Silver Playground Equipment, Play Structures and Public Park Design · 2026
Ural Forest Children Playground Equipment
by Taiga
- A' Design Award 2026 Silver Winner in Playground Equipment, Play Structures and Public Park Design
- Awarded April 15, 2026
- CLIENT: Taiga
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 18,534
- Verification code 0CAF8883AB · Verify this award
About Ural Forest Children Playground Equipment
The Ural Forest series features modular playground equipment designed as geometric abstractions of local nature. Large asymmetrical tree structures, bear themed playhouses, and ant inspired elements facilitate varied play scenarios for multiple age groups. Constructed from stainless steel and larch wood, the units are engineered for extreme weather using parametric software and reinforced foundations. The modular system ensures efficient transport and assembly. Features include internal spiral labyrinths and communication pipes, combining physical challenge with social interaction.
Taiga's Ural Forest Children Playground Equipment represents a distinguished achievement in contemporary playground design, positioning itself within the evolving discourse surrounding biophilic architecture and nature-inspired public amenities that seek to reconnect urban populations with organic forms and natural materiality. The installation demonstrates remarkable technical sophistication in its construction methodology, wherein precisely milled timber slats are assembled into soaring vertical structures that evoke the archetypal silhouettes of evergreen forests, each conical and ovoid form maintaining structural integrity while achieving visual lightness through the calculated spacing between horizontal elements. The chromatic restraint proves particularly noteworthy, as the designers have allowed the inherent warmth and tonal variation of natural wood to serve as the primary palette, creating subtle gradations from pale honey to deeper amber tones that shift with changing atmospheric conditions and viewing angles. One observes a thoughtful integration of contemporary materials where brushed stainless steel slides and structural supports introduce necessary functional elements without disrupting the organic visual language, their serpentine curves echoing natural water courses or wind-bent branches. The transparent dome elements crowning several structures suggest observation pods or tree canopies, inviting contemplation of sky and surroundings while providing sheltered play spaces. The careful incorporation of driftwood-like branch elements as climbing features demonstrates a commitment to tactile authenticity, offering children direct sensory engagement with natural textures and organic irregularity. This work invites viewers to consider how contemporary design might bridge the experiential gap between urban childhood and natural environments, creating spaces where imagination flourishes within carefully crafted landscapes that honor both safety requirements and the primal human affinity for forest environments.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Ural Forest is a series of children playground equipment designed in sculptural, geometric shapes to compliment contemporary urban landscape. The large Tree structures encourage active play in all weather conditions, helping children experience controlled risk responsibly. Smaller playhouses Bears and Mushrooms support roleplay, light activity, and interaction between different age groups. The Ants and Leaves open structures offer safe conditions for physical training to the youngest visitors.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Single Tree 8400 x 4300 x 9700
Two Trees set 18900 x 7800 x 9700
Three Trees set 19500 x 6300 x 11300
Bears 4700 x 1400 x 2500
Two Mushrooms set 6200 x 3100 x 4900
One Mushroom 5300 x 3200 x 2000
Three Ants set 4100 x 2600 x 1200
Ant slide 3300 x 2400 x 1900
Three Leaves set 2700 x 2300 x 1900
Leaf platform 1400 x 2200 x 700
Leaves and logs set 4900 x 4500 x 1300
Leaf with speaker 2200 x 600 x 1400
Climbing Leaf 1 1500 x 600 x 1900
Climbing Leaf 2 1700 x 1400 x 1800 - Tags
- Playground equipment, children development, active play, social play, collaborative play, public space, wooden architecture, landscape design, nature, local identity
- Production Technology
- Equipment is made out of stainless steel and larch wood to withstand extreme weather conditions. To tackle transportation and assembly, the structures are divided into modules that fit standard trucks to be assembled on site as construction sets. Stability of the Trees construction was ensured by enhancing the main beam and foundations according to wind and snow loads calculations. To facilitate the workflow the parametric software was used and universal joints solutions implemented.
