Grown-Up Playground is a linear play structure. It hosts along its length a range of different profiles and activities meant for engagement and play. What may not be apparent is that the design is intended for adults. This was part of the brief presented to us by Frasers Property Thailand who sought to encourage grown ups to play as a way to relieve stress and to take a break away from the prescribed formats of our daily lives.

How could we not empathize with the idea of encouraging adults to play? We didn’t immediately react to the brief seeking to manifest distinct forms of adult play. Instead, we revisited established forms of play from our memory as children: the typical swing, monkey bars, climbing walls, and slides. Our approach was twofold - first to re-proportion these play features for adult use, and second to fuse them together into a unified continuous object. The result is an inclusive play structure, designed for adults but very much accessible to everyone.

The site is a complicated one. Being a paved, narrow, pedestrian strip in front of an operating shopping mall, the construction had to be prefabricated completely off-site and seamlessly ‘placed’ on-site overnight in order to minimize site closures, using concrete blocks as counterweights instead of fixing the structure to the ground. Moreover, the design followed a modular structure where each play feature was designed separately so that when the project gets relocated to a different site, the modules could be culled and reconfigured to suit the new site dimensions.

The siting of the project is one of its most important qualities. To serve as context, playgrounds in Bangkok are few and far between. As a practice, we seek to transform spaces through play. Grown-up Playground is representative of the transformational potential of play in an urban context. The site is a narrow strip in the perimeter of a mall, flanked by some trees and the mall’s impermeable facade. It’s a space that would typically not get much footfall but finds a completely different life through the Grown-Up Playground - immediately becoming a destination with ludic purposes, free, fun and accessible to all.