Connect: A Kit-of-Parts Playground Built by the Children Who Use It

What if the act of building a playground were just as valuable as playing on it? Connect proposes exactly that: a modular construction system where perforated poles, timber bars, ropes, tires, fabrics, and reclaimed crates become a shared vocabulary for children and community members to assemble their own play environments. Rather than delivering finished equipment, the project treats construction itself as a form of play, learning, and social participation.

Designed by Marwa Al-Saqqar, Connect was selected as an Editor's Choice entry in Re-imagining Play 2020. The project responds to conditions in the refugee camp on Samos, Greece, where a large population of children faces limited access to spaces for recreation and developmental activity. Instead of introducing a monumental intervention, Al-Saqqar proposes a distributed, low-profile system that can occupy leftover corners, narrow passages, and small open areas between existing structures.

Structural Logic at a Child's Scale

The section drawing reveals the system's fundamental clarity. Perforated poles anchor into simple foundations, horizontal bars slot in at variable heights, and ropes tie off with legible knots. Everything is sized for children to grasp, both physically and conceptually. The axonometric view expands this logic into a more complex assembly: stairs built from stacked crates, mesh panels stretched between poles, and a tire swing cantilevered from a horizontal bar. What matters here is that the structural relationships remain visible. There is no cladding hiding connections, no abstraction separating the user from the construction. Children see exactly how their playground holds together.

By keeping the structural system exposed and repetitive, Connect doubles as an accessible introduction to modular architecture. A child learns how pieces connect, how frames gain stability, and how swapping a single component, say replacing a mesh panel with a rope net, transforms the way a space is used. The result is a playground where spatial intelligence develops alongside physical activity.

Nine Configurations from One Kit of Parts

Three assembly diagram sheets lay out the system's real versatility. The first sheet details how the same poles, bars, and supplementary materials produce a quiet nook, a seesaw, steps, and a wall module, each with a precise parts count. The second sheet illustrates swing, climbing wall, and net configurations that demand taller poles and more rope. The third extends further into bridge, ladder, and hammock modules, each accompanied by a clear materials list. What these sheets communicate is not just variety but transparency: every configuration can be understood, replicated, and modified by its users.

This open-ended catalogue refuses to assign a single function to any element. A four-pole frame might shelter a reading nook one week and support a climbing net the next. Additional crates turn a flat platform into a staircase. The same rope that holds a swing can be restrung as a hammock. Connect sidesteps the conventional playground model, where a slide only slides and a swing only swings, in favor of a system where reconfiguration is built into the design intent.

Distributed Play Instead of a Single Destination

One of the project's most considered decisions is its refusal to consolidate. Instead of a centralized playground that demands a large cleared site, Connect distributes small assemblies across the existing camp fabric. A climbing wall can tuck into a gap between shelters. A hammock frame can occupy a sliver of unused ground. This distributed strategy respects the spatial constraints of an informal settlement while multiplying the points of contact between children and play.

Scale is deliberately modest. Structures remain low, lightweight, and non-permanent. They do not compete with the camp's existing spatial order; they supplement it. In a context where resources are scarce and space is contested, this lightness of touch is not a limitation but a strategy. It means play infrastructure can grow incrementally, adapt to shifting conditions, and respond to the materials that happen to be available, whether donated timber or salvaged tires.

Construction as Community Ritual

Beyond the spatial product, Connect frames the process of assembly as a social act. When children and adults build together, they negotiate roles, share tools, make collective decisions about configuration, and develop a sense of ownership over the result. The playground becomes something the community authored rather than something delivered to it. In a refugee camp, where displacement strips people of agency over their built environment, that authorship carries real weight.

Al-Saqqar's project recognizes that participatory construction is not just a feel-good gesture. It produces tangible developmental outcomes: spatial reasoning, fine motor coordination, collaborative problem-solving, and an intuitive understanding of structural principles. The playground teaches before anyone consciously decides to learn.

Why This Project Matters

Connect succeeds because it resists the impulse to over-design. Where many competition entries for underserved communities propose ambitious structures that assume stable funding, skilled labor, and permanent sites, Al-Saqqar works with the reality of scarcity. Perforated poles, horizontal bars, rope, and salvaged materials are not glamorous, but they are available, understandable, and reconfigurable. The architectural intelligence lives in the system's rules, not in any single built form.

More broadly, the project reframes what a playground can be. It is not a piece of equipment but a protocol for making space together. For children in Samos and similar contexts, the capacity to shape one's own environment, even at the scale of a rope swing or a crate staircase, is an assertion of presence and possibility. Connect argues that architecture's most meaningful contribution to childhood development may not be the spaces it delivers but the processes it enables.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Marwa Al-Saqqar

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Project credits: Connect by Marwa Al-Saqqar Re-imagining Play 2020 (uni.xyz).