Yes, Yes, Yes
The Launderette of Dreams, designed by Yinka Ilori in collaboration with Lego (photo: Mark Cocksedge).
“This launderette is quite a personal project for me,” says the designer Yinka Ilori. “It’s quite special.”
While he’s speaking, Ilori turns on a tumble dryer that starts swirling, filling the room with a sound like rainsticks. Its drum is loaded with Lego blocks, which tousle and surge inside, rising up before slumping clatteringly with each rotation. “As a kid you want to break the rules,” says Ilori. “And that’s what we’re trying to do here.”
The “here” Ilori mentioned is a working laundromat on Bethnal Green Road, east London, which the designer has now converted into the Launderette of Dreams, a 10-day installation executed in conjunction with Lego. Outside, the launderette’s facade has been overhauled with shades of tangerine, pink, lemon and green that are familiar from Ilori’s wider practice, but it’s inside where things really step up.
The exterior of the Launderette of Dreams (image: Mark Cocksedge).
The washers and dryers have been stripped out, replaced with stage-set versions in pick-and-mix hues. Candy-coloured lighting flashes across some drums, whereas others replace the de rigeur dirty laundry with block versions of Pac-Man’s ghosts, or else a peeping white rabbit – a mixed load of Alice in Wonderland by way of Lego. Atop each machine, Ilori has laid out graphic patterns in Lego blocks, while soft-topped bollards and multicoloured seating that rises up around the machines provide places to perch.
“Kids say they would love to make places that are boring, such as going to a laundromat, more fun and playful,” says Alero Akuya, Lego’s vice president of global brand development. “So we’re so happy to have partnered with Yinka to reimagine things that are quite mundane, boring, repetitive and redundant in our day to day lives and bring it into this magical experience.”
One of the machines tumbles Lego blocks, filling the space with the sound of clattering, tinkling plastic (image: Mark Cocksedge).
The decision to work with a launderette, Ilori explains, is tied to his own childhood. “I grew up in Islington on Essex Road,” he explains, “and as a kid we went to these [launderettes] as a family. It was a place where we came together as a community and told stories, and really expressed ourselves. For me, as a kid, I hated going to the launderette, but also somehow loved going there, because I could sit down, play, go to the corner shop, and have fun without my parents watching me or telling me what to do.”
The Launderette of Dreams has been designed with this freedom in mind, with Ilori having based elements of his design on suggestions provided during research sessions with students from his former school, St Jude & St Paul's CofE. One student’s suggestion for a slide is manifest as ramped seating that climbs up over the front of one of the machines, while another washing machine now acts as a vending machine for small packs of lego. At the rear of the space, a Lego board has been mounted on one of the walls for children to collaboratively build patterns and shapes over the duration of the installation.
Yinka Ilori and Lego’s Alero Akuya, photographed in the space (image: Mark Cocksedge).
Launderettes, Ilori explains, represent spaces in which all users are placed on an equal footing – everyone is there to do the same thing and social hierarchies come out in the wash. “We want [children] to build, create and have fun, and those are the themes that I saw in my childhood launderette,” he says. In the case of the Launderette of Dreams, the installation will be open for workshops, drop-ins and scheduled play sessions, providing space for children to explore and play together. “It’s about community and inclusivity, because I think launderettes are inclusive,” Ilori says. “There are no rules about who can go in. They’re spaces to collaborate, talk and engage in.”
Children are invited to build collaboratively in the space, which will host daily workshops and play sessions over the course of its 10-day duration (image: Mark Cocksedge).
These notes of enthusiasm and optimism pervade the space, which is decorated with signs reading “YES TO BALL GAMES”, “YES TO PLAY”, “YES TO BUILDING”. Plucked from Ilori’s memories, the installation aims to evoke and exaggerate those moments of childhood in which the mundane becomes magical: the moments of play eked out within shops, carparks and launderettes, when children manage to find enchantment even when drawn into the humdrum realities of the adult world.
“The launderette was a space where I dreamed and had fun,” says Ilori. “Every kid is faced with lots of obstacles, which say no to ball games, no to this, no to that, but you always find ways to turn that rule upside down and make it still fun. Here, however, everything is about yes, yes, yes. When you sit down by the washing machine, put your clothes in, the powder, the 20p, how about building and creating and being more imaginative? And that’s what I did in my launderette as well.”