A Tucson community center has teamed up with local and global experts to create a unique, architecturally stunning sensory garden for kids. Second Sky is actively fundraising to reimagine its 1-acre outdoor area into an “oasis for the senses,” which features rolling hills encircled by local plants, with a curved water stream cutting through the middle. Kids can relax in a hammock, run around the tree-like play space or meet at a small atrium for a performance.

“Children need safe and nurturing spaces where life can flourish, curiosity is triggered and their imagination expands,” says Michael Vrijhof, chairman of the nonprofit Dutch design firm Office for the New Earth, which has designed the Second Sky garden with Phoenix’s Green Room Landscape Architecture.

As the group works to raise financial and in-kind resources this year, Second Sky founder Joseph O’Connell, The Green Room founder Charlie Ray and ONE’s Vrijhof explain the impact of therapeutic spaces for kids, how neuroscience plays a role in design and more.

Q&A: Designing the Perfect Public Playground for Kids

What will visitors find currently at Second Sky?

Joseph O’Connell: Second Sky is an adventure playground and community center. There is a 12,000 square foot building that currently includes a small café, two rooms for art activities and some interactive exhibits. The outdoor space includes climbing structures, a “kid wash” that splashes kids as they run through, a tool-use area and various interactive sculptures. Within a few months, we’ll be augmenting the café with a greater variety of food, adding Train Better (a personal training and family fitness experience) and beginning work to landscape the outdoor space and start building the therapeutic healing structures.

What is a therapeutic healing space?

Charlie Ray: Much like our mission for our clients, The Green Room connects people and nature in immersive and harmonious ways, designing and creating beautiful and engaging outdoor spaces that provide habitats for people and ecosystems … environments that are ecologically sensitive, layered, seasonal, restful, fun and thought provoking.

Office for the New Earth, designs and crafts inspired architectural therapeutic structures that are a harbor of safety, playfulness, fun and rest in environments that are often lacking safety and play, and often in dire humanitarian situations.

Michael Vrijhof: Thank you, Charlie. I could not put it more beautifully. I would add that we incorporate evidence-based design aspects into our design. A particular branch of neuroscience, called neuroaesthetics, informs us about the way the right balance of sensory stimuli is necessary for our overall well-being, but also essential to the development of children’s nervous systems.

Evolved in natural habitats, diverse vegetation and landscape features are crucial to grow up psychologically stable and well-connected to our bodies and emotions, and in tune with our needs and boundaries. We can then enhance the crafted natural landscape with explicit features to induce both play and introspection through carefully crafted structures, responding to the climate and context around them. All this adds to a therapeutic and nurturing experience for children; hence the name ‘healing spaces.’

How will this space add to the resources currently available at Second Sky?

JC: Currently, we have about an acre of outdoor space. The design that TGRLA and ONE are working on will transform this into a native riparian immersive landscape with shade and spaces for kids (and adults) to explore, create and play.

MV: The playful dune landscape with shading trees, water features, fragrant shrubs and colorful flowers will set a rich stage for a variety of playful activities. We will add some open healing space structures to respond to more specific needs like motoric and social interaction (such as community swings, on which multiple children can participate), and affordances for restfulness, emotional integration and slow-paced social gathering (such as a series of hammocks covered by canopies).

Can you speak to the impact these spaces have?

MV: Children need safe and nurturing spaces where life can flourish, curiosity is triggered and their imagination expands, spaces in which they feel the protection to express themselves, in which their dreams of a brighter future come alive.

When children have access to a healing place, educational and therapeutic approaches can be practiced on fertile ground. From there on, they will share new hope and vitality with the rest of their communities.

Specialized in the physiological and psychological impact of architecture, ONE builds spaces that help children to feel better and stimulate their physical, emotional and cognitive development. This way their traumatizing background is not further exacerbated by challenging living circumstances. Instead, they get the ingredients to turn into open-hearted grown-ups who prosper in life and add to the peace and affection for the generations to come.

Are there ways for the community to support this work?

JC: Second Sky is already open most days of the week for at least half days, but we’re actively looking for funding to fully build out the indoor and outdoor features to enhance the experience and be open all the time.

Consider making a tax-deductible gift to our capital campaign. Once we have raised the capital to fully launch Second Sky and the therapeutic healing space, we won’t keep asking for money. We expect to become self-sufficient for our operating budget.

Go here to donate: new-earth.one/donate