Just a few minutes walking from V&A East Storehouse in Hackney Wick—a rapidly changing neighbourhood where post-industrial ruins, developer cranes, and subcultural desire still coexist—playbody emerges not as a studio in the traditional sense, but as a collective gesture. Positioned deliberately at the interstice of architectural practice, radical design, and world-making, playbody reclaims their space in the contemporary art world as a mode of intimacy, resistance, and joy.
Founded by a group of European migrants and queer creatives, playbody centres its practice on the lived experience of non-normative identities. Through architecture that refuses to stabilise, installations that challenge boundaries, and gatherings that privilege sensorial experience, the collective asserts play as methodology.
playbody’s bi-monthly events dare to imagine other ways of being—with each other and within space. Their studio at Algha’s Plantroom functions as both exhibition and nightlife ecology, hosting collective experiments in sound, light, movement and architecture: a testing ground for spatial affect, gendered embodiment, and temporal fluidity.
For playbody, architecture does not precede the body; it follows it. This inversion is crucial. Temporary structures are designed not for permanence but for sensation—responsive, haptic, modular, often unrepeatable. The club’s visual vocabulary borrows as much from scaffolding and liminal spaces as it does from high design, refusing tamed lines and binary codes in favour of futuristic, embodied experimentation. If mainstream architecture increasingly serves capital, zoning the city into spaces of control and extraction, playbody responds with soft walls, communal infrastructures, and porous thresholds. Their playground becomes a site of speculative building.
In aligning themselves with club culture—especially its queer and trans genealogies—playbody situates their practice within a long lineage of subcultural architectures serving as blueprints for spatial liberation. But where many archival approaches historicise the club, playbody insists on its ongoing utility—not as a nostalgic revision of the past, but as a collective place-making praxis.
This approach resonates with a growing movement within architecture that have refused the sanitisation of queer expression. [i] By positioning the trans and queer experience at the forefront, playbody, along with international counterparts, is reshaping the architectural discourse to be more inclusive, dynamic, and reflective of diverse identities. What playbody adds to this trajectory is a commitment to architecture not as spectacle, but as infrastructure for survival.
playbody’s making practice is rooted in proximity, consent, and responsibility, a new architecture of relation. In an era where bodily autonomy is under siege—across legislative, technological, and affective domains—playbody’s work offers a counter-model.
To build intimacy through design is a radical act. It suggests that space is not neutral, that walls remember, that thresholds speak. In doing so, playbody refuses the professional detachment of architectural modernism and embraces a politic of care. Their work insists on slowness, on negotiation, on mutuality. It dares to ask: what does a structure feel like when it is built with you, not around you?
While global discourses around queerness often risk abstraction, playbody’s commitment to the hyperlocal—its Hackney Wick studio, its London-based playground, its embeddedness in community—grounds their work in specificity. In a time when queerness is both hyper-visible and violently policed, to remain in place, to hold space, becomes an act of defiance.
If architecture has long been used to divide—by class, by race, by gender—playbody offers a different spatial imaginary: one built on softness, transience, and play. And in doing so, they remind us that in the ruins of normative structures, something else is always already emerging.
Discover playbody’s work activated by their community at Archival Bodies – the first live event at the V&A East Storehouse from our live programme back2back – on Saturday, 7 June 2025.
playbody invites you to inhabit the in-betweeness of bodies becoming, spaces dissolving, identities unfurling. The V&A East Storehouse will become a playground where nothing is fixed, but everything is possible. Find out more.
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[i] One notable parallel can be drawn with the Nordic Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by Kaisa Karvinen for the Architecture & Design Museum Helsinki. The exhibition, titled Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture, features Finnish artist Teo Ala-Ruona, who, along with a multidisciplinary team, reimagined architecture through the lens of trans embodiment.
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