The AA Material Arcade and Swiss architect Sébastien Tripod are responding to a challenge set by the Swiss Embassy and the Design Museum in collaboration with the AA Summer School: design with reclaimed materials a construction game inspiring creativity and community.

From a pallet to a new landscape, and vice versa. The AA Material Arcade and Swiss architect Sébastien Tripod invite you 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 questions reuse and its aesthetics, whilst demonstrating how playfulness invites creativity.

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, 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.

Post-Brexit and post-pandemic, office leases in London have plummeted to a 20-year low in the fourth quarter of 2022. Despite weak market demand, building developments continue, and thus so does demolition.

To counter the use of vacancy as a pretext for demolition, we set up No End State, an agency within the built environment. Our mission is to prevent demolition resulting from building vacancy. Through advocacy and consultancy, we challenge the idea that the buildings we need must be built from scratch — instead, we strive to find new uses for existing structures.