Play: Fragments of Their World: Remembered Architecture Rebuilt as a Modular Playground for Refugee Camps

A refugee camp is planned around survival: shelter, food, sanitation and safety come first, and rightly so. What rarely makes the brief is the thing a displaced child loses alongside home, which is the freedom to play. Play: Fragments of Their World refuses to treat that loss as secondary. It argues that play is a developmental necessity, and that the architecture children left behind can be broken down, scaled down and handed back to them as something to climb, slide through and gather under.

Designed by Tom Gardner and recognised as an Editor's Choice entry in Re-imagining Play 2020, the proposal imagines a modular play environment for children living in refugee camps. Its formal vocabulary draws on recognisable architecture from countries with large displaced populations, including Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Eritrea, Congo, South Africa and the Central African Republic. The result sits somewhere between playground, informal classroom and community square.

A Street of Miniature Landmarks

The opening perspective sets the emotional register. A colonnaded hall runs into hazy light, lined with miniature houses, a clock tower and a slide, while children and adults move through it together. The scale shift does the work here: buildings that might once have read as civic or monumental are reduced to a height a child can occupy and claim. The space feels less like equipment dropped onto a site and more like a street, with thresholds, rhythm and a sense of arrival.

That distinction matters in a camp context, where repetition and efficiency define the landscape. Gardner's hall offers a counterpoint: a place with identity, where adults walk alongside children rather than standing at the perimeter. Play becomes something the community shares, not a fenced-off amenity.

Familiar Fragments as a Kit of Parts

The project's real intelligence lies in its system, which Gardner calls Familiar Fragments. Rather than fixing one playground layout, he proposes a collection of individual elements that can be assembled to suit different sites, populations and environmental conditions. The axonometric shows oversized modules coming together, backed by details of a hexagonal panel system and metal frame joints. It is a sensible answer for humanitarian settings, where sites vary and construction needs to be straightforward.

The abstraction is precise. A dome becomes a small pavilion; a tower becomes a climbing or sliding structure; an arch becomes a threshold; a decorative wall becomes a surface for interaction; a shaded vernacular structure becomes a protected play area. The plan, with its strips of elevations above, reads almost like a catalogue, yet it resolves into a composed courtyard organised around a central domed pavilion. The forms stay recognisable without tipping into literal replica, which keeps them open to a child's imagination.

A Walled Courtyard Beside the Tents

Seen from above, the playground sits next to rows of tents, and the contrast is the argument in a single frame. The camp's grid of identical shelters gives way to a walled court with a dome at its centre, arched swing frames and a slide. The enclosing wall provides a clear boundary that supports supervision and a sense of safety, while the central pavilion gives the space a focal point that the surrounding settlement lacks. Slides, platforms, sand areas and gathering spaces are organised as one coherent spatial system rather than scattered objects.

Domes, Spirals and Arches at Eye Level

At ground level the fragments become tangible. A domed tower carries a red spiral slide, set beside pink arched swing frames, turning a building type tied to memory and gathering into a vertical play element. Elsewhere, orange arched swings sit opposite a patterned play wall with black bench seating, and children cross the paved square between them. Colour is used assertively, separating each fragment from the next and from the muted surroundings of a camp.

The bench along the patterned wall is a small but telling detail. It acknowledges that carers need somewhere to sit and watch, and it lets the wall work both as a surface for children's interaction and as the edge of a social space. This is where the claim that the playground is also a learning environment and a community space becomes convincing.

Why This Project Matters

Humanitarian design tends to measure success in units delivered: shelters erected, litres supplied, latrines built. Gardner's proposal makes a quieter case that a child's sense of curiosity and safety deserves a dedicated architectural framework too. By treating play as part of the humanitarian response rather than an afterthought, it widens what a camp's infrastructure can include.

Its most transferable idea is the use of abstracted cultural memory as a design method. Fragments that are familiar yet reconfigured let children recognise something of home while still discovering it fresh through play, and the modular kit means that idea can adapt from one settlement to the next. It is a thoughtful reminder that architecture for crisis can carry identity as well as shelter.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Tom Gardner

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Project credits: Play: Fragments of Their World by Tom Gardner Re-imagining Play 2020 (uni.xyz).