? And what role might artists find in this process