Illustration by Sam Island.

About 40% of U.S. department store outlets have closed over the past five years. Many of the large, boxy structures that house them, where prom dresses were purchased and perfume sampled, will be demolished. But some will be put to new uses.

Why repurpose department stores, the supposed white elephants of the retail world? Property owners and designers are becoming aware of the cost savings and environmental benefits of adapting older buildings rather than tearing them down. Beyond that, many urban department stores have high-quality historic architecture, prime downtown locations, big lower-floor windows, and lots of open floor space. Suburban stores are often plain and windowless; inside, however, they have the same large floor plates, as well as key locations near highway interchanges. (No wonder some stores have been converted to temporary Covid testing and vaccination sites.)

“The big urban question of the 1980s and 1990s was what to do with former industrial areas of all of our major cities,” says Owen Hopkins, director of the Farrell Centre, a research hub for architecture and planning at Newcastle University in England. In the 2020s, he says, it’s “What can we do with post-retail spaces?”

Mist Garden by Quennell Rothschild & Partners in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens. Photo by Ismail Ferdous/Bloomberg.

When the Unisphere made its debut at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, the stainless-steel representation of the planet was surrounded by a turquoise pool and rings of powerful water jets, whose leaping plumes echoed the curves of the globe. Radiating from that central basin were the Fountains of the Fairs, including a 310-foot-long stepped pool initially surrounded by bands of colorful flowers.

The visual and aural effect of this waterfall fountain was dramatic, even symphonic: The constant sound of flowing water followed fairgoers as they explored the pavilions along the paths radiating from the Unisphere. This feature was also high maintenance. By the 1970s, the flow had been turned off, and even a pump repair in the early 2000s proved short-lived.

In the summer of 2021, the water at the Fountain of the Fairs finally got turned back on — not as falls, but as fog. Fog is an atmospheric effect that has shown itself to be environmentally responsible, ephemerally beautiful and large-scale spectacular in artists’ hands many times before.

Flushing Meadows-Corona Park’s $6.8 million “mist garden” was the result of input from the Queens communities that live near the park, New York City’s fourth-largest, as well as shifting priorities for the city. The New York City Department of Parks & Recreation was looking for a water feature designed for cooling off, rather than decoration, that would also conform to the city’s new usage restrictions of no more than 25 gallons per minute. A water feature that would delight, but also be visually strong enough to stand up to the 140-foot-tall Unisphere.

Yes, you can have athletic sex in a cardboard bed. The rumor that the cursed COVID Olympics in Tokyo was promoting celibacy through flimsy furniture has since been debunked, but that doesn’t mean that those beds aren’t worthy of further scrutiny. It’s not their material that’s weak but the design ambition behind them. Stylish temporary architecture has been a hallmark of Olympic Games past — just look at Los Angeles in 1984, where construction scaffolding became enchanting Pop villages — but these boxy furniture pieces read as designed for forgettability, not engineered to give bodies under stress the best rest.

Why build another box when, since the 1960s, cardboard dreamers have demonstrated that the material can bend, curve and roll, much like the Irish gymnast Rhys McClenaghan, who went viral on Twitter jumping on one of said beds to disprove its anti-sex reputation? Why build something in white or brown when they could be red, yellow, or blue or have polka dots or Olympic rings?

Once upon a time, cardboard was going to save us all from conformity. “Those beds are pretty basic,” says Andrew Blauvelt, director of the Cranbrook Art Museum, and the curator of the 2015-2016 Walker Art Center exhibition Hippie Modernism, which showcased some of the weirdest and wildest experiments in temporary living environments of the 1960s. “The Olympic Village is doing it for ecological reasons, and that’s the funny thing. The 1960s stuff was supposed to reflect a new modern lifestyle — it was supposed to be longer-lasting rather than just tossed away after use.” Cardboard attracted attention back then because of its ubiquity as first a byproduct of, and then a design problem produced by, the postwar culture of consumption. Cardboard was lightweight, it was portable, and it lent itself to D.I.Y. and customization. Giving boxes a second life in the home was a positive tweak to throwaway culture.

