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It’s quiet inside Street Lab’s warehouse midday in early June. Some of its inventory has been loaded into a truck and delivered to a street in Belmont for a Bronx elementary school’s field day; a kit of tables, benches, and drawing supplies has been deployed to Times Square; and a reading room to a Downtown Brooklyn plaza. Over the course of the week, a DOT lift-gate truck or man with a van will deliver their custom-designed and -built equipment to 21 school streets, open streets, plazas, parks, and playgrounds, and then bring them back to the Red Hook waterfront. Some equipment is out on long-term loan to regular collaborators including Chelsea Market, the organizers of Jackson Heights’ 34th Avenue Open Street, and Business Improvement Districts at Amsterdam and Atlantic Avenues.
Street Lab’s simple designs and complex operations grew from a portable reading room designed to activate public spaces for learning, gathering, and exploration. From locations like Queens’ Corona Plaza, the set of bookshelves and stools traveled to cities across the country and as far as Kazakhstan. Other designs followed. Spurred by the pandemic’s rediscovery and experimentation with uses of streets and public spaces, the nonprofit’s operations have expanded to new programs and a citywide lending library. Last year, with the support of New York City’s Departments of Transportation and Small Business Services, Street Lab began offering an equipment library with 14 different kits for everything from block parties to building block play to community engagement, delivered for free to nonprofit community organizations. Each installation is strictly temporary and highly mobile, designed to make an immediate impact on its urban setting. For that purpose, Street Lab’s urban furniture — co-founder and executive director Leslie Davol calls their designs “experience creators” and “space transformers” — needs to be beautiful, durable, modular, load onto vans and move through doorways, and easy to fix. Design lead Hannah Berkin-Harper indeed makes modifications, replaces parts, and repairs bits as they cycle in and out of the Red Hook warehouse. We asked them both to talk about their growing catalogue of outdoor equipment, and the design, logistics, and long-term vision behind their temporary installations. – MM
In 2010, Sam and I did a project in Boston’s Chinatown called the Storefront Library. We want to go outside. How can we bring this experience to more neighborhoods? The answer is a portable structure that can make an institution of sorts in the open air. We called it the Urban Neighborhood Institution (UNI), a “portable reading room for public space.” We brought it to New York. We said to the Department of Transportation (DOT) and to a couple of community groups: “We have this portable reading room. Can we set it up in your space?”
From the get-go, we wanted to make it look purposeful, and be portable and durable. It was always: set it up in the morning, take it down in the afternoon. It took several people to set it up. Once we started getting more requests from groups, we realized: “Okay, we need to go mobile. We need to be a little more portable. If there’s a fire engine that needs to come through, if suddenly it starts raining, we can’t be deinstalling everything.”
We were inspired by the stage cases that musicians use to set up a whole arena or stage show. You can drop it off in a plaza, keep it locked until the staff arrive and then open it up, and everything is displayed. The vision is not just to transport materials but to feel like you’re in a candy store or one of those beautiful art stores with pens. I want to see all the stuff on the shelves: the bounty. It looks generous. It doesn’t look like it’s going to run out of material. There’s a lot of principles built into it that we apply to everything. It’s not just about transporting the gear: It has to be a beautiful installation in and of itself. When it’s in use and it’s open, we want to see books on the shelves.
It’s particularly exciting during the opening. Our staff will roll onto the street, and there’s this moment where these blocky looking cases become wavy, cool bookshelves. That sense of drama is really nice.
The objects came about because we couldn’t find anything that we could purchase. But we also want something that signals what it is and what you’re supposed to do.
The benches too. You’d think you could find a lightweight, stackable bench that was strong. It’s not that available. Höweler+Yoon came up with this origami design for the bench, which has served us forever now. It’s been great because they’re super light. The benches are polypropylene. They are in flat sheets, and they get cut and then bent and grommeted together.
The two pieces that go together are identical, which means that when we make repairs you can take them apart, and you can match up good pieces to bad pieces.
Libraries started to contact us and say: “We want to buy this. We want to copy what you’re doing.” We have made these carts for a bunch of libraries around the world. We still make the portable library for groups, some parks, and conservancies. Tulsa, Oklahoma, has a big park. They’ve got their own. They’re using it here in New York: Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island has their own portable reading room. They use it all the time. All three library systems in New York City bought and have used them.
