The Main Dream: A Recycled Plastic Kit That Lets Refugee Children Build Their Own Playground

Most playgrounds arrive finished: a slide stays a slide, a swing stays a swing, and children play by rules written long before they arrived. The Main Dream refuses that premise. Taking its cue from the line "The best way to predict the future is to create it," the project delivers no playground at all. It delivers a kit of parts, colourful recycled plastic components that children can assemble into walls, shelters, seats, toys, trees and gathering spaces, then dismantle and remake the next day. The architecture is deliberately unfinished, and that incompleteness is the whole point.

Designed by amin farhoudi, Alireza Kalantari, Nazli Mozaffari and Sajjaw, the proposal was shortlisted in Re-imagining Play 2020. It was developed for children living in refugee camps, a context where fixed infrastructure is scarce and agency is scarcer. Rather than prescribing a single definition of play, the team offers the pieces from which children can write their own, folding education, environmental responsibility and social interaction into the act of building.

A Burst of Colour Wedged Between Grey Volumes

The aerial view sets up the project's central contrast. A cube assembled from multicoloured blocks sits pressed between grey, undifferentiated masses, and small figures walk toward its opening as if drawn by the colour alone. The image makes a quiet argument: the surroundings are fixed and monotonous, while the playable structure is visibly composed of parts, each block legible, each one capable of being moved.

That legibility matters. Because the object reads as an assembly rather than a monolith, it invites intervention. Children are not simply occupying the space; they are being shown that they can participate in producing it.

From a Single Block to a Ring: Building as the First Game

The storyboard sequence is the most persuasive drawing in the set. Across eight frames, silhouetted figures gather coloured blocks in a sunlit desert and stack them into a tower. There is no contractor, no installation day, no ribbon cutting. Construction itself becomes the play, and the finished form becomes a second stage for further games.

The accompanying timeline formalises this logic in plan, tracing five stages from a single block to a closed ring, with rendered cubes growing alongside. The team treats architecture as something that accrues over time instead of something delivered whole. The project establishes a module rather than a building, and that distinction reshapes the design process: blocks can be removed, relocated, rotated or recombined into smaller children's modules, so the plan never truly settles.

Towers, Frames and Trees From One 30-Centimetre Cube

The mushroom-topped tower and the rectangular frame show how far a single unit can stretch. Both are built from the same cubic component, roughly 30 × 30 × 30 centimetres, yet one becomes a shaded vertical marker where figures rest at its base, while the other becomes an open room that two children inhabit as a third runs past a blocky tree. A wall becomes a seat, a cluster of seats becomes a room, a room becomes a tunnel or a stage.

The designers studied LEGO, where standardised pieces build complexity through repetition, and jigsaw puzzles, which depend on complementary connections. Their component borrows from both but goes further: instead of stacking mostly vertically, it connects across the x, y and z axes. Different faces perform different roles, some interlocking, some left open, one serving as a usable surface. Through rotation alone, one shape produces cantilevers, enclosures, furniture and canopies. A limited kit yields a nearly unlimited range of arrangements.

Peering Out From Behind the Grey Wall

The view from behind a grey wall is the most human image in the set. Two figures peek out toward a distant group playing among colourful cubes and a blocky tree. The framing captures the hesitant moment before joining in, and it suggests the social role the structures are meant to play: visible, open to approach, a reason to step out from behind the wall and engage with others.

The final pavilion, stacked from red, blue, green and ochre cubes with figures seated inside, shows the system at its most architectural. Openings arise wherever blocks are omitted, and the structure reads as a small civic room as much as a toy. Here the dual identity is clearest: the playground is a toy and a piece of architecture at once, built at a scale children can lift and arrange themselves.

Why This Project Matters

Humanitarian design tends to arrive as finished product, engineered elsewhere and installed for people rather than with them. The Main Dream inverts that relationship by designing a rule set instead of a result. Its intelligence lies in the component: a single recycled plastic cube whose three-axis connections and differentiated faces carry the full spatial range of the project. That restraint makes the idea portable, repairable and endlessly re-arrangeable, qualities that suit temporary settlements far better than a fixed steel climbing frame.

More importantly, the project treats children as authors. In places where routine, space and choice are often dictated by circumstance, a kit that lets young people decide what a wall, a room or a tree should be is a modest but meaningful transfer of control. The proposal reminds designers that sometimes the most generous thing architecture can do is leave itself unfinished and hand over the pieces.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: amin farhoudi, Alireza Kalantari, Nazli Mozaffari, Sajjaw

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Project credits: The Main Dream by amin farhoudi, Alireza Kalantari, Nazli Mozaffari, Sajjaw Re-imagining Play 2020 (uni.xyz).