In One, Many, In Many, One: A Shipping Container Becomes a Modular Play System

What happens when the thing that delivers a playground also becomes part of it? In One, Many, In Many, One proposes a shipping container that arrives loaded with lightweight play volumes, deploys them across a refugee settlement, and then stays in place as a permanent hub for education and community life. The logistical object and the architecture are the same thing, just operating at different moments in time.

Designed by Matias Kubacsek, this project was shortlisted in Re-imagining Play 2020. The competition challenged designers to rethink how play environments are conceived, and Kubacsek's response rejects the fixed playground entirely. Instead of a static collection of swings and slides, the proposal treats play as a distributed spatial system: a vocabulary of modular forms that can be configured and reconfigured according to the constraints of each site.

A Container That Reverses Its Role on Arrival

The system begins with a custom container roughly 12 metres long and 2.10 metres in both height and width. It arrives by truck, its hatch lowering into a ramp so the individual play pieces can be removed and distributed throughout the camp. Once emptied, the container does not leave. It becomes a social node: a centre for play, education, and gathering. The site plan reveals how intervention zones radiate outward from this anchor point, with colourful clusters marking where the smaller volumes land across the settlement.

The dual function is what gives the project its name. A single volume carries many objects; those many objects collectively establish a larger network of activity. Transport and architecture are not separate budgets or separate timelines. They are the same investment, reframed.

The Corridor as a Social Space

Once the container is emptied and activated, its interior corridor becomes a place where community members of all ages interact. The visualization shows children, adults, and elderly residents occupying the same narrow volume, its pink-tinged walls framing informal exchange. The corridor is not a hallway connecting two rooms; it is the room. That spatial compression forces proximity and encounter, turning the most economical possible enclosure into something genuinely social.

A Spatial Vocabulary, Not a Predetermined Playground

The exploded axonometric reveals the full family of colour-coded components packed inside the container. Inclined planes, steps, curves, tunnels, low enclosures, and hollow volumes all nest together for transit, then spread apart to create distinct spatial conditions on site. The forms are made from lightweight reclaimed polyurethane, keeping them portable enough for children and adults to rearrange without tools or machinery.

Kubacsek organizes these elements into named configuration families: Slope-land, Up-and-Under, Curious Edges, Slide Time, and Hodge Podge. The diagram mapping three of these families shows how the same basic geometric pieces produce radically different arrangements depending on whether they prioritize slope, vertical layering, or curved edges. A sloping element might become something to climb, sit on, or slide across. A curved form might define a boundary, a gathering circle, or a tunnel for imaginative play. The architecture provides spatial prompts; children determine how those prompts get used. That open-endedness is deliberate. Play here is not a prescribed sequence but an ongoing negotiation between body and form.

Why This Project Matters

Refugee settlements are routinely designed around survival logistics: shelter, water, sanitation. Play and education infrastructure, when it exists at all, tends to arrive as an afterthought, bolted onto a system that was never designed to accommodate it. Kubacsek's proposal collapses that separation by embedding play directly into the logistics chain. The same container that solves a transport problem also solves a community infrastructure problem, and the pieces it carries are ambiguous enough to serve multiple ages, abilities, and cultural contexts.

The deeper lesson here is about economy of means. With a single shipment, one settlement gains a community building, a distributed play network, and a collection of educational tools. Nothing is discarded; nothing requires a second delivery. For designers working in resource-constrained contexts, that kind of systemic thinking matters far more than any individual formal gesture.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Matias Kubacsek

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Project credits: IN ONE, MANY, IN MANY, ONE by Matias Kubacsek Re-imagining Play 2020 (uni.xyz).