Spencer Luckey Keeps Climbing

The pulsating orb-like structure in the Liberty Science Center appears to float, impossibly, high above the heads of people walking below, as if it’s lighter than air, or underwater. The fact that it isn’t just a sculpture, but in fact a playground for children, only adds to its improbable whimsy. Liberty Science Center is in Jersey City, N.J., but the shop that designed and built the orb, Luckey Climbers, is right in New Haven, on East Street. Its chief architect, Spencer Luckey, has been around the playground design business all his life. He took over the company from his father, and has made dozens of climbers for clients all over the world. But he also has a vision for the Elm City.

And it all started with duck decoys.

Spencer’s father, Tom, ​“got into making things through making duck decoys when he was in college” at Yale, Luckey said. Tom’s father was a career military man who liked to hunt, and needed something to shoot at. Tom provided. But his ​“profound love of carving” quickly blossomed from there, into sculptures as he attended Yale’s school of architecture, and, when he had children, toys. 

“Between those two passions, he got into making merry-go-rounds,” Luckey said. Tom was also ​“dedicated to his own self-employment”; he was a ​“vivacious individual” who wanted to create his own business. This led to his ideas about creating climbers — playgrounds for children, but more vertically oriented, with a keen sense of absurdity. His idea caught the attention of arts patron Agnes Gund, who commissioned Tom to create a climber for the Boston Children’s Museum. 

“And that’s how the climber business started,” Luckey said. ​“He pretty much stopped making merry-go-rounds after that.” It was the early 1980s, and Spencer was about 10. He was ​“really an amazing craftsperson, and very whimsical.” He recalled a string of creations his father made for his children, from sleds to rocking horses to cars to tricycles, made amid a whirlwind of activity. He even built a sailboat for Spencer and his sister for Christmas. ​“She, of course, never set foot in that thing, but I loved it,” Luckey said.

His father’s business took off, building climbers for children’s museums around the country. ​“He had jobs all over the place and things were going great.” Spencer went to boarding school and college, and in time to Yale’s school of architecture, sometimes working for his father’s business. When Spencer graduated from Yale, he got a job at Pirie Turlington Architects (now called Pirie Associates) in New Haven. 

“She was a wonderful boss,” Luckey said of Laura Pirie. ​“Very reasonable person, and had a great, hands-off way of managing people, which I really appreciated and admired. It made me realize how insidious micromanaging is.” He didn’t know how soon he would put those lessons to use.

Luckey was working at Pirie Turlington in 2005 when Tom ​“fell and hit his head, and turned into a quadraplegic. It was the day before my wife and I got married,” Luckey said. He found himself at a crossroads. Luckey Climbers was ​“a business I’d worked for all through my 20s.” His father wouldn’t be able to run it any more. ​“I just didn’t want to watch that — and him — go down,” Luckey said. He thought about how he liked being an architect, but didn’t always love working in an office. He thought about how the parts he loved about architecture from architecture school — ​“the instant gratification of drawing something, making something” — was necessarily absent from a larger firm where he had less autonomy. In the end, he understood, ​“I just want space to doodle and do my thing,” he said. 

In the wake of his father’s accident, ​“everyone was rolling up their sleeves and doing what they needed to do.” Luckey wanted to help save his father’s business. Pirie understood completely; ​“she went way beyond what I thought she would do, in a lot of ways,” Luckey said. 

One initial obstacle was his father. ​“My old man didn’t really want me involved in the business,” he said. ​“Pretty much nobody wanted me involved in the business, truth be told.” But ​“they needed my expertise. There was really no way they could get out of the woods without me. The business was not viable without me. And I don’t know that it was me, singular. But I’d worked for him a bunch. I knew how to make a climber, and because of my training in school, I knew how to design them — in a lot of ways, maybe better than him. Faster than him, for sure. And so one day I just brought my laptop and a monitor to his hospital room, and I set it up, and I said, ​‘we got a deadline. Let’s fix this thing and sort it out, and I’ll go present it.’ ”

“That was the moment I got really involved,” he added. That particular job was in Illinois. Then he did another job at the Boston Children’s Museum, a replacement for the old climber that had been his father’s first job. ​“He and I designed this thing, and it was a huge success.” They did several more designs together. ​“Then he went up to Martha’s Vineyard, and when he came back, he decided that we were no longer a team, and he and his wife were going to go on their merry way.” The company had six clients. Three of them went with Spencer. By that time his job at Pirie Turlington was in the rearview mirror. He had his name on work contracts and a shop in New Haven, ​“and the infrastructure to pull these things off, so I did.”

He did two children’s museums — in St. Louis and Houston — under his own steam and developed a track record of his own. His father, in time, returned to support him. ​“He realized that I was intent on keeping the ball rolling for all the right reasons, that I was competent and hard-working and talented, so we had six or seven really great years together. Toward the end of his life, he used to say that falling on his head was the best thing that ever happened to him.”

Tom died in 2012, and Spencer felt his absence both personally and professionally. ​“He was the romantic head of the company, and I didn’t realize how much of the work he had actually done,” Luckey said. ​“He talked on the phone a lot, and did a lot of very generative schmoozing. He was a very charming guy.” Without him, the company needed to shift its business strategy. Dana Peterson joined the company and is now its director of operations and a 50 – 50 partner in the company. ​“He’s a childhood friend — I don’t really even remember meeting him — and then he went and married my older sister. He’s just a great, standup individual, who does everything he says he’s going to do and then some. He’s become the perfect partner for me.”

With Peterson at Luckey Climbers, the company has grown to 11 employees, with more projects and more prospective clients than when his father ran the company. The scope of the company’s clientele has expanded to include malls, cruise ships, and a few other places, across 18 countries. By designing playground equipment on the computer, Luckey is also able to push his designs into shapes that were difficult to attain in the past by building models. So there are more curves, more helixes, in Spencer’s designs than there were in his father’s. To meet its expanded needs, the shop moved to East Street in 2018, from its a former location at Chapel Street and Blatchley Avenue.

But in other ways, the core principles of the design of the firm haven’t changed. ​“It’s part of the DNA of a climber that you’re going to go up, and you’re going to get a better view. But unlike a tree, where the higher you go, the more dangerous it gets — the thinner the branches, the farther the fall — in a climber it doesn’t actually get any more dangerous. The whole thing is designed and made so that it’s very much terra firma, so that there’s never a sensation that it’s shaky or more precarious in any way.” For Luckey, that means that he sees the climbers he installs as ​“part of the built environment. I don’t see them as kinetic. They’re more like fountains, with kids animating them.”

Luckey Climbers, perhaps obviously, has safety on its mind, first and foremost, with every climber it builds. But what about the sense that kids go to playgrounds to take risks, and possibly reap rewards, like on a swing set, or a jungle gym? ​“Kids, at least by my own experience, my own observations, seem really amazing at figuring out where their own thresholds are,” Luckey said. As such, he has wry observations to make about much current playground design, which sends a certain kind of message.

“The whole psychology of it is really unfortunate, I think, because it says to kids, ​‘you don’t have to take risks. We’ve taken all the risks for you, or taken the risk out of things for you,’ ” Luckey said. ​“And those risks are endemic through the entire thing. It’s why a lot of current playgrounds look like fancy backyard decks. What kid is going to be excited about railings and sand? And they’ve made slides so ridiculously safe that they’re boring, and kids just go up them the wrong way because it’s the only thing they can do that’s pushing the boundaries. And they love that! That’s what they want to do — they want to find where these thresholds are. It’s why swing sets are so exciting.”

But ​“my main beef with playground equipment is aesthetic,” he said. ​“The idea that little kids love pirate ships, or castles, is to me profoundly errant, because I know that kids don’t go to the park thinking ​‘I’m so excited to go play on that pirate ship.’ They might think ​‘I’m so excited to wear this goofy mask and lose my shoe.’ They might have no agenda. But the idea that you’re going to funnel them into some role-playing on a castle? Give me a break.”

Of his own playground equipment, he asks, ​“why can’t it be nonreferential and weird all at once? I think kids are more sophisticated than adults give them credit for. I once had a very enlightened conversation with a second-grader about sneaker design. He knew everything about everyone’s shoes in the classroom. It was remarkable — and probably not unique,” Luckey said. ​“That same sensibility is everywhere. Part of growing up and becoming an adult human is learning how to say yes and no properly to yourself, about whether you like things or don’t like things, about comfort and discomfort.… I try to react to architecture, in terms of design, and to look at things that are going on in the field, and try to translate some of those same vibes to playground equipment.… I try not to talk down to kids. You can be subtle. You can be weird. Kids are totally down with that.”

Which is one reason that Luckey would love to design a climber for New Haven, the city his company calls home. As he sees downtown developing, he wonders about the possibilities for making it more friendly to children — both outdoor public spaces, like the New Haven Green, or Millennium Plaza behind City Hall, where talks to install a climber stalled in 2017, or other places that haven’t been developed, like the inside of 45 Church Street (see Luckey’s mockup above), where talks to possibly develop it into a cultural center stalled in 2016. If part of the continued economic development is about lifting up everyone, and letting them get a better view, maybe a climber can be a part of that vision.

“My aim is to always make something that pleases myself, artistically, that it’s satisfactory to me from a cultural perspective — in hopes that kids will look at it the same way,” Luckey continued. ​“They’ll look at it and be intrigued, and think ​‘I can get lost in there.’ And then it’ll make them feel good about themselves, maybe.”