Cylinder Park: Turning Surplus Buckets into a Modular Play System for Refugee Camps

What if the most abundant object in a refugee camp could become its most versatile building material? Cylinder Park starts with a plastic bucket and ends with a full architectural vocabulary: seats, tunnels, musical instruments, screens, platforms, and climbing structures, all derived from the geometry of a single cylinder. The project does not import a prefabricated playground. Instead, it treats surplus household containers as raw architectural potential, extracting multiple spatial functions from an object most people discard without a second thought.

Designed by Sahar Issapour, Lynden Savage, and Emma Ng, Cylinder Park was shortlisted in Re-imagining Play 2020, a competition exploring new possibilities for environments of play. The project responds to a specific material condition: in many refugee camps, plastic buckets accumulate faster than they are reused. Rather than viewing this surplus as waste, the designers treat it as a resource for circular design, modular assembly, and creative reuse.

From One Cylinder to an Entire Architectural Vocabulary

The axonometric drawing above lays out the full component library: posts, arches, curved screens, stepped platforms, and hanging musical elements, all generated from cylindrical logic. A single bucket can stand upright as a seat, flip to become a stepping stone, stack into a column, or cluster into a boundary wall. Stretched into longer tubes, the cylinder produces tunnels and enclosures. The critical move here is scale variation. The same geometric primitive operates at the dimension of a hand drum and at the dimension of a walkable tunnel, holding the entire system together through formal repetition rather than material uniformity.

The approach matters for sustainable architecture because it avoids the production of specialized components. Instead of manufacturing a new catalogue of playground parts, the project discovers multiple functions within a limited family of forms. The architecture becomes less about producing more objects and more about revealing latent possibilities in what already exists.

Three Circular Zones Scaled to Community Need

The site plan organizes Cylinder Park into three distinct circular play zones, each sized for different group capacities and distributed across an urban grid. The circular plan geometry echoes the bucket's own cross-section, reinforcing the cylinder as the project's generative unit at every scale. By clustering activities into discrete zones rather than spreading equipment uniformly, the layout allows communities to build incrementally, activating one zone at a time as materials and labor become available.

Corrugated Fences and Purple Posts: Context Meets Intervention

These two images show the play system landing in a real material context. Corrugated metal fencing borders a dirt soccer field where players and spectators already gather. Purple cylindrical posts punctuate the fence line, marking the intervention without dominating it. Adjacent to the field, graduated cylindrical drums arranged in a wave formation create a climbing element that children scale against a blue metal fence. The graduated heights turn a simple row of drums into a legible topography of challenge, where the difficulty increases visibly with each step.

The color palette is deliberate. Vivid purples and blues distinguish the play components from the neutral corrugated metal, making the system legible as an invitation. Yet the construction language remains compatible with the existing infrastructure: bolt-together frames, sheet metal, and cylinders that could plausibly be assembled with basic tools and local labor.

Fabric Curtains and Gradient Tubes: Sensory Richness from Simple Means

A blue frame supports purple fabric curtains that billow and part as children move through them, creating a soft threshold between zones. Drum seats cluster beneath the canopy, offering seating that doubles as percussion instruments. The hollow interior of each bucket-derived cylinder becomes a sound chamber, turning a structural element into an interactive one. Nearby, a sloped structure built from horizontal cylindrical tubes in gradient colors provides a climbable landscape where children sit, scramble, and recline across its undulating surface.

The color gradients on the tube structure are not decorative afterthoughts. They signal elevation change and guide movement intuitively: cooler tones at the base, warmer tones at the crest. Combined with the fabric curtains, these elements demonstrate that sensory richness does not require expensive or imported materials. Texture, color, and sound emerge from reconfiguring the same basic cylinder.

Why This Project Matters

Cylinder Park makes a compelling argument that the gap between waste and architecture is narrower than we assume. By refusing to treat the plastic bucket as a finished product with a single function, the designers unlock a modular system that can be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled according to the needs of a specific place, age group, or activity. The project does not romanticize scarcity. It responds to it with spatial intelligence, extracting maximum programmatic variety from minimum material input.

In the context of refugee camps, where resources are constrained and infrastructure is provisional, Cylinder Park offers something more valuable than a playground: it offers a process. Communities can build incrementally, adapt configurations over time, and maintain the system without specialized skills or imported components. The cylinder, the simplest of geometric primitives, becomes a vehicle for agency, play, and community ownership. That is a design proposition worth taking seriously.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Sahar Issapour, Lynden Savage, Emma Ng

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Project credits: Cylinder Park by Sahar Issapour, Lynden Savage, Emma Ng Re-imagining Play 2020 (uni.xyz).