Modular Playground: An Open Construction Logic for Children's Play in Refugee Camps

Refugee camp planning runs on a ranked list of necessities: shelter, sanitation, food distribution, circulation. Play rarely makes that list, yet children growing up in these settlements need room to climb, hide, pretend and test themselves as much as they need anything else. Modular Playground does not offer a fixed set of swings and slides. It proposes a framed spatial structure that children can occupy in many different ways, and that builders can assemble from whatever a particular camp has on hand.

Designed by Till Connor, the project was recognized as an Editor's Choice entry in Re-imagining Play 2020. Connor starts from a hard question: how can architecture give children meaningful opportunities when everything around them is temporary, unpredictable and constantly shifting? The answer he arrives at is less a playground than a set of rules for making one.

A Black Frame That Accepts Any Infill

The axonometrics show the system in its simplest form: a black tube frame that hosts different elements. In one bay a row of white modular seats lines the deck while a child crouches beside it. In another, a numbered tile floor panel sits inside the frame and two girls stand on it looking down. The frame itself stays neutral. The panels slotted into it decide how each bay is used, whether as a place to sit, to gather or to count out a game across the floor.

What makes this frame useful in a camp is how the parts connect. Connor proposes a system of adaptable joints that can join different framing materials, on the reasoning that material supply and construction skills vary widely from one camp to the next. Modularity here does not mean identical repetition. It works as a framework that local builders can interpret, and that hands real agency to the residents who will put it together.

A Narrow Line in an Open Clearing

The first site plan places the structure as a narrow linear element in an open clearing, ringed by dense black building footprints and scattered trees. The contrast does a lot of the work. Against the solid grain of shelters, the playground reads as a thin, permeable line that children can reach from several directions and that never claims more ground than it needs.

Connor never ties the design to one fixed location, because a camp may expand, contract, reorganize or close altogether. He treats that uncertainty as a design parameter. The linear form suits this well: it can grow or shrink by adding or removing bays, and the plan reads as one possible arrangement among many, not a final layout.

Above and Below, Near and Far

Here the frame becomes something children can play on, not just around. On a rooftop platform a child peers through a rotating binocular viewer while another sits in a lower trough, so the two occupy opposite ends of the structure's vertical range. Elsewhere a white table slides out from the black frame, a bucket and spade on top, and three children gather around it. Neither element tells anyone how to play. Each sets up a situation, and the children supply the activity.

This is where Connor's view of play as self-education becomes concrete. The project aims to support pretend play, role play, free-flow play, physical play and sociodramatic play. For younger children it also introduces paired concepts through direct experience: near and far, heavy and light, lines and curves, above and below, open and enclosed. A binocular viewer that pulls distant things close and a roof deck set against a sunken trough teach these ideas with the body instead of a blackboard.

Fitted Into the Lanes Between Shelters

The second site plan tests a harder condition. The structure is packed among rows of black building footprints and narrow lanes, with only a few trees nearby. No generous clearing exists here, only leftover space between dwellings. That the same linear frame slips into this tighter grain shows the system can adapt to a site, not only expand on one.

Placing the two plans side by side makes the project's argument better than any rendering could. In an open field or a crowded block, the playground uses the same kit of parts and the same jointing logic, adjusted to local constraints. A design meant to work across unknown sites has to show this kind of range.

Why This Project Matters

Humanitarian architecture often treats play as a luxury that can wait until the essentials are in place. Modular Playground pushes back on that ranking without overreaching. It does not ask for specialist materials or a stable site. It asks for a frame, adaptable joints and a few well-chosen infill pieces, then trusts local builders and children to complete the work.

The strongest idea in the proposal is that its open-endedness is deliberate, not unfinished. By treating modularity as local interpretation and play as learning, Connor offers a template that design students working on displacement, education or public space could reuse: set up the conditions, leave the outcomes open, and let the people who live there decide what the structure becomes.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Till Connor

Enter a Design Competition on uni.xyz

uni.xyz runs architecture and design competitions year-round that reward proposals with spatial conviction and real site intelligence.

Project credits: Modular Playground by Till Connor Re-imagining Play 2020 (uni.xyz).