Make the city your living room with these creatively designed unconventional street furniture designs
Source: Web Urbanist
Smart, well-designed urban seating encourages greater interaction with the cities we live in and with each other. They infuse our cities with vibrancy and a sense of connection. What makes them even cooler is when they are built right into a park or sidewalk as a multifunctional element to add some sculptural visual interest, delineate different zones or offer opportunities for fitness and play. Here are some really creative modern street furniture designs:
Just a Black Box: Furniture Transforms Into Kiosk
A cube of semi-private seating by day, ‘Just a Black Box’ by Max Boano and Jonas Prismontas transforms into a kiosk for commercial or public use at night (or whenever else it’s desired.) The box elevates itself on its own hidden hydraulic columns to become a customizable space that can be used for retail, cafes, bike repair, selling tickets or even as a mini theater.
Urban Hammock Installations
Comfy hammocks come to public spaces in various forms to create some of the most nap-worthy urban furniture you’ll ever see, including a series of nets strung over the grass by The Chartered Institute of Housing, bright blue hammocks inserted into a void in a promenade along Paprocany Lake in Poland, and re-purposed fire hoses hung from a steel grid in Copenhagen.
Vanke Cloud City by Lab D+H
Vanke Cloud City is a mixed-use development project in Guangzhou, China boasting a series of creative public seating strategies by Lab D+H. The Cloud Line is a continuous tubular steel structure offering benches, monkey bars, parallel bars and other uses, while Cloud Seat is a modular set of interacted spaces made of perforated steel plate, with vertically stacked seating.
Meeting Bowls for NYC
Small groups can get together and chat face-to-face in a comfortable, breezy space with ‘Meeting Bowls’ by the Madrid-based design firm mmmm… in partnership with the Times Square Alliance. The urban furniture installation was situated in the center of Manhattan’s busiest plaza in summer 2011to facilitate interactions and dialogue between friends and strangers alike. The base of each bowl gently rocks to imitate the sensation of floating.
Outdoor Office Urban Street Furniture by Adi Kalina
Lots more of us would leave our offices and work in the fresh air if we had access to this smart piece of street furniture by Adi Kalina. ‘Outdoor Office’ is an ergonomic wooden chair with long back rising into a built-in sun shade. The whole thing swivels so you can keep the sun out of your face at all hours of the day, and there’s even a cupholder.
Zona Verde Campus de la Cuidadela, Barcelona
Tables and benches nestle into the grassy area outside a school in Barcelona, becoming a part of the landscape, with ‘Zona Verde Campus’ by F451 Architecture.The new congregation area separates two terraced levels of the green, with the seating organized to accommodate groups of all sizes.
Sunset Parklet in San Francisco
Set just outside a grocery store and cafe in San Francisco, The Sunset Parklet by INTERSTICE Architects reclaims 3-4 public parking spots and turns them into usable space for passersby and cafe patrons. Four strips running the length of the parklet offer various levels of seating, tables, planters, leash ties for dogs and a bike rack.
LIFT Dis-Section
A wooden mesh of urban planters lifts up on one side like a rug to reveal a built-in bench facing the sidewalk. Lift Dis-Section is modular seating aimed at bringing nature into “the sterility of urban sprawl” while also providing a relaxation zone.
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