- Design Challenge
- The goal was ambitious: to create a play environment to be an urban attraction point for residents and city visitors, and a new iconic visual landscape of Yekaterinburg city. To tackle it we designed every element representing local symbols of the nature of the Urals. Another great challenge was engineering, production, and pre-assembly testing. Teamwork of experts, iterative design, on-site upgrades and supervision after installation is what allowed us to deliver high quality and reliable solution.
- Project Duration
- The project started in 2018 and finished in 2025. The address: 15, Stepana Razina st., Yekaterinburg, Sverdlovsk Region, Russia, 620063, 56.825640, 60.608933
- Operation Flow
- The series is designed to host games for children of all ages. The youngest ones are physically training and play cooperatively in a separated zone with Ants and Leaves equipment. In the larger zone of Forest, older children enjoy active play in the Trees. They climb the inner spiral labyrinth, through interchanging closed spaces and open lattice structures, to slide down the impressive slides as a reward. Inside the Bear playhouses there are distance communication pipes that foster roleplay.
- Research
- We joined the Iset River embankment improvement project as play environment experts at the invitation of the S&P landscape firm. The site was based on the architects' proposed "Ural Forest" concept. Our team's subsequent work transformed this idea into a fully-fledged project with unique engineering and well-thought-out play scenarios. Zoning and interaction between objects were established, making the site vibrant, logical, and safe.
- Inspiration
- The company is located in the Ural region, covered with forests of deciduous and coniferous trees, inspiring series. The Trees were designed asymmetrical to look different from every side, just as in nature. Among them live Bears - common residents of the forest. Chanterelle mushrooms are famous and loved in the region, inspiring the smaller playhouses. Ants placed among leaves are tiny, but they are the most hardworking and strong forest tenants, teaching children collaboration.
Colors of Ural Forest Children Playground Equipment
Design Interview about Ural Forest Children Playground Equipment
The main principle and inspiration behind our design is the unique nature of the Urals, specifically the mixed forests where coniferous and deciduous trees thrive alongside mushrooms, bears, and insects. The core idea behind the project was to integrate this natural “DNA” into the urban environment to give back to children the living forest in a playhub format. We designed the space across two distinct scales: the Microworld and the Macroworld. In the Leaves and Ants zone toddlers can feel tiny between oversized shapes, playing within an effect of nature under a magnifying glass, improving their social skills and learning cooperation. The Macroworld represents the high forest, featuring trees, massive bears and mushrooms, vertical pathways, and bigger challenges. Here, the setting requires children to show physical grit, wait their turn on narrow bridges, learn where to yield or where to hold their ground. Modern urban environments are often overly safe, while in fact, providing calculated risk for children allows them to learn how to overcome fear and test the world's boundaries. It is absolutely vital for their psychological development, and can be done within the safe boundaries of meticulously engineered architecture. Ultimately, the nub is designed for children to grow within its borders, finding a new layer of complexity every time as they age, instead of outgrowing it in a single season. Finally, the project embraces "honest architecture" by refusing cheap, primitive bright colors in favor of an aesthetically sophisticated framework that takes children seriously as individuals fully capable of navigating complex emotions, routes, and real-time decisions.
Our primary focus in designing this work was to create an environment that naturally fosters social connections and neuroplasticity in children of all ages, achieved subtly through open play and direct physical experience. We specifically wanted to revive the lost tradition of spontaneous "backyard socialization," which we accomplished in the toddler zone by using an anthill metaphor with structures that gently nudge children toward collective cooperation, communication, and shared action. For older children, we aimed to introduce healthy risks to build assertiveness, self-confidence, and group negotiation skills. Additionally, we wanted to support cognitive flexibility and neuroplasticity by pairing contrasting materials and textures like warm timber and cool metal. Apart from that, we wanted to achieve true organic authenticity in visuals, ensuring that no two trees looked exactly alike. And finally, we aimed at creating single-post play structures of the greatest height we ever saw in Russian or international practice. There are plenty of multi-legged play towers out there, but a single-post structure of this scale is a genuinely unique engineering achievement: designing a monolithic, single-post structure that can safely handle loads from weather and full occupation of playing children.
