When contemplating how to construct a new playground for the New York Hall of Science, an architect with the eclectic firm BKSK Architects, Joan Krevlin, employed an unusual method.

“We built a giant clay model and tried to imagine what it would be like to climb though,” Ms. Krevlin said, recalling how she and her co-workers eschewed traditional computerized models. “Putting yourself in the mind of a 5-year-old, that’s really hard.”

The result of that leap of imagination is a dynamic $2.7 million, 30,000-square-foot new playground for the under-5 set that the Hall of Science in Queens unveiled last month. The project is intended to complement an existing 30,000-square-foot play site for older children, also designed by Ms. Krevlin. At a total of 60,000 square feet, the playground would be the largest in North America.

“In New York, you don’t often get the chance to make worlds like this,” Ms. Krevlin said. “Architecture in New York doesn’t really have the time to integrate with the landscape, so you are often left with no true sense of place.” The Hall of Science decided to expand its play space to accommodate its shifting visitor demographic, according to the president and CEO of the Hall of Science, Marilyn Hoyt.

“New York is in the middle of a baby boom right now. The zero-to-5-year-olds are the fastest growing population cohort in the city, and we realized we were not doing a whole lot for the young children coming here,” Ms. Hoyt said.

The architectural team, which also included landscape architect Lee Weintraub, created a series of interlocking paths to highlight five pedagogical themes — fluid dynamics, physical acoustics, the physics of light, the behavior of solids, and built and natural environments — all constructed into the hills and valleys of the natural landscape. The new structure is designed to develop abstract thinking skills in young children, which new research shows can have a big impact on children’s abilities to process conceptual ideas later in life.

“We started from a standpoint that the best environment for any kid to play in is just a stream in their backyard, and there is not really a lot you can do to improve upon that,” Ms. Krevlin said. “You can’t be that didactic with kids, but they are still learning and still connecting to the natural environment even as they play and move their bodies and touch things.”

Playgrounds in New York have become the target of some of the leading minds in contemporary architecture. Last month, the city announced that Frank Gehry, fresh off the opening of his Interactive Corporation headquarters in Chelsea, would design a $4 million, one-acre playground near the Battery Park Ferry Terminal. By next spring, David Rockwell’s “Imagination Playground” is scheduled to open at the South Street Seaport.

A New York-based architect who runs his own practice and has written extensively about playground architecture, Richard Dattner, is taking a wait-and-see approach on judging the success of the boom in playspace construction.

“The jury is out on all of this, and the jury is the kids,” he said. “Starchitects are very good at the grand dramatic gesture that has everyone gasping but it may or may not work as a kids environment. If a kid gets impaled on the sharp edges of some Zaha Hadid-designed playground architecture, well, it won’t be quite a successful environment.”