The City Playhouse
The City Playhouse envisions play as a civic instrument—an architecture of care, connection, and collective imagination. Developed through a collaboration between the university, myself as the student, and LandSec U+I under the brief The Future of the Future, the project explores how play can serve as a temporal and spatial agent for urban transformation.
More than a building, the City Playhouse is a prototype for participatory regeneration. Comprising a gallery, storehouses, a makerspace, a design studio, and a sorting facility—interwoven by a raised logistical corridor—it forms an infrastructural network for creativity, care, and exchange. Designed with a modular kit-of-parts approach, the architecture draws from recycled steel and circular material strategies to support adaptability and long-term resilience.
From Placemaking to Playmaking, the thesis proposes a framework where incremental, playful interventions seed deeper systemic change. Beginning with speculative exercises in Flux:Labs and evolving through public co-design initiatives, the project culminates in a trail of site-responsive installations—inviting communities to imagine, construct, and reshape their urban futures.
Grounded in the industrial legacy of its context yet open to the unknown, the City Playhouse challenges conventional notions of permanence. It positions architecture not as a fixed object, but as a living scaffold—capable of evolving alongside the city and its citizens.
Through joy, reuse, and imagination, it poses a provocation: could play constitute a new architectural paradigm for the future?
