Across Europes shorelines, remnants of World War II linger in concrete: bunkers, battery platforms, defensive bollards, and more. With no official tally, these structures number in the tens of thousands, including several thousand along the Atlantic Wall, a vast defensive network built by the Nazis between 1942 and 1944 in anticipation of attacks by Allied forces. Long disused and often regarded as eyesores, they become something else entirely in the hands of The Wa.
In the ongoing series A Kid Could Do It, The Wa treats these plain, heavy forms as staging grounds for jubilant, childlike interventions. Saturated color scrawls collide with blocky windows, doors, and even flowers, turning stark concrete into buoyant, doodled architecture. The projects title winks at the familiar murmur heard before works by Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline My kid could do that and flips the sentiment into an ethos of making. As The Wa puts it, the work follows one simple rule: the unfiltered creative logic of a child.
From wartime relics to a festival centerpiece
This year, that logic scaled up in Stuttgart at PFFFestival 2026, where The Wa applied the approach to an empty house. The facade reads like a drawing sprung to life: windows hung with purple curtains appear in unexpected spots; a door narrows toward the ground instead of the top; and a roofline ripples with scalloped forms that could be shingles or drifting clouds. Across it all, huge, assertive marks in bright blue and red cut through the composition, amplifying the sense of spontaneous play.
The PFFFestival installation extends ideas first tested on Europes coastal defenses, where bunkerstypically cast in concreteare recast as colorful, approachable objects. While the series revels in carefree mark-making, it also acknowledges its origins in collaboration: The Wa began A Kid Could Do It by working alongside his mother, a nod embedded in the projects very name.
Reframing a familiar refrain
By leaning into a phrase long used to diminish abstraction, The Wa reframes it as a method for looking and making. The results in Stuttgartand on those once-militarized coastal structuressuggest a simple proposition: when architecture becomes a drawing, even the most unassuming surfaces can feel newly animated.
