Marunouchi Street Park 2024 Summer

This is a social experiment project to observe how people spend time in the outdoor space of Nakadori Street in Marunouchi, Tokyo, and to consider the future of roadways and sidewalks.
For the summer of 2024, we tried to gently define the way people gather by manipulating the shape, and to explore comfort. The concept was "i-ma-i." We gave shape to the furniture through geometric manipulation, such as a square movable block bench, a long big table with gradually changing face-to-face distances, a round bench that combines concentration and diffusion, and a bollard bench that combines the roadway and sidewalk with handrails, and wrapped it in a way that resonates with the materials of the surrounding environment. Because it is an eventful product, variables need to be taken into account before it can be made permanent, but we were able to demonstrate a new way of gathering.
(Event period: July 25th to August 18th, 2024)

With the future in mind that this road will be centered around people, we concept design the fixtures as a response to multiple themes, such as creating comfortable places to linger, adaptable fixtures, and utilizing existing road infrastructure like bollards. Even in the standard grass-covered spaces, we attempted to add undulations to create a new landscape and experience, resulting in a form that reflects the seemingly contradictory demands of not disappointing expectations for "Marunouchi Street Park" while also providing ways to keep visitors engaged.