An aerial nighttime view of Little Island park on June 14, 2021. Noam Galai/Getty.

The architecture critics have already called Little Island “a charmer” and “a handmade Eden.” The new $260 million park just off Manhattan’s west side has been praised for its concrete “tulips,” its amphitheater, and its lush and colorful plantings.

But however beautiful the park is at this point, a moment when the sun is shining, the flowers are blooming and New York City is reopening, there’s a price to be paid for building what a billionaire wants.

As part of the arrangement between media mogul Barry Diller — the prime mover behind the park’s design and development — and the Hudson River Park Trust, the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation has to pay for maintenance and programming costs for the next 20 years, a figure that Diller estimated could add another $120 million. Even if 20 years seems far away now, that’s still a big question mark for the future in a city which invests less in parks than many of its peers.

When New York City parks have long received 0.5% of the city’s budget, and lost $84 million to austerity measures in 2020, Little Island sets a terrible example. It is not gated, but it might as well be, given how complicated, how high-maintenance and how bossy it can be. While it may be Barry Diller’s ideal park, it doesn’t line up with the needs or expectations (or budget) of most of the 8 million plus New Yorkers, many of whom don’t have access to private outdoor space and need room to walk, play, party and sprawl. Sometimes spending less can do more when funders ask their designers to lay out the welcome mat … and then walk away.

"Swing Time" by Höweler + Yoon Architecture.

When the playscape Swing Time popped up in Boston in 2014, visitors started having too much fun. The 20 hoop-shaped swings suspended from a white shade structure light up when in use, glowing purple with vigorous motion. Its creators at Höweler + Yoon Architecture had imagined people would swing in ones and twos. Instead groups tried to pile on together, hoping to share the sway and have a conversation.

Susannah Walker, co-founder of the newly created British charity Make Space for Girls, saw in Swing Time something that would have delighted her 17-year-old self. “At the end of the summer holidays my friend and I ran out of money,” Walker wrote in a March post. “We had nothing to do and there was nowhere to go. So we’d go and hang out on the swings in the early evening and chat as the light slowly faded into dusk. It was better than sitting around at home.”

She highlights Swing Time to illustrate two points: One, girls love swings. And two, there aren’t enough swings made for teenage girls. “They are almost always placed with the equipment for younger children, so that if teenagers use them they are seen as invaders.”

There also aren’t enough spaces for teen girls. Where aren’t teenagers seen as invaders? They are too big, too loud, too old for playgrounds, at least in the eyes of parents; and too young, too loud, too broke for restaurants, bars and stores. The problem is magnified for teen girls who, surveys show, are less likely to use the basketball courts and skate parks intended for adolescents, and run the risk of harassment, or worse, when they appear in adult spaces.

Philadelphia's Playstreets. Photo by Ken McFarlane/Philadelphia Parks & Recreation.

On July 5, 1976, Philadelphia capped off the nation’s bicentennial celebrations not with flags and fireworks — all those grand displays were held on the 4th — but with play. Frisbee Golf on Winter Street. Paper airplanes at Logan Circle. Kid-sized pick-up sticks at 20th and Parkway. Music was provided by a giant xylophone and kazoos on Park Town Place and a Jamaican steel band at 22nd Street.

This grand day of play was organized by Bernie DeKoven, a game designer and “fun theorist” who believed “being at play together is being in flow together,” quoting psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, known for his theory that humans are happiest in a state of absorption within an activity. Given the right environment, given permission to join in the fun, humans have the ability to “form play communities.”

After more than a year of closed schools, shuttered playgrounds, canceled sports and called-off birthday parties, the idea of a “Playday on the Parkway” like Philadelphia’s or, better yet, many play days on many parkways, sounds like just the sort of freedom and collective boost our children need. If it was a sign of patriotism in 1976 to open the streets and parks to fun, the symbolism would be even more powerful now. Let the children — not the cars, not the delivery trucks, not the Zooms — find their flow. Let’s declare this the Summer of Play.