This design was commissioned by S&P landscape studio, who approached us with the core theme of the Ural forest and the initial idea of using coniferous and deciduous trees, which we then took as our inspiration to fully design and realize the project's visual imagery. While our client acted as an exceptional collaborator — providing tight feedback and pushing us to refine the concepts until we achieved a more airy, transparent style for elements like the giant bears — the structural and artistic sculpting of the trees, wildlife, and natural motifs was handled entirely by our team. Ultimately, we pursued this specific concept to bring the authentic DNA of the Ural and Russian wilderness into an urban play space, turning their initial sketches into a deeply custom, cohesive landscape that celebrates our local flora and fauna.
The realization of this concept was one massive hurdle after another, beginning with a conceptual sketching phase that lasted for nearly a year and a long pause before detailed engineering could start. The core technical challenge layed in adapting the engineering to match the design, seamlessly fitting irregular hexagons together and marrying the internal load-bearing frame with the visual outer cladding, everything to maintain the aesthetic and calculated structural stability. Because we engineered the equipment from day one with a massive margin of safety for brutal regional wind, snow, and user weight, we faced major complications with the local soil conditions and foundation design, which required extensive technical simulations to ensure the ground could support a massive single-post structure under maximum capacity. Finally, our non-negotiable principle of not allowing on-site welding, forced our engineering and R&D departments to develop a modular frame system that was pre-fitted perfectly at the factory, allowing the entire multi-structural tower to be delivered in compact shipping dimensions and assembled seamlessly on-site. In terms of design, the most significant challenge was finding the exact key for styling and establishing a meaningful dialogue with the surrounding architecture, which required moving away from literal, semi-realistic forms that clashed with the site's topography. Through several intense iterations with the lead architect from S&P, we pushed past these dense, heavy forms to a meticulous balance of volume and negative space, ultimately arriving at a style of abstract eco-bionics with elements of polygonal parametricism. This shift toward abstraction intentionally leaves fewer prescriptive details, ensuring the forms don't dictate how to play but instead point a direction, leaving total freedom for interpretation and more room for a child's imagination.
Grand Interview about Ural Forest Children Playground Equipment
That defining moment emerged during the sketching phase. Initially, our designs leaned toward literal, semi-realistic forms, such as a direct tree shape or a realistic animal. However, we realized this literalism completely clashed with the river embankment's modern architecture. The forms also felt too heavy and lacked structural transparency. Through these abstract, irregular geometric forms, we created a landmark that is both stylised and natural at its core.
We solved this by designing the play hub as a continuous, unified ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated elements. For toddlers, the Ants and Leaves zone acts as a secure "microworld" where oversized structures foster early cooperation and physical training safely away from high-speed play. This area is distinctly divided from the "macroworld" of the massive Tree towers, where older children can tackle vertical challenges and controlled risks. The zones are accessible to children of any age, but separated by activities, so varying play dynamics do not cross each other, thus avoiding conflicts. In addition to that, through these layered, age-specific scenarios within a shared forest narrative, children find new levels of complexity to graduate into as they grow.
Parametric software was essential for marrying our irregular, asymmetrical Tree forms with rigorous engineering. Because these structures look different from every angle, every single hexagonal panel possesses a completely unique geometry. In contrast, the joints utilize a universal design to reduce the technical documentation and streamline production. As a result, the structures were built as a modular constructor set that was perfectly pre-fitted at our factory and then safely bolted together on-site without a single weld. Weather loads were calculated through simulations using different software, after which our engineers carefully designed enhanced main beams and distributed the weight loads across the foundation. This part of the project was revised several times to ensure the durability and safety of the structures.
We believe that for the international jury, the project stood out because it rejected generic playground formulas in favor of an authentic narrative wrapped in sophisticated abstract eco-bionics. We translated our local wilderness into a high-end geometric landscape, proving that a specific regional identity can be communicated through a universal architectural language. For the local residents of Yekaterinburg, the impact is deeply personal. They see their own natural heritage: the bears, spruces, and chanterelles, elevated into a world-class public landmark. By using genuine materials like larch wood instead of primitive bright plastics, we gave the city an iconic space that respects both their culture and their children.
