As a part of the 2014 Seattle Design Festival nine pedestrian scale installations were designed and built by a diverse cross section of local designers. Pop-Up! Street Furniture was an LMN Architects led project, collaborating with an inter-disciplinary team of students, professionals, designers, manufacturers, and contractors.
Simply put, this installation was street furniture – but it’s more than that. Created for this year’s Seattle Deign Festival and responding on a theme of ‘Design in Motion’, this project explored the transient aspects of street life and temporal nature of festivals through the creation of movable, interchangeable, multipurpose objects. These moveable modules easily combined into endless configurations that transformed the streetscape into temporary hubs for conversation, play, engagement, and relaxation.
The built piece comprised of eight interconnecting modules approximately 18”x18”x36” and were constructed from reclaimed wood dunnage. Allowing for dynamic transformation of the piece, the sturdy reclaimed wood shell protects and conceals a curved surface made from 3Form plastic and decorated with colorful Seattle Design Festival graphics, encouraging new configurations through playful discovery.
Through this design we posed questions of:
- How can street furnishings be assembled and configured by the public user? - Can design help us discover clever and novel ways of seeing the world around us? - Will the ebb and flow of a people respond (or modify) to the furniture? - Can we playfully engage the public with functional products?
Born out of a cross-disciplinary collaboration between students, professionals, designers, manufacturers, and contractors, and working together from early visioning through construction and installation allowed design concepts, construction, and delivery to be considered holistically. Removing traditional divisions between design and construction providing a great opportunity to learn from one another and expresses the festival’s mission to promote design and its transformative benefits, not just for the public, but also to the construction industry.
While built for the festival, the projects flexibility and scale has allowed it to continue to be integrated as street furniture in multiple contexts around the city including festivals, bus stops, conferences, and parks.
