Prague-based Skull Studio, known for an exploratory design collective and blending art, creativity, innovation, and architecture into a playful attraction, has designed diverse interventions in the urban city as a playground that transform the way we interact with public spaces and embrace a radical philosophy of how the notion of playfulness and material tactility changes our perception of an everyday urban space.
Design as an Invitation to Play
SKULL Studio’s projects explore the concepts of imagination, interaction, and inclusivity through designing lively spaces for spontaneous human experience. Integrating natural materials, textures, color, and irregular forms, they create art, sculpture, and installations for people to experience public spaces that are inviting and interactive in nature.
The visionaries of Skull Studio transform the rigid edges of urban public spaces with softness, offering tactile materials and interactive interventions. Public places are a utilitarian zone, always designed as functional entities rather than aesthetic or interactive spaces. Challenging this rigid notion, their works are based on a consistent ethos: softening urban environments through play and sensory engagement.
Play as Public Practice
Sculptor Matěj Hájek, creative strategist Pavel Krajčík, and photographer Bet Orten founded Skull studio to address modern challenges and create an experimental hub of ideas, concepts, and design solutions that incorporate art, design, and landscape. Their creativity focuses on crafting an interactive urban installation, a fusion of sculpture and social engagement that makes the city’s edges softer, playful, and humanized through art.
Skull Studio designs playful playgrounds for all age groups. Building impactful design enhances tactile experiences and encourages informal interactions in public spaces. The material plays a significant role in their projects, whether it’s straw, wood, or inflatable membranes; the focus is always on tactility, warmth, and sustainability. It offers sensory richness and inspires us to rethink the urban space as a playful and interactive intervention.
A Catalogue of Creative Interventions
The site-specific, ingenious intervention of temporary installations encourages visitors to reconsider their rigid ideas and experience impactful public spaces that are more alluring and fascinating, promoting creativity and spontaneity, even in the most utilitarian urban areas.
PRIOR
Drawing on neuroscientific insights into designing playful installations, PRIOR, located in Logroño, La Rioja, combines optical and haptic stimuli to engage visitors in playful and unexpected perceptual experiences. Modular public seating, designed for both children and adults, serves as a space where people can play, interact, and unwind. It has natural texture, softness, and warmth that make it the ideal material for this project, which seeks to engage the public and adapt, creating contrast with the industrial materials and hard surfaces of modern city streets.
BORORO
A 2014 installation at Prague Zoo was inspired by Amazonian tree villages, integrating hanging, labyrinthine structures that invite exploration and imaginative play. Thinking unconventionally, they created a structure resembling an extraction of a hut that invites visitors to climb inside and experience it. Crafted from reclaimed wood, thatch, and tree trunks, it serves as a gathering place for the community, blurring natural and man-made elements.
PECCA
Located at 1062 meters above sea level in Velká Úpa, Czech Republic, this playscape invites children and families to engage with the forest through sculptural elements crafted in harmony with natural materials. The design challenges gravity and form, transforming passive spectators into active participants, and focuses on soft, irregular elements that invite interaction, play, and relaxation, a break from routine.
The Floor is Lava Soft
A temporary urban intervention transformed the parking space into a soft, straw-bale space that creates an inviting and tactile landscape. Sensory experience and community connection were key design elements; visitors were encouraged to touch, feel, and experience the installation.
This approach offers visitors a chance to pause from their busy lives and explore, jump, sit, gather, or sleep on straw, blurring the boundaries between play and mundane city life and fostering community engagement in public spaces. UIT Festival, where “uitama” means “to wander,” is a dedicated theme of the event, aligning with SKULL studio’s philosophy of a playful city.
A Tactile Anomaly: Redefining Public Space
Skull Studio’s projects arise from sustainability and a playful ethos, align with reconnection with nature and human-centered design, and reshape public spaces that are not just functional but creative, inclusive, and playful in nature. Through material experimentation, community engagement, and lively design principles, they transform public space into places of joy and connection, demonstrating participatory art and meaningful dialogue in fostering vibrant, flexible, and inclusive cities.
Image credit: © Skull Studio
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