We had been partnering with the DOT. We knew they were going to do this Open Streets program. Since we were in touch with them, we were like, “What can we do?”
This was designed during lockdown, in March and April of 2020. Since the playgrounds were closed, two kids — my daughter and her friend she was allowed to see — were the lone testers of the obstacle course before it debuted in New York City streets. We were using mesh-topped wood frames; the bases were these dowels which sat on off-the-shelf brackets. The colors were based on what was available given all the supply chain craziness of 2020.
We were out on the street the first day restrictions were lifted in July 2020. That was the first day we did PLAY with the mesh. We had 60 pop-ups in 2020, so we tested it a lot on Open Streets through the fall.
The general point of all our work is iteration. The funny thing is, Hannah makes a prototype, and I’m like: “It’s done! We’re using it tomorrow.”
And I’m like “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
It’s been through like three iterations. They all fell over the first time out. It used to drive me crazy that we had to sandbag them, and now I don’t care at all. Otherwise, it would be have to be so heavy and over-engineered that it’s just not worth it.
The new base is wider than the old base, so it really doesn’t fall over anymore. But they’re super lightweight, so when they do fall over, they just come apart: If kids knock them over on themselves, it isn’t going to injure anybody. Making them heavy would make it less safe, even though they would fall over less.
Those are some of our considerations. This equipment is going to fall apart, kids are going to climb on it. There were pictures from some of our staff the other day of all these kids climbing through it. And we go, “Okay, that’s fine.”
Not the way it was designed, but that’s fine.
We also consider, how can we just turn these out?
We thought the mesh would be permeable to the wind, but it’s not. We redid the design with plywood with bubble-shaped cutouts, with little details that make it better for transport, that make it look better, that make it work better. We also redid the sizing so that it would fit in a bin.
That happens to us a lot. We realized if we made these an inch and a half shorter, they would fit in our bins. We make decisions based on efficiency. We make decisions to reduce waste.
Everything’s in bins and, ideally, everything’s in pieces. The idea is that everything comes apart fairly easily and is repairable. We really don’t break all that much stuff. Often, the time when things break is in transport: these big bins with the big, round edges tend to protect the things inside them pretty well, even if they’re not so lovely themselves. We’ve also been experimenting and made some of our own bins.
Covid-19 brought this question of how we could bring people together when we can’t touch and we don’t know what’s happening. We have this new Open Street space and we need to signal to cars that the street’s closed. There are practical things that we need to achieve. In conversations with Small Business Services they asked, what can you do around outdoor dining? And we’re like: “Well, we’re not going to design a shed because that’s sort of a long term, permanent structure.”
There were so many small restaurants that couldn’t make a shed for financial reasons. Creating a place where you could grab your food and then eat it outside became great. We were developing the modular bench at the time, and it seemed obvious that a similar system could become a table. It’s been super popular.
We’ve also been looking at just how hot it is in the summer. Being able to be in the shade is a challenge. The tables and the benches can all hold umbrellas, and you can shade a whole long table in the middle of the street.
We added lights. People were saying: “I don’t want to do our things in the daytime anymore. It’s too hot in the summer. We want to go until 10 o’clock at night.”
Or even into the wintertime. We’ve had so many more events off our standard season: the season goes later and later every year. In November, it’s dark at four. So, we did a custom set of lights that goes with the table. You can keep adding tables and you can keep adding lights to the system, and it has those poles.
We used to design where every program had its own custom infrastructure — a sort of signature for that program. Because we also want to be responsive, it’s great if a group says, “We want to create a water park.” Or, “This is what we have in mind, we can do that if we combine this with this and this.” Increasingly, I think that is a principle that we’re trying to follow: Can we make a series of gear that looks great, makes a dramatic visual impact on the street but the individual pieces also talk to each other and work together?
It’s crazy, trying to transform the city with a pop-up approach, with gear in a warehouse that you deploy. But I have to say, there’s so much you can do with that model, as long as you can figure that piece out. It’s so physical.
That is the big piece, right? You can design a modular table, but then the logistics and the moving and the staffing: All of these pieces happening in the same place make it possible.
