VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY

Abstract

As adaptive reuse becomes increasingly central to architectural practice, design studios face the pedagogical challenge of fostering creativity within heightened constraints. Despite the traction of adaptive reuse in architectural education, limited scholarship addresses how experimentation and conceptual freedom can be cultivated within projects framed by heritage significance, material limitations, and regulatory restrictions. This paper reflects on a design studio centred on the adaptive reuse of Sydney’s disused Newtown Tram Depot, a heritage-listed industrial shed. Drawing on Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, Winnicott’s theories of play, research on the relationship between creativity and playfulness, the studio positioned playfulness as a generative methodology. Students were encouraged to treat the existing structure not as a static artefact but as a scaffold for imaginative reoccupation. Through theoretical readings, playful mapping, and surrogate modelling with toys, found objects, and components recovered on site, students temporarily suspended habitual design constraints, opening speculative pathways grounded in the depot’s existing fabric. Students’ proposals ranged from community gardens emerging from the building’s current overgrown condition to urban agriculture hubs centred on production rather than consumption, to participatory workshops and open-ended infrastructural systems, reconceiving the depot as a site of co-authorship, temporality, and civic possibility. The paper argues that playfulness, essential for generating novel responses to spatial and societal constraints, can be mobilised as a design strategy within adaptive reuse pedagogy, reframing constraints as opportunities for creative inquiry. This ludic approach enabled students to imagine transformative yet contextually grounded interventions, demonstrating the value of play in advancing conceptual innovation in architecture studios.