A major challenge occurred during construction when we encountered severe complications with the local soil conditions. Because we were erecting the market's largest single-post play structures under tight site constraints, soil stability became a critical issue. We had to run technical simulations to guarantee the ground could support these massive towers under peak capacity, factoring in heavy crowds of children, snow, and wind. This forced us to upgrade our foundational design and optimize our modular load-bearing frame system. By reinforcing the main beams and enlarging the foundations beyond the norm, we transformed a challenging soil hazard into a triumph of structural integrity and safety.
We designed the Tree towers as an alternating sequence of closed spaces and open lattice structures. Inside, children navigate an internal spiral labyrinth, scaling narrow bridges and open lattice tunnels where they must build up the courage to take a step. Every climb can be rewarded with a fast slide from a great height that might seem risky to children, when in fact, we control the speed of the descent precisely through the angles of the slide's trajectory. The highest structures have a toddler-proof filter: the first step of the ladder is located higher than they can climb, while older children will not have an issue with it. Therefore, the structure invites only age-appropriate play. Ultimately, we aligned every dimension of the play elements strictly with safety standards and children's physiology, eliminating entrapment and falling risks. This is how we introduce a sense of risk and discovery in a completely safe and calculated environment.
From our experience, every playground is different. We work on all kinds of sites, from small residential complex gardens to public squares such as the one for Ural Forest. Not every playground needs direct visual imagery embedded in its core. For example, in the case of residential areas where the same children play every day, we prefer to set up universal and abstract equipment. The structures are able to adapt to different games every day, leaving space for children's imaginations: one day a rocket ship, the next day a dragon, and later a secret base. In the case of public parks and squares, the approach is unique to each individual project, depending primarily on the concept of the space within the larger architectural master plan. Sometimes our clients might need a subtle environment designed for the neural relaxation of children away from their fast-paced surroundings, while in other cases, like with Ural Forest, our partner S&P Studio planned a dominant landmark and attraction point. For these types of projects, we conduct research into the local culture, history, or fairy tales to reimagine well-known motifs, which are then developed further through dialogue with local representatives.
We hope Ural Forest proves that a children's playground deserves the same architectural rigor, structural ambition, and artistic honesty as any major public monument. We want to show the global design community that outdoor play environments can reject superficial, cheap, and oversaturated materials to become sophisticated public sculptures that are unified with the environment, not in opposition to it. Simultaneously, these spaces must function as true instruments of development, not just places to aimlessly pass the time: respecting children enough to trust them with controlled risk, offer diverse sensory feedback, and foster genuine socialization. Ultimately, embedding the local heritage of the Urals is what we wanted to share with the world, adding to its visual abundance and versatility.
The choice of materials comes from our 15+ years of experience building playground equipment. Stainless steel is the most resilient metal to corrosion and structural loads that can be sourced, and larch has the ability to harden over time, becoming stone-like. Apart from that, our larch wood is locally sourced in the Urals, making it the exact kind of wood that is naturally designed to withstand the conditions of the region. Our vast experience with these materials is what allows us to rely on them completely, knowing exactly how to avoid cracks in the wood and how to design welded structures. All Taiga products are made using these materials as our palette, along with stones, sand, pebbles, and ropes, so we are keen on this natural aesthetic. We believe that such an approach allows children to restore their connection with nature in a highly synthetic urban environment.
Today, children often grow up atomized: parents work in offices, and children spend a significant amount of time among unfamiliar adults and peers across disconnected locations. We want the playhub to function as a new social institution, so we focused on designing the space in a way that gently nudges children to face each other and play together. For example, in the narrow tunnels between the Trees, they would need to negotiate who should give way, and in the Ant zone, the pebble-pouring structures can be fully activated only through collaboration. Inside the Bears, communication pipes spark analog distance roleplay by connecting children separated by physical walls. Through this collective play, children develop not only social skills but also new neural pathways that support their capacity for learning and adaptation.