We’ve been lending some equipment out informally ever since we started. More formally, it started with a grant from the Small Business Services Department in 2023. We were able to add more gear. A lot of our capacity is limited by how much gear we have. We’ve gotten pretty good at staffing and being in five different places in a single day, but it is limited when you’re like, “We only have four of our One Big Tables and three sets of Read.” Through that grant, we were able to add some more gear and make some more of our custom tables.
We have long worked with groups who are trying to activate their neighborhoods and their spaces. We know them, and they know us, and every year they come back, and we try to provide them with our programs as much as possible. That makes it efficient for everybody and allows us to achieve much more than we could.
Every year, we think maybe we’re out of ideas. But then, working with neighborhood groups, you hear their practical problems and their dreams. There’re ideas that come out of that work and those relationships. And you’re saying: “We want to bring plants, we want to make a beautiful landscape.”
For a long time, we’ve been thinking about doing a misting, cooling station. Misters are used in other cities around the world. It is getting hotter and hotter. We go to Play Streets in the summertime with our programs, and the hydrants are always open, and the kids are getting soaked. There’s no way for adults to get cool.
We’ve also seen a bunch of situations where the kids can’t get wet for whatever reason. That comes up especially when we do weekday programming, where kids who are in Summer Rising at the school can’t get soaked, because then you’re a teacher with 25 soaking wet children. So, making something that cools people off and feels like the fun of getting wet, but you’re not really wet-wet.
The idea of the cooling station is: “What are the elements that we need to cool people down?” We need shade, so umbrellas. We’ve got plants that transpire. And then water. So those are the three elements that we’re playing with in the cooling station.
The prototype is made of pool noodles and some foam floor tiles. They have sprinkler misters like a lawn sprinkler. You can keep connecting segments. This system creates a low mist, which cools the immediate sitting area.
It looks a little bit like a slip-and-slide, but when you put it all together, it evokes a river, and there’s a natural landscape. The responses that we get are funny. The first day we brought it out, people were sitting around, and they were like: “I feel really calm.”
Even little kids were like: “This is so relaxing.”
It is funny that it’s just pool noodles and floor tiles. We don’t work at a scale where you’re talking about mass manufacturing. We try to find ways to create these impactful, evocative landscapes. My role in June and July is going to be head gardener.
The big question was: How can we make plants portable and reusable? And store them overnight in between without harming them?
We were testing the structure, we were testing a bunch of things: Can Street Lab keep plants alive as we move them around the city? How much stress will these poor plants take? There are still some unknowns about this as we head into June and July.
We didn’t know how much the wood was gonna swell, and now we know it swells more than we thought. The next ones are all a half an inch smaller. And then there’s some other fiddly things.
And the design is four parts so that you can lift it into a van. The next version will have handles, so you can take out each section and carry it. We can replant sections of it.
It goes with our Explorer Program, too, which is all about urban nature. Everything is a program opportunity.
The next versions have magnifying glass holders. If we’re sticking magnifying glasses in, maybe we find a way to not put them down in the dirt.
We’re going to target the cooling stations — the OASIS program for Open Streets — near senior centers, so we can make an intergenerational space. That’s the specific challenge we have: Can we get those seniors out, socializing, sitting, and enjoying the space, and cooling down?
We’ve also been deploying the landscape on its own because it works like a portable greening, and a lot of places just don’t have enough greenery in the city. A park I just talked to is mostly asphalt, so they’re very interested in this.
It’s an instant transformation into green space.
It’s funny what changes when you make things permanent. It’s there, it has to please generations of people. Hopefully our stuff will please generations of people, but it’s temporary. It’s there and it’s gone the next day, so it’s not as big a deal.
There’s never going be enough money to give everybody a playground, a library down the street, all the things that you want in your neighborhood. We should keep working towards that; there should be an equitable approach. That is the goal, and change can happen. But it’s going to be decades.
I think every city should have a pop-up force to provide more resources, as much as possible, in every corner of the city. That’s another solution to always building things permanently, because neighborhoods are going to flood. Where people built playgrounds, there are suddenly going to be seniors and no kids. I want to argue for less permanent things, and having some systems in place where you can respond, but don’t bolt things down. Because we’re going to be moving, and things need to move. The needs are going to change, and where you need them changes.
The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of The Architectural League of New York.
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