From a pallet to a new landscape, and vice versa. The AA Material Arcade and Swiss architect Sébastien Tripod invited the Design Museum audiences to play with shapes and textures to collectively create a sculpture as part of the London Design Festival on 22 September at the Design Museum. Addressed to adults and children alike, REPLAY questioned reuse and its aesthetics, whilst demonstrating how playfulness invites creativity.

REPLAY, as part of Play Build Play Day, Design Museum, London W8 6AG, Sunday 22 September, 11.00 am – 4.00 pm

The rules are simple: take a piece and place it touching another. If it falls, a new foundation is formed. Players must always work with the existing layout, leading to a shifting structure shaped by past and present participants – reflective of the process in the development of the project. Once the structure, building or landscape is completed, it’s time to think of reuse and replay. The construction game turns into a puzzle and the puzzle will become a construction game for future players.

REPLAY was developed in collaboration with the AA Summer School. It benefited from conversations with political scientist and urban planner Gabriela Burkhalter who came to the AA Book Shop in July to launch the expanded edition of The Playground Project (Park Books, 2023). The Design Museum kindly offered a tour of the Enzo Mari exhibition which masterfully highlighted that design can encourage creative thinking and autonomy in children. Finally, Marcel Raymaekers’ Salvage Architecture echoed the designers’ wish to create beautiful pieces by bringing together salvaged pieces with typically no value.

- What are the key elements of the design concept?

AA Material Arcade (AAMA) and Sébastien Tripod (ST):

The design playfully explores ways of giving salvaged materials a new form and use. Each bloc, each piece of the game is the result of a negotiation between the original shape of the waste material and the way in which we could combine it with other pieces, using as little crafting as possible.

This game is a collective building site. And an invitation to test and reflect on the aesthetics of reuse in architecture.

- Could you please tell us about the sourcing process?

AAMA: Materials were sourced from the scraps of London’s workshops. From Croydon to Bermondsey and Kensington, as well as deconstructed models from the Architectural Association’s student projects. Materials destined for the skip were gathered, reinterpreted, connected and used to form new objects. Through new and existing relationships with makers in London, we drove to workshops collecting materials – each one expressing interest in the project and potential for future partnerships.

- Which aspects of your work does REPLAY reflect?

ST: Building is about giving people, but also materials, the opportunity to find places, to be accommodated for a while. I like to think of it as a big construction game, where materials are placed and moved, and where elements remain adjustable for a closer relationship between the space and the inhabitant.

AAMA: Questioning existing (linear) systems is at the core of the work of the AA Material Arcade. Our initiative looks at material flows at the scale of a school and how subtle shifts in these systems can connect ‘waste’ with use and inspiration. This project is reflective of our practice, but rather than purely facilitating reuse we are our own customers, producing from materials we have salvaged.

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Project supported by Presence Switzerland.

Main image ©Richard Heald

Mosaic ©AA Material Arcade