Thomas Walker Luckey (January 6, 1940 – August 19, 2012) was an American architect and sculptor, best known for inventing abstract playgrounds called Luckey Climbers.[3] Luckey also created furniture, merry-go-rounds, and interiors.
Life and career
After graduating from the Yale School of Architecture in the late 1960s,[1] Luckey began remodeling friends' houses[3] and doing experimental projects, including one described as transforming:
... part of a Vermont house into a "spooky space landscape," as one critic described it. Randomly placed steps, ramps, and terraces ascended to the ceiling, and surfaces were sheathed in woolly orange carpet. Elsewhere in the house, a cylindrical rotating room replicated the spatial transmutations of LSD with a bed that became the back of a sofa, a table that morphed into a seating platform that became a desk, and so on.
— Alastair Gordon, Spaced Out: Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties[4]
In addition to interiors and furniture, he also designed merry-go-rounds; one, inspired by square dances, moves riders from one seat to another as they go around.[2]
A mutual friend introduced Luckey to Agnes Gund, who insisted he contact the Boston Children's Museum.[2] After he persuaded officials to let him build his first Luckey Climber, the structure turned out to be one of the museum's most popular exhibits, and has now been replaced with a new version.[3]
In 2005, Luckey fell out of a second-story bathroom window and landed on his head. He fractured his cervical vertebra and was paralyzed from the neck down.[1][2]
Luckey Climbers are multi-story climbing structures crossed with mazes and jungle gyms. In appearance, they have been compared to "a Calder mobile fashioned from Monet's lily pads".[3] They have been installed in locations across North America that include:
