Temitayo Ogunbiyi Builds Playgrounds Out of Risk and Steel Piping

Temitayo Ogunbiyi's practice began where most playground design stops: with a security fence. Watching galvanized steel piping used to wall off private compounds across Lagos, she saw instead a material she could turn into structures for public play, cheap, weatherproof, and endlessly reconfigurable. In this conversation, she traces that material discovery alongside her long research relationship with Isamu Noguchi's playground sculptures, and how the two threads converged into a body of work now spanning over a dozen functional playgrounds worldwide.

We go deep on her process: why she never brings children in to test a structure before it's installed (engineering tests, yes; play tests, never), and how watching adults attempt her work is, in her words, "hilarious," because most adults have simply forgotten how their bodies move. She also discusses the linguistic roots of her titling convention, the Nigerian "you will" construction as blessing, wish, and affirmation, and how it shapes the way strangers encounter her work.

The conversation traces her six-year path to her exhibition at the Noguchi Museum, from a folio of small drawings shown to senior curator Dakin Hart in 2018, through her first realized playground in Lagos, to the show itself. We also cover her installation at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, her Venice Biennale presentation (where confused security initially tried to stop visitors from touching the work), and her forthcoming solo exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio, opening September 2026.