Temporary Playground Houses | Architecture Global Aid

This project was thought for the island of Santorini, as a “Temporary Playground” for children visiting the village of firostefani two weeks during the summer.The project consists on a playground space where children would be able to paint.

The plot was very irregular  and the floor was made of concrete so we could not plan a foundation or use nails or tents, and in plus, the budget was very small, but we finally decided to go for it as a social issue.

At first the client suggested us to create one single big covered space  but we thought it was not the best solution for such an irregular plot. We studied the topography of the land and  decided to build small paper houses at different scales adapted to each one of the steps of the plot, developing this way a small temporary paper city (foldable city) that we could fold down during the evening , since in the same site, people use to watch the sunset over the volcano of santorini. 

The only material we could afford in the project was paper and we chose  a particular and very resistant paper produced in spain called  "mello paper" which was the only one strong enough to support structurally the weight of the house, big enough to build at a human scale  and flexible enough to be easily foldable and it  would work  very well since we wanted to use the walls of the houses  as canvases to paint on.   

From time to time, children could get inside the houses and play and paint there and when leaving  the island, the paper could be storaged or recylced.

Thanks to the fact that in santorini it hardly ever rains in summer, and that the area where the plot is (caldera) is strongly protected from the wind, it sounded as a good solution for a temporary playground placed on an irregular surface.

We decided to build  four different scales of houses according  to the different terrace sizes. The 4 types of house scale were: house for children, house for books, house for colours and house for brushes. 

We found plenty of models that could have worked as paper houses, but the most suitable one, was the japanese technique of origami, which consisted on folding a bidimensional square surface until it became a threedimensional space.

The greatest advantage of the houses was that they could be folded and placed in a minimum space such as a small storage room in a hotel nearby the plot.

The project was executed  in firostefani over the cliff of caldera in august 2014 and lasted two weeks. the result of the execution was that it fited in the urban landscape of white houses of santorini as if it was a small white paper city in Greece.